andyshuxin
Re:Student group leader arrested on suspicion of inciting secession in HK
on Wednesday July 29, 2020 @11:01PM (#23994100)
From what I heard, they intend to win the way France (de Gaulle really) won the World War II – by losing on the ground but siding with the victorious.
Many of the secessionists hope for or expect an immediate collapse of the Chinese central government, either due to internal economic, political, or ethnic problems, or to external pressures applied especially by US, at which point, with support from the Anglosphere, they could obtain and sustain sovereignty.
Re:Arabic, a great language, has a low profile
on Thursday October 25, 2018 @05:20AM (#18299565)
The Quran and its language ("Modern Standard Arabic") may be what binds the "dialects" together under one umbrella label "Arabic". Chinese is in a similar situation, whose writing system unifies the mutually un-intelligible "dialects" like Mandarin, Hokkien, and Cantonese as one "language" called "Chinese".
Such is an advantage of separating written and spoken forms of a language: as the spoken form inevitably mutates over time and fractures over space, having a stable written form means people who would otherwise consider each other foreigners may (1) share a common understandable set of historical and cultural documents, (2) communicate with each other at least in letters, (3) identify each other's language as but a "variation" of the standard written form.
English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese remain largely uniform across the Oceans because they are spread across the Oceans only recently, that is, not long before centralised nation states, compulsory education, sound recording, radio broadcasting, and YouTube.
Re:Billionaire Is Reported Seized from Hong Kong Hotel and Taken into ...
on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @10:10AM (#13541245)
The Brits' hands were tied. Modern Hong Kong is comprised of three parts, Hong Kong island, Kowloon, and the New Territories. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded to UK, while the New Territories had only been _leased_ for 99-year (1898 - 1997), which in 1980s accounted for around 90% of the land and 40% of the population of Hong Kong.
If the Brits had obtained permanent rights in the New Territories, the situation would have been different. But they hadn't and by contract had to return Hong Kong to China.
It has been argued, though, that they should have returned Hong Kong to Republic of China.