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| The photo in National Review, makes the police look terrifying |
And here’s The New York Times giving space to Vivienne Chow to talk of the protestors’ anthem.
And here’s US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi “vowing to push ahead with legislation on HK”.
[ADDED: it’s the “Human Rights and Democracy Act” which sounds fine but will potentially remove Hong’s Kong separate-status treatment and thus hasten rather than delay the end of “one country two systems”. Another case of “the road to hell…”]And here is Congressman (R) Michael McCaul standing with Joshua Wong (about whom I’ve had words before) saying:
"This is a battle about democracy versus dictatorship, liberty versus tyranny and freedom versus oppression. We’ll stand here today as Americans untied with the freedom loving people of Hong Kong.”Look, this is like motherhood. Who is not for it? Who is not in favour of democracy, of liberty and of freedom? We all are.
So it’s a question of how we get them. Or, in the case of Hong Kong, how we maintain them. For we have Liberty, we have Freedom and we have Democracy.
Whereas there are many of us -- Alex Lo, for example, no friend of Beijing or of the HK government -- who believe that what the demonstrators are doing will endanger the very freedoms and liberty we already have.
Another thing bugs me: if you’re against what the demonstrators are doing now, you’re lumped in with being “pro Beijing”. I, we, are not at all. If you search this blog for Xi Jinping, you’ll find plenty of criticism of him. I hate the party, while loving the country and the people. I’m also not pro HK government, neither Jing nor I are, we think they’ve made horrible mistakes. But we don’t think what’s happening now on our streets, all the violence and destroying the livelihoods of hard working Hong Kong people is going to lead to any more of what they’re after. It’s time for calm and discussion, not more petrol bombs. That doesn’t make us lackeys or running dogs of Beijing.
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*The Chinese government is indeed “nasty”. I don’t like Xi Jinping one little bit and have said so many times on this blog. (what I seem most often to say is that “I hate Xi Jinping”). I like the people I like the culture, I just don’t like the government, at least the present ones; some past ones were better.But the government going back 40 years has also done incredible things for its people, not only improving housing and transport and all infrastructure, but increased the average wage by an annual compound 14.3%. That is phenomenal; amazing; unprecedented. It’s brought 500 million into the middle class. When I first went to China they were all poor peasants earning a few tens of dollars a month. Now they earn in the tens of thousands. And we ought not ignore that.
Also: for all the talk of Beijing’s “dark hand” in Hong Kong, of its interfering, of repressing Hong Kong, I can think of very few examples. To my mind, they’ve been remarkably hands off.
