An update on the Hong Kong situation from a mainlander:
I wanted to send this to you last week but the outside internet has been completely inaccessible in China for the past two weeks because of the National Day holiday. They do this every year but it’s particularly bad this year.
A few days ago the ENTIRE Hong Kong metro system was closed because the “protesters” went on a rampage in response to a new law making it illegal to wear a mask in public. Every single metro station. Imagine if that had happened in a major American city of ten million people, what the police and the National Guard would do.
Pat Buchanan has an article in which he states, “The people of Hong Kong, who are surely being cheered by many on the mainland of China …” All respect to Pat Buchanan but he doesn’t understand this situation at all.
There is mutual hatred between Hong Kong and mainland people. NO ONE on the mainland is cheering the Hong Kong protesters. They think Hong Kong people are a bunch of spoiled brats who are now wrecking their own city and being used by the West because they think they’re better than mainland people. And Hong Kong people, meanwhile, think they ARE better than mainland people because they’ve had the benefit of a hundred years of imposed quasi-Western civilization and the result is a more well-mannered people and a more orderly society in a higher-quality environment.
But Hong Kong has been going downhill for decades now, due to various reasons that are not reducible to a simple statement, and the mainland has been in the ascendancy. But regardless, if Beijing sends in the troops, (which I don’t think they will do because the bad PR outweighs any other benefit; they’ll probably just let Hong Kong burn because they don’t really need it) I assure you that the vast majority of mainland Chinese will applaud this decision and love their government even more, seeing it as just desserts for a bunch of spoiled traitors, i.e. Chinese who don’t want to be Chinese and who collude with the yang guizi (foreign devils).
The global media would of course use any move by Beijing as a way to paint China as the new Nazis. You can see this narrative already developing and being pushed by Bannon and others, as well as the Hong Kong protesters themselves, who are quite obviously trying to provoke a violent response. But for the mainland Chinese, it would only solidify their sense of “us against the world.” My fear is that the people who want the next big war are actively pushing in this direction. I hope that Trump and Xi Jinping really are friendly, because they’re increasingly looking like Kennedy and Khrushchev.