Sigh. Hopefully we won't get a repeat of the Tiananmen square massacre. I've not seen any nations speak out about the HK protests. Unlike, say, when many expressed support for the Arab Spring.
To pretend like it was a moral issue is insane. Most people don't care in the slightest in democratic countries. Virtually every country involved in sending troops couldn't point to it on a map nor talk about the region with any sort of knowledge. We walked in and replaced Hussein with ISIS. It will go down as 21st century Vietnam.
China has nukes. Absolutely nothing will happen regardless, just like 30 years ago. Perhaps some more outrage on twitter I guess?
China has shown (again) in their treatment of Hong Kong that they don't care about past agreements. The least that anyone can do, even in the presence of nukes, is to get their business out of China, and that is already happening to some degree. And of course be welcoming to people who choose to emigrate from Hong Kong.
Make them care and things might change, truly. Don't bother with CEO's or governments, we all know who they serve.
If anythin, most HKers aren't very interested in what's happening around the world either, AFAIK.
Spinning that particular situation in a reason to boycott a country (and replace it with what? India isn't exactly a paragon of virtue and neither is the US, and let us never speak of the stain that is Russia) is a strange mental place to go to.
So if I told you you would be maimed in 10 years, does that make the maiming less painful when it happens? I'm not sure what you're getting at by stating that this was preordained to occur.
You cannot annex your own territory.
And your post are still visible. Which suggest it is only a minor downvote.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2019/07/16/europe-joi...
I don't see what's controversial about that. The bigger question is whether this will hurt China at all; time will tell.
Every nation that feels it is powerful enough reneges on past agreements when it's strategic to do so: Russia[1], Great Britain[2], and even the current US admin which is set on rolling back every agreement that Obama might have been involved with, chief among them the Iran nuclear deal (JCPA).
Realpolitik-wise; any country with a permanent seat on the US security council can do as they please.
1. nuclear agreement with US
2. disavowed multiple agreements with former-colonies, especially under Tony Blair whose government didn't put much weight on being bound by the predecessor conservative government
At least some serious sanctions / embargo on some chinese industries as a direct result of their actions in Hong Kong would be good.
If you can't see the good of the balance sheet shouldn't always justify the enablement of despotism... Well... I'm probably not going to make any convincing argument that'll make it past the pragmatism filter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_of_the_willing#Usage...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-National_Force_%E2%80%93...
It was the US, UK, AU and PL : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2003_invasion_of_Iraq
Who and how? Outside of the Iraq/Afghanistan invasions, which were huge excuses to hand over pallets of untraceable bills to US contractors.
Quite a few telecoms etc companies lost money and assets in the strife. Or contracts with the collapsed governments.
"We are calling for peace, for order, for dialogue … we certainly call on China to be very careful and very respectful in how it deals with people who have legitimate concerns in Hong Kong," Trudeau told a televised news conference in Toronto.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-concerned-hong-kong...
China PR (the de facto mainland government) already blames the US for Hong Kong protests. Things will get worse if we do something overt.
"In the Joint Declaration, the PRC Government stated that it had decided to resume the exercise of sovereignty over Hong Kong (including Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories) with effect from 1 July 1997, and the UK Government declared that it would hand over Hong Kong to the PRC with effect from 1 July 1997. The PRC Government also declared its basic policies regarding Hong Kong in the document.
In accordance with the "one country, two systems" principle agreed between the UK and the PRC, the socialist system of PRC would not be practised in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), and Hong Kong's previous capitalist system and its way of life would remain unchanged for a period of 50 years until 2047." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-British_Joint_Declaration
For the UK there was concern that if the PLA arrived in force in Hong Kong overnight to make it part of China in practice as well as in law many, perhaps millions, would try to defy them and demand sanctuary from the British. The international community, looking on, would certainly prefer the story "This is Britain's responsibility" over "We all need to take some of these people". So then either the UK has to find somewhere to put a LOT of people or it is seen to have failed badly as the Chinese put down the resistance.
For China it was recognition that their notional sovereignty over all of "China" must be temporarily shadowed by the consideration that Hong Kong is not just some nice waterfront property (which they could have seized at any time by military force) it's a people, a culture, lots of successful businesses. If you roll in with tanks overnight that probably goes away and you might not get it back.
But gradual is the thing. "Unchanged for a period of 50 years" is merely the ambition on paper. Nobody in Hong Kong thought they'd wake up in 2046 still under the same democracy they'd had under the British. Things get chipped away, they shade over, decisions are made that might once have been different, this year's protests are about some of the less subtle changes.
Gradual change suited both parties. Not the people of Hong Kong themselves of course, but they weren't signatories.