Hong Kong's civil society 'withers' under national security purge

What a sad reflection of a system with no respect for other peoples and cultures.

Goodbye Hong Kong. Freedom was nice while it lasted, eh?

Get out of Hong Kong while you still can, if you can

I am with sf2k, get out while you can.

Taiwan is looking at this situation and is likely making a wish list for weapons that will keep the CCP at bay a while longer.

Hong Kong can never be it's same ol' vibrant self when people are afraid anything they do can possibly land them in jail

And Taiwanese people see this - they don't want to be the next Hong Kong. They now know "1 country, 2 systems" won't work

So China is only making Taiwanese people not believe in the "1 country, 2 systems"

He said some venues have quietly urged his group not to turn up after one was questioned and reminded of anti-coronavirus rules by police recently, a tactic commonly used on the Chinese mainland.

....how eeriely familiar that sounds. Our current globalist elite is very much copying notes from the CCP handbook of population control.

Swallowing HK's democracy will, at least in the short term, give Beijing communists a chronic case of social indigestion, political hiccups and, in the long term (let's hope), cause the scelerotic CCP to finally succumb to a a failure of nerve and a fatal, self-inflicted gastrointestinal disorder of China's unsustainable, undemocratic society resulting in the ultimate collapse of its autocratic rule. The people of HK will have to bite the bitter bullet for now, but they will never give up hope because their dreams can't be canceled by government fiat!

One country two systems is officially dead and buried. The vibrant financial and business hub of Hong Kong is now but a memory as Communist party laws strangle freedom of speech and thought in that city. It is now just another Chinese city of repression and totall control by a communist Party that will eventually fall at the hands of its own disaffected citizens. A sad situation all around.

HakmanToday  03:02 pm JST

The United Kingdom never should have handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Easier said than done, the treaty had to honoured. Retaining HK by force is unsustainable, China controls the food and water. Nice idea but an impossible dream.

HK is screwed, if you have business there then dump it, get out asap and leave them to it. It will never ever be like it used to be. A great pity, I've been a regular visitor since the 70s but like most good things, ......................

@

sf2kToday  03:09 pm JST

Get out of Hong Kong while you still can, if you can

I agree totally.

do you think we will be saying this about Japan due to an ear with China in the near future out of interest?

Ideas are extremely dangerous to the CCP only because they are so weak and the CCP ideas cannot win any disagreement without violence by the state.

Really sad and depressing, at this point there’s nothing you can do except for cut and run, it’s over. The mainland didn’t keep its solemn oath to allow HK to continue to rule as a free nation and China decided to end that 27 years earlier than expected. This goes to show that the Beijing can’t be trusted to hold any promise it makes domestically or internationally and they can’t be trusted. A sad day for democracy.

"The red lines are being tightened each day," the 20-year-old told AFP.

It's not a red line anymore, it's a red fishing net. They catch and kill anything that's opening its mouth.

The location of HK would have made it impossible to defend militarily, and the contract for the handover would have been upheld by any court.

What has since happened was inevitable. It was just a matter of time. China is a dictatorship and this is how dictatorships function.

Did the people of HK really think the US, UN or the RotW were going to intervene in any meaningful way?

If they can escape, they should do so. If they can't, they need to get their heads down and stay under the radar. Volunteering for martyrdom is unwise.

HK citizens have been colonised and are now living under occupation. If they wouldn't do it in Beijing, they shouldn't now do it in HK. The party is over. The bad guys usually win and they have here.

Any opposition has to be undertaken in secret and very carefully.

It won't be much consolation, but many Westerners are also likely to be feeling a lot more Chinese going forward, as nationalism increases and governments take back control from corporates and their own citizens, using Orwell's novel as a playbook.

Since the handover, HK residents had a couple of decades to plan an escape. The Taiwanese should take note. US forces walked away from fighting the Islamic State (after some real successes) and the Taliban (having failed miserably), leaving their local allies to face the consequences. Every American President has an 'America First' policy, even if they don't put it on a T-shirt. Taiwan is a long way from the US and very close to China. Beijing will probably wait for the ebb and flow of Taiwanese politics to flow their way, but if you have been a vocal Taiwanese opponent of China, now might be a good time to begin work on a 'Plan B'.

sorry folks typo in my above comment. “War with China”.