穹顶之下: Rolling 中华人民共和国 / People's Republic of China (PRC) Thread

China Snares Tourists’ Phones in Surveillance Dragnet by Adding Secret App

I've a friend who had to delete Orwell's 1984 from his Kindle upon entering China, but this seems like a step further?

was listening to someone saying on our state run broadcasting station the other day that other state run media in mainland China was reporting that in Hong Kong pro-government activists were carrying banners with: "I support the police" on them!

All for enforced deletion of Orwell tbh

I always keep my kindle in airplane mode cos of all the "cheeky nandos" l1bg3n content anyway, and am more paranoid about untrammeled evil american corporations doing something to brick my device or something, the bunch of fucking greedy scumbags!

Yeah, no problems there. xp

Hong Kong is a nasty episode though. It got me thinking: has the Mighty, Superior West completely forgotten about Tibet? The 'Free Tibet' festivals where pop stars raked up the karma points where absolutely everywhere 10, 15 years ago. But now? Been a long time since I heard about any effort to pressure China on this. Must be a new 'cause of the week', or have 'we' given up on Tibet entirely?

Students for a Free Tibet is old news, Students for Justice in Palestine is the new hotness

The US is still trying to cope with the reality that China is the new great power of the world. They won't throw any solids to Tibet at this stage.

I guess, but the Tibet thing had a reach well beyond the US. I had a neighbour for a couple of years who 24/7/365 had a Tibet flag out and stickers on his car. He wasn't the only one either! He moved though :(

Tibet should have had a freedom referendum, that would have sorted everything out!

i’ve bought two different chinese translations of 1984 in china on two separate occasions, and the one i read (from 2013-ish) seemed to be a pretty accurate and faithful translation, so perhaps this is another indication of how much things are changing there

Any good sources for what's going on in Hong Kong? (or is there a HK thread?)

The Guardian was live blogging today, if they do that every day I'll follow along, there were some good links.

The duration of the protests means it isn't getting the coverage, but it's just getting worse every weekend. Each weekend I think it can't get any worse, but it does.

#HongKongPolice shooting POINT BLANK at protesters inside an MTR station pic.twitter.com/mcFFQZlq1p

— Victor Ting (@VictorTing7) August 11, 2019

I have no words.

there is a Chinese twitter account I used to quite like when it was about food, huge infrastructure projects, Chinese culture and history etc.. But since the protests started he's posting lots of stuff that has my questionable crank alarms ringing ...like consistently showing the protesters in as bad a light as possible. I might even agree with some of it - like fules using the old HK colonial flag ffs or occasionally acting like thugs. But this is looking like the MSS or whoever is really involved in how this situation is being "dealt with" is obv not playing by the rules and it is escalating into a dangerously bad situation that only can get worse.

My Hong Kong born friend, who is otherwise quite sensible, spends lot of time on the Chinese internet. He's pretty pro-mainland to start with but I'm starting to hear a lot of the crazier stuff through him. His most frequent line, not specifically about the latest developments in Hong Kong, is that China should be allowed to develop with a disregard for human rights because of the disregard for human rights that the western colonial powers had when they were developing (and still do). Essentially he sees a massive double standard and has a fairly large chip on his shoulder about it. I don't think he's necessarily wrong but I would hope to hold everyone to a higher standard.

On Hong Kong the sees wholly as the work of Agents Provocateurs and mercenaries training rioters. Again, if Hong Kong didn't have foreign meddling going on it would be the only place on earth that didn't, but he seems to completely deny that Hong Kongers have any agency in the situation at all.

China should be allowed to develop with a disregard for human rights because of the disregard for human rights that the western colonial powers had when they were developing

Irony alert. Japan took a very similar line in regard to the East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere in the 1930s. The Western powers allowed one another to massively exploit their colonies, but were incensed when Japan tried to accumulate its own colonial empire, partly through the invasion of Manchuria. See also: The Rape of Nanking.

it's incoherent and sometimes ppl will try 'human rights is a western concept' instead but china is hardly alone in pointing to the west to justify heinous shit.

i thought this was pretty good: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/hong-kongs-fight-for-life

That is a good article, i’m Interested to see what my friend thinks.

Dylannn, where the best writing on japan happening in English right now?

no idea! china, for many reasons, has the attention of journalists, academics, natsec think tank guys, etc. dedicated sections of the economist, fp, ny times (sinosphere seems not to have been updated for a while though), still a million blogs covering everything from labor struggles to literature to translating state documents, variations on whatsonweibo translating and covering web content. also over the past decade or so, you have more chinese/taiwanese/hk folks writing in english, too.

i have no idea. maybe the japanese equivalent of all of those is out there, but i haven't found it. lots of coverage that's translated content about fads or whatever, not much critical writing in english, I DON'T THINK. i'm sure some japanophile ilxors could help out here, but it seems like japan blogs i read in the past have mostly gone dormant. i read neojaponisme even when i didn't care about japan. maybe there was never much, possibly explaining how momus became a respected voice on japanese cultural affairs.

i do like https://www.tokyoreview.net/ which launched 1 or 2 years ago, inviting academics to put their work into readable form.

Chinese state media showed armoured vehicles assembling near Hong Kong

Again, with the link:
Chinese state media showed armoured vehicles assembling near Hong Kong
https://img.theweek.in/content/dam/week/news/world/images/2019/8/12/Screengrab-Video-PAP-forces-Shenzhen.jpg

While I'm sympathetic to the protesters, the tactics of vandalism and shutting down the airport/economy doesn't play very well with mainlanders. China will face no repercussions from its own public (or for that matter, Trump) for Tiananmen+30.

They have other viable options?

The protesters?

I don't speak Chinese, nor have I followed this closely.

My impression is that the PRC needed some protester activity that would enrage the mainland public before they could move in. As ineffectual as a daily peaceful demonstration might have been, it wouldn't have given the PRC the licence to roll over the protests with martial law and the armor/mechanized infantry elements of Southern Theater (~ 6 divisions).

As for the PRC, whose major concern is unrest in the mainland, this played well for them. To mainlanders, the government probably looks overly tolerant.

The music is Chinese state media's choice:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gIi1mP5Yce8

But nothing came of the peaceful demonstrations? Violent crackdown in Hong Kong would be devastating to the financial economy there, no? A lot of capital flight, I'd assume.

Read the article Dylann posted

That does not really seem to be a view from the ground as much as standard leftist explanations I could read everywhere?

xp: There will be shiploads of people fleeing, but capital? Capital doesn't give a damn about liberal democratic ideals, so long as there's reliable property rights, contract law, and tolerably low corruption.

freddie b how much more from the ground do you need? wilfred chan is in hk currently and was there for 2014 as well, born and bred hong konger. i thought it was a pretty good summing up of what the hell is going on over there.

on capital flight i think i agree with sanpaku. it wouldn't be a violent crackdown on protest that would cause capital flight but the potential for beijing to fuck with the money, which is why business elites are not into the extradition bill either. all that money is flowing into hk from the prc now, for the reason that it's safer/more reliable, not because they're a quasi-democracy still. they're also the most vulnerable to interference from beijing. who cares about dissidents getting dragged over to shenzhen, since that's already going on, just ask gui minhai, but if a ceo or two get nabbed and put on trial and they go after their ill-gotten gains, it's a problem. xiao jianhua getting kidnapped from the hong kong four seasons to stand trial in beijing was a sign of things to come.

He could be as much a Hong Konger as possible, but if the story begins with neoliberalism and ends with a call to support Bernie Sanders it's just completely useless to me. Thousands could write exactly the same thing all over the world. And does. I know all that already, so what's the point?

lol fair enough i missed the part about bernie
i think the meat of it though was that hk no longer has the leverage to demand much since their usefulness to the prc is mostly gone, it's become pool of dirty mainland money meaning that the political and business elite can't risk shutting off the tap by calling for political change. those people are out of the game. they've made their plans already. but for most people the place has become an unliveable shithole and they can't get out and are pissed off about their living conditions and the failure of protests in 2014 (and smaller protests through the 2000s and before). so now the protests are "about" about extradition (or the five demands, which are mostly about police brutality, and throw in universal suffrage as an afterthought, bottom of the list, completely impossible) but more about anger, frustration at the state that the political and business elite has left hong kong in, but they're destined to fail because there's no direction, no leadership, "no obvious escape routes, no postcolonial models of self-determination."

i dunno, what's your take on it so far b?

That it's the most important news story of the year... That's basically my take away, and I'm just following along to see what happens. But just looking at history in a broad sense I think it's way too early to dismiss what happens because it's not having direction or leadership, that seems to me to be a misreading of historical upheavals in general. The anger is the point, it's not that they have, like, the right anti-neo-liberal way to look at it. The mainland ledership will seem to have everything under control until the exact point they don't.

same here, buddy. just following along. but i tend to think this is the end of something, the final convulsion of what started in 2005 or 2010, rather than the beginning. i'm not writing it off because of the lack of leadership or direction, but that makes it tougher to call what "their" next move is, and it's nearly impossible to make a call on a prc-managed crackdown with reinforcements from across the border, since there's no precedent and we have no access to what's going on at top levels in beijing.

one more question, frederik b... talking about "historical upheavals in general," which do you think provide the best lessons for those involved here or map onto this protest most accurately? just to name one so that i seem better informed, is it the orange revolution in ukraine?

how do i embed tweets

Police officer had his baton taken from him and was attacked with it. Drew his pistol and aimed at protesters. Astonished nobody killed here tonight. pic.twitter.com/Wox8yziDnz

— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 13, 2019

how many times in a situation like that would a cop just shoot someone dead? fucking hell.

No, I'd agree, it seems like an end, almost knowingly trying to confront the PRC into doing... something... no matter what. The obvious historical comparison seems Tiananmen, or the Green revolution in Iran, or the various failed protests against Putin. Although what's going on there at the moment is really interesting as well.

also following the story of the alleged undercover cop who was being struggled, and currently strapped to a luggage cart, it seems.

Pan-dem lawmakers Fernando Cheung and Kwok Ka-ki are now negotiating with protesters who have tied the man to a luggage trolley. Very ugly scene pic.twitter.com/Xk578seTYL

— Austin Ramzy (@austinramzy) August 13, 2019

There's a lot of stress in the world right now, where you can't really be half a dictator anymore, to paraphrase a shitty American tv show.

he was wearing a press vest, they grabbed him, thinking he was a cop, and then found an I❤️警察 t-shirt in his bag...

ICYMI let’s fill in some blanks https://t.co/21Fhvs6QQF

— tricialing (@tricialing) August 13, 2019

hope it doesn't turn out like this

i dunno, imho ideally stop this and get back to occupying government buildings and scuffling with triad thugs

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EB3LhTyU8AAqDS4?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

attacking other HK citizens is terrible tactics, even if they have "i heart the bizzies" t shirts or are wankers who are the HK equivalent to the UK FBPE posse.

turns out he was a reporter for global times.

live feed from hkg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7IvjtgSawY

how do i embed tweets

Police officer had his baton taken from him and was attacked with it. Drew his pistol and aimed at protesters. Astonished nobody killed here tonight. pic.twitter.com/Wox8yziDnz
— Mike Bird (@Birdyword) August 13, 2019
― XxxxxxxXxxxxxxxxXxxxx (dylannn), Tuesday, August 13, 2019 12:07 PM (forty-three minutes ago)

This video is crazy. It was only after watching it a few times that I noticed the bystander with the wheeled luggage trying to hurry by and getting caught in the melee.

congrats on the bbc finding some myopic, thick as pigshit UK twat describing it as a "bitter pill to swallow" cos it has inconvenienced his honeymoon, hope she's shagging the milkman by next week ya weapon!

My (wife's) family in Hubei are in full meltdown about the Coronavirus. Sister-in-law is actually due to fly from Wuhan to the UK next week. Bit concerned.

There's a lot of racist crap out there about "Chinese eat anything" but this cunt has not done anyone any favours, ridiculous that this sort of thing is still being permitted anywhere in 2020.

Photo from Douban of a menu at #Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market. Don't know when it was taken, but they sell all kinds of wild animals incl. live wolf pups & palm civets. 2nd photo taken after outbreak discovered shows this storefront (3rd left) covering word “野 (wild)” in its name. pic.twitter.com/HiQlzX4XBX

— Muyi Xiao (@muyixiao) January 21, 2020