cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/49224731
China’s ambassador to Australia has urged Canberra to prepare for dealing with a “reunified China”, declaring Chinese people “will not forgive” countries that seek to obstruct Beijing’s push to bring Taiwan under its control.
In remarks that frame reunification as inevitable and resistance as unforgivable, Xiao Qian likened Taiwan’s status to that of Tasmania and warned that any attempt of “compromising or openly distorting” Beijing’s one-China principle would constitute a retreat from prior commitments and erode trust.
He said Australia could not keep reaping the benefits of trade with China while seeking to block reunification, signalling economic consequences for resisting Beijing’s aims.
[…]
Mr Xiao also lashed a recent [Australian] Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade statement that described China’s military and coast guard drills around Taiwan as “deeply concerning, destabilising and risk inflaming regional tensions”, and reiterated that Canberra opposed any unilateral attempt to change the status quo.
[…]
He also cautioned governments, including Australia’s, against pursuing dialogue on Taiwan unless they were committed to reunification.
[…]
Hong Kong is still governing themselves. Their governmental system is still intact. It was not dismantled. You clearly just saw some violent protests and assumed you knew what was going on.
China’s one country two system approach is very explicit about one country meaning one military and one national security apparatus. The protests were about a national security law coming into effect that would give the CPC the legal framework to remove politicians that collaborated with Britain, the US, or other enemies of China.
And even though the student protestors fire bombed the police, the police were extremely restrained on the face of protestors literally burning people alive. The protests raged for weeks on end and the violence we saw on the news was almost entirely showing students throwing molotovs while the police retreated slowly. A far different sort of conflict than what we see in the US or England.
So, yes, the world absolutely believes China’s One Country Two Systems because it’s been doing it for literally centuries and because even in Hong Kong, where there was a violent student protest, the Hong Kong system of government is still operating in the same form it was operating when the British installed it.
It’s not governing themselves if the CPC decides who they collaborate with. And your argument about police bring restrained is similar to how Israel supporters try to gaslight everyone how Israel is acting restrained against terrorists.
It’s an obviously overused tactic now to paint the students as the bad actor when they have every right to decide how their country is supposed to be run, given that they are the future of their country. Anytime a government cracks down on student protest, it’s never the government that is in the right.
So no, the world, especially China’s neighbours, doesn’t believe that China will let Taiwan to govern themselves. They’d only allow a puppet government to be in power, like they’re doing in Hong Kong.
Well then you’re not free because your government decides who you can collaborate with. What silly absolutism.
I mean, you could say that, but then you’d have to look up the numbers killed and then you’d be embarrassed for making such a comparison.
This is an obviously shallow take. Hong Kong isn’t a country. It’s a part of China that the British carved off at gun point. Then they abused and oppressed the Chinese people there for decades. Then, when Thatcher realized that they were going to have to abide by the terms of the lease and actually give it back to China, it was the British that decided on the form of economy and the form of government. And they made deliberate choices to privilege a specific subset of the population that was amenable to being supported of British rule. Compradors, we call them. The British were the ones who came up with the concept of a Hong Kong identity, even, as a way of creating separation between Chinese people in Hong Kong and Chinese people in China.
And the students grew up in a system organized by the compradors, with Western style universities tied directly to Western financial interests (Hong Kong, after all, became a strong British financial hub) and the British were well positioned after occupying the region for a century to really stir the pot.
The student protest movement in Hong Kong was nearly universally shunned by the parents and particularly the grandparents of the students. The grandparents had really gone through the oppression of British rule and they rightly told those kids that they were being manipulated, even shutting them out of their homes for protesting.
But of course, liberals like you see everything in a vacuum. Those students were protesting because they were fully formed intellectual with all the context and not a single thing could have swayed them one way or another - they just know deep down that communist China is evil because they’re the future of their country of Hong Kong…
It’s just so sad that you know all these concepts, like puppet government, but you think history started right around the time you graduated high school.
The government in Hong Kong was a British puppet. If you do not understand that, you are either ignorant or willfully ignorant. China, through One Party Two Systems, clearly knows that the government of Hong Kong was British puppet government at the time of the lease ending and instead of doing anything about it allows that government to continue operating for a decade while China focused entirely integrating Hong Kong into national defense. Then China went spy hunting and by 2015 had effectively shutdown all the Western spy networks in China. And then, as they saw Hong Kong and Taiwan being manipulated by the West, they tightened national security so they could go after British puppets in Hong Kong and the students took their bodies to the streets and risked their lives for some fucking compradors. And China, understanding that this was the situation, let the protests rage for weeks and kept having the police back off despite the protestors getting seriously violent. And now it’s called down, and the British puppets are gone or in jail, and the Hong Kong system is still operating as an independent government system, but without British manipulation.
You really need to take the wider view here. It’s not one sided. Hong Kong is not operating in a vacuum as some group of Chinese people that hate communism. It’s literally a British colony, now former colony being manipulated by the British, who have been enemies of China for literally centuries. It will take many decades for Hong Kong to recover from the traumas of British rule. The student protests were a manifestation of that trauma. They had to happen. But they do not represent some sort of signal that China is a brutal evil dictatorship.