This is just utter nonsense, and I say this as someone who grew up in northern Ireland. So you think HK will be better when it's more equal?

I am not really familiar with Northern Ireland and how it relates to Hong Kong. Most of youngster in HK are quite pessimistic on their economic future. Working hours are long. Houses are very expensive, small and crowded. The strange things is most of the population don't speak English but in corporate the language are English. This make a lot of locals was overlooked in Job Promotion.

This won't change if the BJ overlords move in:

Working hours and conditions on the mainland are even worse than in HK, famously so.

If the office language gets pushed more towards Mandarin that doesn't help locals. The uneducated don't speak Beijing'r Mandarin just like they don't speak flawless RP English. They will still get overlooked, but now the their bosses will be princelings from the north instead... Yay?

The N Ireland thing is about British repression, which was mentioned. Some people like to claim the British occupy northern Ireland (they don't, the majority want British rule). If a free press, fair elections, rule of law are what repressing dissent looks like, then I'm not sure how the CCP stack up!

I haven't read as much about Northern Ireland as I would have wished to, but the parallels are quite similar, especially the legal "innovations" used to quell dissent.

For example, the recent National Security Law allows non-jury trials, which seems to me taken directly from the Northern Ireland playbook: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplock_court

There are a some interesting NI court case(s?) which I've encountered in the past couple years relating to riots that were occasionally cited in the Hong Kong court which escapes me right now.

Anyway the point is that while freedoms are indeed being eroded in Hong Kong, it's a fallacy to paint the British colonial rule as benevolent just to make a point. (Most of the freedoms were granted to Hong Kong in the 1990s _after_ UK signed the Sino British joint declaration, it worked as a narrative to kind of force the Chinese government to revert a bunch of freedoms and hence the UK escaped most of the blame for making much of those those repressive laws in the first place)

The British tried to hold democratic elections during that time, but it was the Communist Party that pressured them not to. The riots you're talking about were Hong Kong Communist going against the British.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1967_Hong_Kong_riots

I read wikipedia. I just realized that the suppresion is more brutal than what I imagined. Are u referring to HK 1997 election? That election is after the British reluctantly agree to handover HK. From the CCP point of view the elections is a plot to sabotage the Handover. It is not that iI agree or disagree with CCP view or British motive. There are many anti colonial politicians in Asia suspicious of the British motive.