Yeah, now you think of that…
Police clash with anti-government protesters at the airport in Hong Kong. Photograph: Thomas Peter/Reuters
Talked about it a while ago. Reposting post below. Money quote (yes, I quote myself…): “I don’t think China really understood what a virus it was taking into its system when it accepted Hong Kong.”
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Hong Kong clashes as police clear food stalls
Read BBC piece.
Can you imagine trying to shut down street food stalls in Hong Kong on Chinese New Year??!!
One of “perfidious Albion’s” most heinous twentieth-century acts was handing over a city like Hong Kong — cosmopolitan, exuberant, free-wheeling, sexy, with a rich journalistic life, a riotous popular culture and cinema and simultaneously a living curator of a broad array of Chinese cultural traditions erased by the Communist/Cultural Revolution — not to mention full of great food — to a heinous country and regime like communist China. All Britain had to do was what I call “doing a Turkey”: meaning when Turkey says that wasn’t us, that was the Ottomans, so we have nothing to apologize for. (Not that I think they do have anything to apologize for — which I make clear in this piece about “genocide.”) Just say: “Sorry, we made that treaty with Imperial China in the nineteenth century not with the current People’s Republic of China, so…” What was China going to do? Go to war with Britain over Hong Kong? It hasn’t attempted anything except occasional sabre-rattling over kocaman Taiwan. Hong Kong was its problem?
[Of course, we’ve seen England’s slow slide into the ethical mud since.]
I hope the democracy movement in Hong Kong continues to be such a thorn in China’s side that it wants to spit it out and hand it back to the UK again. I don’t think China really understood what a virus it was taking into its system when it accepted Hong Kong. Mark my words: Hong Kong is going to be the factor that’s going to change China forever. It’ll be a model and example to other Chinese that it’s ok to resist; it’ll break that fear.
One of the positives of colonialism: a vibrant city with a vibrant political life that doesn’t think it has to kowtow to the emperor.
I mean, the NYPD couldn’t even clear Flushing of food stalls if it wanted to.
See also in the Guardian [2015]: “Is Hong Kong really rioting over fishball stands?“
And a film it seems will be very hard for Western audiences to see:
Ten Years (2015 film) – Wikipedia
A really powerful trailer. WATCH
Jadde: from Bosnia to Bengal 
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