Comment by nickdothutton
2 days ago
When the UK handed back HK, the Chinese who are nothing if not wiley, understood that they needed to maintain intelligence, surveillance, and some kind of institutional knowledge of the various organised crime groups, certain individuals with borderline business interests, that sort of thing. They offered the British police officers houses, stipends, and other incentives to stick around and clue-in the incoming crop of officials, domestic intelligence officers, and cutouts/go-betweens. Something of an untold story. Would make a great streaming series.
I'm interested in how the takeover happened on the inside. How do you take control of a country with minimal drama when even small corporate takeovers get so messy? I assume there's been a lot of work to root out internal dissent, install aligned individuals, take control of computer systems. Even though the UK handed HK to China, there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.
The takeover was deftly executed, with the kind of patience only a government not concerned with elections can exhibit. While local elections came and went, and the opposition parties valiantly fought in the public sphere, the institutional takeover was slow but steady. That is the only way the pro-China powers in government were able to outlast and suppress the protests in 2019. The government faced unprecedented public opposition, but enough people at all levels of government feared for their livelihoods that neither the bureaucracy nor the police reached a critial mass of sympathizers.
Another crucial factor that's part of the CCP's victory in HK is that China inherited a police force essentially structured as a colonial occupying force. Police staff get benefits that include segregated housing (such as the West Kowoon Disciplined Services Quarters), which maintains morale in the ranks and allows those so inclined to live quite separately from the rest of the populace.
There was also quite a lot of cooperation for many years between the relevant organisations.
The prosperity in the 80-90s numbed people’ minds
If anything it's the opposite. Many in HK in the 60s and 70s were much in favor of uniting with China, there were protests and movements about that. Took lots of British propaganda and a lot of clampdown to change the minds of the younger more inexperienced generations.
China can trade directly with the rest of the world through Shanghai- it no longer needs the middleman.
That prosperity was based on a system that no longer exists. Hong Kong is a normal Chinese city now.
> there's got to have been people with strong feelings that created roadblocks along the way.
Look into 2019 protests
It was big at the time, but ended up being a minor blip, and from what I read, there were no actual deaths caused by the police.
There was one guy who fell down a high rise garage and there was a street cleaner who was killed by the protesters.
Compare that to when the British were taking over Hong Kong, and hundreds of protesters were killed.
I’ve always wondered what would have happened if the pandemic didn’t occur soon after.
What’s crazy is the trigger was a Hong Kong national who killed his girlfriend in Taiwan. Taiwan wanted to extradite him but there was no law in place to do so. Apparently the killer is still free today.
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