@mastodonmigration @heidilifeldman I'm not even an American, but people who do understand the danger we're *all* in and are trying to do *what they can* needn't feel ashamed on behalf of the sociopaths (i.e. those not caring about what happens to others).

I know that many decent Americans were regrettably preoccupied during trump 1.0 when the Chinese dictatorship crushed #Hongkong's struggle for democracy and civil rights in 2019-2020 (#trump didn't lift a finger and even denied pleas for political asylum...), but I remember you speaking up.

Having witnessed the struggle, the resulting repression and the weaponization of courts against the finest people of Hong Kong I genuinely understand what is at stake in the USA with your own ethnic supremacist fascist coup.

It is painful to look at the United Nations' human rights charter and see how over the past decades we allowed greedy profiteers to set our foreign policies instead of standing by that admirable document countries signed up for.

We need a global alliance prioritizing *democracy* over any business empowering despots.

We had so many many chances *and reasons* to do that when it would have been easy.

Now it's going to be fucking hard but we need that commitment more than ever.

(Thought experiment: would the rich elite support fascism in any country if they knew it was going to destroy their business prospects in all other developed democracies?)

@arstechnica He was admittely appreciated in his native Hong Kong until he turned into a firebrand communist party stooge.

Now it's quite the opposite. He's loathed.

(Not sure about the timing, but his son was caught in the PRC in possession of cannabis which might have something to do with his radicalization, but now he's a full jingoist little pink.)

#Hongkong #CCP's #BankingColony #jackiechan

A totally quick recap to those who don't know what happened in Hong Kong between early June 2019 and January 2020:

Hongkongers were promised by the UK-PRC (CCP China) handover treaty signed in 1984 that after the handover to PRC sovereignty in 1997 HKG would retain its civil liberties like freedoms of speech, media and assembly plus political autonomy with *universal suffrage*.

Initially after 1997 there remained a semblance of democracy although the legislature was always preloaded with indirectly 'elected' seats guaranteeing the CCP-aligned "popular minority" control of the legislature. Furthermore the all-powerful "Chief Executive" (essentially a governor) was supposed to be elected by the people but CCP "re-interpreted" the treaty to allow *itself* to choose the candidates! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hong Kong continued to function as Chinese dictatorship's banking colony and as a powerful tool to play around the international trading system, but instead of making progresss towards the promised democracy through universal suffrage and especially after Xi Jinping took power in the PRC in 2012 the CCP stooges running Hong Kong began rolling back Hong Kong's civil rights.

In early 2019 the "HKG govt" announced they were going to change local laws to allow "suspects" to be extradited to the notoriously unjust PRC to be convicted in CCP's kangaroo courts.

Thousands marched but the "gov't" ignored them. By early June 2019 there were tens of thousands protesting, and the HKG regime set its police force to teargas and baton-charge the pro-democracy crowds...

People were outraged and the crowd grew to hundreds of thousands marching orderly through the city's long main avenues despite the draining heat and humidity.

On June 15 a demonstrator known as the Raincoat Man (Marco Leung) fell of a high rise building during a protest. The following day saw a record *2 million* people flood Hong Kong's roads. Out of a population of 7+ million.

There would be several million+ marches in the following weeks and months, but the steadily increasing *POLICE VIOLENCE* and various legal and other threats by the regime would start scaring regular people off from joining.

(Note: my avatar here is an ambigram character combining 警 'police' with 暴 'brutality' — ACAB only applies in authoritarian states)

All the while the local regime ignored people's "Five Demands, Not One Less" and cracked down on any peaceful pro-democracy activism ever harder.

A law banning *masks* was enacted on Oct 4. A few months later when Covid-19 hit HKG masks would be both banned and compulsory...

Anyway, violent police crackdown, zero compromise by the regime and later strict Covid rules (no gatherings above 3 people!) would ensure that protesting was not only futile but criminalized. The regime was engaged in a "WHOLE PROCESS CRACKDOWN" on all remotely democratic activism.

On 30 June 2020 the HK puppet regime imposed "National Security Law" (NSL) on the city; essentially anything the CCP considers threatening or 'insulting' to its dictatorship was criminalized.