With Hong Kong it was somewhat inevitable but I can't help but imagine how different it would be if the US and EU/Britain (as leads) would have strongly denounced their approach. I suspect in a decade from now the West will be lamenting how Hong Kong was the right opportunity to stifle China's ambition.
[i] https://www.bloomberg.com/quicktake/territorial-disputes
These actions can all be traced back to China's increased tendency towards authoritarianism, for example the elimination of the term limit for Xi Jinping in 2018,[1] which stands in contrast to China's economic liberalization in the early 1990s.[2] It's important to understand that this liberalization is more or less the sole reason China is the "young superpower" we see today (just look up the GDP numbers from 1990 onwards), so the question is how a reversal of this attitude will serve future Chinese interests. Although unconfirmed, there are claims that Xi's grip on power may be decreasing somewhat, and that there is "widespread opposition" from within the party, but for obvious reasons few are willing to speak out.[3]
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/25/world/asia/china-xi-jinpi...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_economic_reform
[3]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/18/china-xi-jinpi...
A mature legal system is the only reliable way to combat problems like corruption. A legal system is much more reliable than a single powerful executive. China could have gone beyond mere convergence in its economic success. Different egos are running things now than during the start of the economic reforms, but in a better timeline I think some successful institutions from Hong Kong would have been adopted in more areas of China.
However, the west isn't in a position right now to say that in spite of it being harder work to run a system where political influence doesn't affect the legal system that strong institutions are the source of our prosperity. We're simultaneously in a period of dismantling established institutions, and less capable when it comes to managing crises than we used to be.
> We don't know a perfected totalitarian power structure, because it would require the control of the whole planet.
- Hannah Arendt
I would add that several totalitarian singularities, that each are closed off from one another or perceive each other through a completely controlled ideological filter, might also constitute such total control.
Why USA has historically entered into so many treaties?
They reason is is because USA's constitutional arrangement makes it really hard for the US government to declare a war... on the paper.
So, by giving a treaty, USA was giving the strongest assurance that by turning a treaty into its own law, it prevents the chance of anybody in the constitutional order of precedence stopping, or reneging on the obligated retaliation.
You can't give a pass by saying "They're just testing waters". Everything in war is testing waters.
What? What could the US have done beyond what we did other than all out war? The US response to this was very harsh.
We undid 50 years of diplomacy with China, and have started building a sortof SEA equivalent to NATO.
Chinese/American relations have probably never been as unfriendly as they are right now, and Hong Kong is a major part of that. Seriously I don’t know what the next step would be that wasn’t a de facto, weapons-hot war.
Signing the TPP could have helped _a lot_. DT gave China _a lot_ of diplomatic leverage there, for free...
This isn't just a Trump thing (though he has accelerated pulling the US out of leadership positions) but it goes back to the lack of response to the Crimea annexation (and Russia's continual pushing of it's Ukrainian boundary).
China has spent the last several decades smartly becoming more diversified in what countries they depend on, while at the same time making sure the whole world was heavily reliant on themselves. Due to that no one country can do anything to keep China in check, and in normal times that would be OK. However, the world has relied on the US to form global coalitions that would work together to push back against things like this, and now that the US has made it clear it will not work with anyone else (even allies), China knows that no other country has the influence to form such a coalition. That means it doesn't even need to be coy about what it's doing (as we are seeing with Hong Kong).
So yeah, I agree that in 2019 and 2020 the US and Eu/Britain couldn't have done anything meaningful, but what's happening right now is heavily caused by the US' pulling out of the world stage leading up to it.
Goes both ways though.
True territorial disputes can invoke different measures. Grouping HK and other human rights topics like Xinjiang with territorial disputes I think muddies the waters.
As for actual territorial disputes,
> ...China, which has displayed a willingness to negotiate in many such situations. In just over 60 years, China has gone from 23 land disputes down to just six. In the majority of its settlements, China accepted less than one-half of the territory it originally claimed.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2012/10/territorial-disp...
The article prefaces by saying this
"One way to cement a claim to a disputed territory — and to anger others who think it belongs to them — is to build on it."
Then goes onto describe the disputes almost being exclusive between China and the US Navy, and further reinforces that point by saying,
"The U.S., the longtime guarantor of freedom of navigation in Asia’s waters..."
I'm sorry, but isn't it sort of ironic that Bloomberg accuses of territorial disputes mainly with China as being the aggressor, when most of their maritime incidents are almost exclusively against the US Navy?
China is clearly the "aggressor" in this situation because they are building military installations in an area that was previously not a militarized zone.
That isn't true. Some of the dispute involve the Americans, most involve the Vietnamese and Filipinos, and then some from the Indonesians and Malaysians. That only the USA has the resources to keep these disputes from being one sided shouldn't muddy those waters.
There's a reason Russia and China are bold right now.
EDIT: I get it, it's politically charged, but I remind everyone to discuss, rather than downvote, based on your own political opinion.
Globalization unified Chinese elites with oligarchs in the US and Europe so they both could profit from exploitation of the Chinese labor force. But now that the country has developed past the point of this being easily profitable for all parties, the Chinese regime has to resort to ever more authoritarian tactics to keep the wheels spinning. Average people in western countries might oppose all of this, but the people who rule them put as much stock in these objections as the Chinese leaders do their dissenters.
Why? What would the benefit be? What would the benefit have been?
See also: cointel on BLM while white supremacists plan and execute with freely. Team America: World Police reflecting our actual police.
The West's reactions so far have been ranging from ineffectual economic sanctions to completely ignoring it. I would expect similar "annexations" by nationalist/totalitarian states to continue in the future.
Some people are more "western" than others. More specifically, the ones that can vote to mobilize the "western" military. Spill their blood and get demolished. Spill the blood of their worshipers and suddenly their own blood is too valuable to waste.
The West gets textiles from turkey and China, electronics from China (and many other natural resources), natural resources from UAE and Russia. And Israel has been viewed as a ‘stable’ partner in an unstable area.
I would agree that the annexations / subjugations have not been legal or good. And in some ways could be equated to what the Nazis began to do. But again, the stakes have changed. One bad decision could totally wreck the world as we know it. It would make the Second World War look small. I believe the West desperately wants to avoid that.
Plus, the US does not have a great (albeit recent) track record with helping out in regards to annexation / subjugation. See Vietnam war and Korean War and War on Terror and Bay of Pigs etc
Hongkong is a Chinese territory that was annexed by a European colonial power then handed back (so pretty much exactly what the US want to see, right?). China is not annexing any foreign territory, it's managing its territory the way it sees fit. The aim of making noise is to create trouble for the Chinese government, it's a cynical, but classic, game with HK used as pawn because, of course, the West does not actually generously care about HK, they have 'friends' who manage their countries in the same way or worse.
Crimea is objectionable because of the method used. But no-one is willing to make too much noise because it's Russia, sure, but also because everyone knows that Crimea was Russian territory until the 1950s when it was moved to Ukraine by the USSR and because the majority of the population is Russian and quite happy with being back in Russia. When the time is right for everyone to save face and get something this will be accepted and everyone will move on.
On the other hand Turkey has indeed very plainly invaded a foreign country. But they are good friends of ours (well... at least still friends strategically). Arguably the same goes for Israel.
I mean outside of areas like Hong Kong and Taiwai that used to be part of China has China ever invaded foreign soil like Western countries to every few years?
Go fight somewhere else when necessary/appropriate, or the the fight will come to you eventually.
These are broad brush strokes, I know, but the principle holds true across the centuries.
reality is, just a year ago, no one would have believe an outbreak like covid in China can become a worldwide pandemic that hit this HARD and ended all of our way of lives
it's too often we are blind and ignorant to incoming dangers
I was on a flight back from Japan to Heathrow in early March and the only thing they did to contain it was announce that if you feel sick, please report it to the crew. Needless to say, nobody self-reported and they didn't do anything at all in immigration after we landed.
China “bailing out” Hong Kong is a common myth popularized by the CCP [0].
China refused to interfere with Hong Kong during the 1998 financial crisis, according to former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa [1].
The Monetary Authority head did not acknowledge any help from China back then [2].
[0] https://medium.com/@lineposthk/%E5%AF%92%E6%9F%8F-%E4%B8%AD%... (in Chinese)
[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/2101761...
[2] https://hk.finance.yahoo.com/news/%E4%BB%BB%E5%BF%97%E5%89%9... (in Chinese)
I'm not exactly sure what you're referring to, but Taiwan is generally considered a much nicer place to live than China for the average person.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_in_Asia_and_...
In particular I’ve suspected for awhile that China desperately wants to “own” Taiwan Semiconductor ($TSM) since they’ve been trying to build up their own domestic chip business for awhile and $TSM is the gold standard in chip manufacturing.
Some other mainland Chinese people are more nuanced in their thoughts. I have no idea about population percentages for opinions. But this a world-class top 20 MBA school, and had one undergraduate student die while protesting (fell off a building). Bunch of these classmates are educated with masters degrees from American universities. If they default to war, I'm a bit concerned, I'd expect them to see more nuance in the world. For them, it's not really war of course, as Taiwan was always theirs in the first place in their eyes. Any foreign interference in the matter is a slap in the face of Chinese sovereignty, was the same for Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is a difficult situation because the entire world agrees that Hong Kong belongs to China. Taiwan is difficult in that most of the world has agreed that Taiwan belongs to China, that is the crux of the One China policy that China forces all countries to agree to if they want to have diplomatic and trade relations with China. If you break with the One China policy, you break diplomatic and trade relations with China. Don't see most countries willing to take that step. Big game of chicken.
For what it's worth, the Chinese government's official stance is that military action is a last resort option only if diplomatic negotiations fail.
The difference is that the People's Republic of China (what 'China' usually refers to) has decided that the Republic of China has ceased to exist in 1949 (Taiwan is the last remaining territory controlled by the Republic of China) and that they are strong enough to largely 'enforce' this policy on the world stage.
So, of course for Chinese this is a domestic issue.
The West cares because the PRC is an adversary and Taiwan has a strategic location on maritime routes to East Asia.
It's more nuanced than that. The reason for the one country two systems policy was that the rest of the world doesn't agree that the CCP should hold sovereignty over Hong Kong.
China is seen as only temporality under the control of the CCP and that it will transition away from authoritarianism given the chance. The idea is that Mainland China will become more like HK. That didn't happen at all. With the passage of the security law, HK looks more like China.
The reason why HK was taken now, with all narrative pointing it to be the death knell of 1 country 2 systems, is because HK nativism educated under western textbooks will be fundamentally incompatible with with "1 country" - for PRC any generation trained under Uk textbooks will be a perennial poison pill in terms of cross strait relations. So now new gen of HKers will get brainwashed on patriotic education and NSL will ensure future generations to be firmly pro-China which may coincide with revival of 1C2S if happenstance leads to compatible political shifts in Taiwan. Ideally it will coincide with a prosperous greater bay area with the simultaneous economic decline of Taiwan due to PRC geopolitical maneuvering. Again 29 years is a long time, that's the only hope for peaceful reunification. Meanwhile hope CCP manages nationalism, because a democratic China would have invaded Taiwan already. Fucking Taiwan would be everyone alternative factions trump card if there was ever internecine political struggle.
Alternative is engineering false flag attack from Taiwan and invading under guise of a retaliatory action. IMO all the scenarios of China flat out invading Taiwan because muh redlines is not credible. It will be hybrid warfare with gray zone tactics that China has perfected in SCS, belligerance will be ambiguous enough to provide ample excuse for most countries to sitout, except US, no one wants to intervene against a nuclear power, or just Chinese conventional power on current tracetry of acquisition.
It will depend on the overall relationship between US/China, and between China/Taiwan.
If Taiwan declares independence or develops nuclear weapons, expect war within a year.
If the status quo continues, then peace is likely to continue.
China will probably acquire the capability to militarily invade in 2025-2030 even with US intervention.
It's my understanding that Taiwan is a nuclear threshold state and has pretty much everything in place to build nuclear weapons in a very short time. Similar to Japan and Germany.
Taiwanese themselves are more split on the question of independence. People's opinions and moods change over time as well.
I lived in Hong Kong until 1995. The Basic Law is supposed to apply for 50 years, so we should only be about halfway through that. The sense in the HK expat community at the time was skepticism that it would make it the whole way unchallenged, but that China "needed" HK, so it wouldn't rock the boat too much.
Of course, now that is no longer the case. Any optimism we had at the time of the handover was rooted in HK's economic importance but China went and built Shenzhen into a bigger, better Hong Kong within two decades. Still a Special Economic Zone but without all the pesky political baggage.
China has been extremely pragmatic and results-oriented. When Hong Kong was the most economically successful part of China, they were happy to leave it be and learn some lessons from it. Now the rest of China has largely caught up and it's time for them to make HK more like Shenzhen, rather than the other way around.
They weren't going to make big moves until they had built up their navy.
There were people making noise about China. But in general China was off most people’s radar.
The Olympia’s they hosted was when I personally realized China was a big deal.
But what’s really happened is that the internet has given new powers to governments to regulate and control the people. While I would love to talk about how big and bad the CCP is (they are both of those adjectives and many more) I would be in remiss if I didn’t look at my own country (US) and see that we have been guilty of creating false narratives on free trade.
It’s sad to me that we lack Political leadership in our country. That’s one thing that China does not lack. Both governments are propagated by lies. But the difference is that the Chinese people have suffered greatly and now (on average) are suffering less. So they may be willing (as a whole) to turn a blind eye to situations like HK and what’s happening to the Uighur people.
Let's call it what it is; genocide [1].
[1] - https://www.heritage.org/asia/commentary/chinas-forced-steri...
So the real question is what or who is going to stop them from expanding? Asians have a higher IQ, they have the human numbers and natural resources.
The only thing I can imagine stopping them is that they will be composed of too many regions that want to split. But as long as they can maintain a strong grip, I don't think anything can split off.
There is no world power that can or wants to face them head on, and it will only get worse when they grow bigger (which they will).
Maybe I'm pessimistic, or maybe just realistic?
The agreement does not grant China full control to do whatever it likes over the territory at this time.
So legally, in response, Westerners in the form of the UK still have some kind of duty towards the people there.
A second reason, which I rank higher ethically, is that just by virtue of people existing, we still have a duty to demand better treatment for people who are being treated badly, especially when it's an imposed political event (and therefore can be changed) which is going to radically change their lives for the worse as they see it. Landmass connection or not.
The handover of Hong Kong from Britain to PRC in 1997 is based on the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 1984, which is being violated [1]. PRC is violating an international declaration it signed, which at least Britain has a say.
Putting aside the international nature of Hong Kong, other nations should take a part in some extreme cases, such as to push back on concentration camps and genocide, be it in Nazi Germany or modern day PRC.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-britain...
P.S. As other comments said, Hong Kong (transferred from Qing to Britain in 1841, 1860, and 1898) has never been a former territory of PRC (formed in 1949). It is also arguable if Britain should give Hong Kong to ROC instead of PRC.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Territorial_integrity
But just imagine how crazy it would be if every place could declare itself independent. Would states count? What about cities?
China struck HK 2 months ago with the new law at the weakest point in recent history with the pandemic.
China's basically like, "Look at me. I am the captain now."
It's a sad time for HK and the world.
The phrase has been used in propaganda with the same meaning for maybe a century at this point, if not at least since the 50s.
It's so ingrained that I had to reread your comment several times to understand how you could possibly be upset at that.
The exact wording is "The socialist system and policies shall not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, and the previous capitalist system and way of life shall remain unchanged for 50 years."
By analogy: a violent drug-dealer shoots you, robs you, and then kidnaps your child at gunpoint. Years later, you manage to have the child returned, but in the interim they have been taught by their captor to hate you and resist rejoining their family. What do you do?
"Well, the british weren't perfect but compared to Japan, or the 50 years of totalitarian warlords who ruled after, they were a paradise"
That got us into some trouble, I seem to recall.
Is this not similar? I worry this has a certain path written on it, with our good intentions paving the way.
Why would the CCP defer to the wealthy when they already have far more power than they do?
