Taiwan has a different spoken language and culture than Hong Kong. If I were going to move away from Hong Kong I'd prefer an international, primarily English speaking city like London or Toronto.

Wouldn't be so sure about it, having lived in Taiwan for many years, a lot of my friends there people leaving HK and setting up a new base in Taiwan. The writing is similar (both HK and Taiwan are far from China's simplified Chinese), the spoken language has a lot of commonalities (bunch of dialects in Taiwan that are closer), and the culture & mindset is very close. Not totally a surprise as Taiwan has a lot of dissidents who left China in earlier conflicts, for quite a while back.

So yeah, from personal experience, Hongkongers fit right in coming to Taiwan.

Agreed. From what I've seen, Taiwanese people are very welcoming of Hongkongers especially in the current political climate. An example would be that of Lam Wing-kee.[1]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-52425350

Yes and no on the language argument. Written Chinese, sure, but Taiwan's Fuzhou/Hokchew-based dialects are far from the Cantonese of HK and neighboring Guangdong/_Canton_. These dialects branched apart very early, about 2000 years ago, and saying they are more similar vs mandarin is kind of like saying that French and Spanish are much closer than French and Italian because Basque is closer to French than standard Italian. Most commonalities in pronunciation are due to both dialects preserving some older Chinese pronunciations, but overall pronunciation and vernacular word choice are very, very different.

While I agree most in Hong Kong would probably prefer to move to other large cities like Vancouver or Sydney, it's not due to language. Having lived in both for many years, most folks in Hong Kong wouldn't have any language trouble in Taiwan, at least not up north towards Taipei.

Nonsense. HKers and TW people welcome each other with open arms.

Well the risk here is that Hong Kong is merely the beginning and based on how the world reacts will determine their action towards Taiwan. They likely will wait till the next US election to take stronger action in either case. They pretty much tipped their hand with mock invasions of Taiwan, can you imagine the international uproar if the US did the same with North Korea?

[Removed: wild theory about pandemic being cause of world wars]

The historical record strongly indicates that people didn't care that much about the 1918 pandemic after it was over. It's not like history was poorly recorded in the 20th century; if people were fighting wars or implementing policies because the public was still angry about the pandemic, that would have been reported in the daily news.

You seem to have your dates mixed up... The 1918 pandemic is largely accepted as being exacerbated by the end of WW1.

There's a theory that it caused WW2: https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/woodrow-wilsons...

WW1 ended in 1918. You could theorize that maybe the pandemic made peace.

I think from a business perspective TW is definitely the rise but the real move is towards Singapore.

An anecdotal data point ...

We (rsync.net) established Hong Kong as our Asian POP in 2009 for a variety of high-minded, conscientious reasons. I wanted to cast the firms dollar-votes for open, democratic societies and further the establishment of Hong Kong as a business and network hub ... obviously a very small impact but that was the idea.

I am now seriously considering moving our operations out of Hong Kong and Singapore is an obvious candidate for the move. The trouble is, Singapore is not exactly a paragon of free and open society. Australia makes some sense in terms of Internet topology but I'm not sure it's a fit, either.

I'm upset about this because I love Hong Kong. I think it's the most interesting city in the world and I love being there.

The Lee's family is like another CCP, just that they can speak English, went to elite west university, and used economic prosperity as an excuse to push down on dissident or threaten to their power. Singapore is somewhat suppressed and not necessarily free. I agree that Singapore is still most favorable, but there are considerable factors to not move out there.

And then the same thing will happen 10-20 years after it happens to HongKong. Probably better just to live in HK, not like China is gone genocide the population.