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Comment by LAC-Tech | Hacker News Reader

There's no great conspiracy here.

The vast majority of people in Taiwan do not want to be a part of the PRC. The vast majority of people in the Falklands want to remain a British Overseas Territory.

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It doesn't matter. You can kidnap a daughter from a poor family and now she doesn't want to to back. Yes, we should respect her decision, but it does not make kidnapping right. It is the result of the colonial age.

Yes, however nobody is asking "should we do it again?" - I think the west has decided that's not their cup of tea - but instead "what should we do next?"

The challenge is in a very real way the PRC is interested in replaying the colonial era, taking over Taiwan and exerting iron-fisted control over Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Macau.

Hong Kong and Macau are relics of the colonial era and exerting "iron-fisted" control there is no different from exerting it over, say, Shanghai

Artifacts of the era, sure, but I think that's a very incomplete take.

IMO they're closer to the people of St. Pierre and Miquelon than they are to Shanghai. [1] The people of Hong Kong were British Citizens until 1997, and the citizens of Macau, Portuguese citizens until 1999 (it's a little more complicated there, it's ~1981-1999, depending). Just as the Miquelonians are French citizens - not British, not Canadian and not American.

A tiny island, in North America, that retains its allegiance to France and uses the Euro. Even flights to Paris are limited, to say the least.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Pierre_and_Miquelon

As colonial power, they can issue passports for oversea citizens, it does not mean anything. When returning to China, citizens are given a choice to take whichever passport they choose. To fix a colonial problem, you need to have the power to confront them, British left Hong Kong, and Portuguese left Macau not because those details, because they couldn't hold on to it

As in Sri Lanka or Bangladesh, British still owns properties legally from colonial age, and they are able to extract wealth legally. They have papers, documents and everything. Does legal papers make it right?

For clarity (1) "As colonial power, they can issue passports for oversea citizens, it does not mean anything." -- French folks living in any Overseas Territories are French-French, EU citizens free to live anywhere in the EU or Metropolitan France. This is not true of for instance folks born in British Overseas Territories. So YMMV. Depends on the nation. Your take is more a reflection of UK policy than colonial policy.

(2) "When returning to China, citizens are given a choice to take whichever passport they choose." - Unfortunately they were not. You could register as a BN(O), a British National (Overseas) which conveyed no right of abode anywhere on Earth - not in the UK, not in the EU - but when combined with an HKID offered you one complete 'passport.' Valid for permanent residency in Hong Kong plus consular protection of the British when traveling abroad that the PRC has chosen not to respect. Or you could be a Hong Kong (SAR) Citizen if the PRC would take you, which roughly required you to be ethnically Chinese. BN(O) registration has been closed for years I believe.

I think Macau followed a similar model, with SAR passports, but I'm not 100% sure.

(3) "To fix a colonial problem, you need to have the power to confront them, British left Hong Kong, and Portuguese left Macau not because those details, because they couldn't hold on to it." - Do you think the French could defend St Pierre and Miequelon? From America? I agree that Portugal could not defend Macau and the UK could not defend Hong Kong but that’s not really all there is to it - see Taiwan.

I always thought HK citizens were British the same way people living in French overseas territories are French. That not being the case was quite shitty IMHO.

What's different is the will of the people. If Shanghai, or San Francisco, or anywhere, developed a cultural consensus that it wanted to leave its parent country, it would be evil to prevent them.

Several US states south of the Mason-Dixon line developed a cultural consensus that they wanted to leave their parent country. Was it evil to prevent them?

A substantial number of their residents weren't included in that decision making process, as I recall.

Declaring after the war that the secession had never happened and was impossible was an evil move in my book. (Though whether there was any desired to maintain the Confederacy without slavery I don't know).

Going to war with the seceding states over their endemic human rights abuses is more arguable. Personally I despise the holier-than-thou attitude of so many northern states, who had tolerated those same human rights abuses for centuries and then suddenly decided that they were utterly unconscionable, coincidentally just after the northern economy became able to manage without them. But maybe that's ultimately how moral progress gets made.

In PRC's opinion, it is not colonial replay. Taiwan was returned to the China after WW2 officially, and the government that time was ROC, Republic of China, and there is no official end of the Chinese civil war, no peace agreement signed. Taiwan's independence party want to make Taiwan to be the front of containing China, which can only make the situation worse.

I don't like to predict, but I have to say a war will happen. Ever since PRC was founded, unifying China is part of its mission. There was a hope for a peaceful unification of some sort, it is long gone now. It is the reality now.

Argentina never had meaning full settlement there, and there was never really a native population neither. The Falklands are a bad example to show the bad things caused by colonialism, if you need examples of British colonial atrocities pick anything from Africa to India and you'll find plenty up to the 20th century.

That analogy might work for the Falklands, but with Taiwan it would be more like "a poor family that abused the daughter".

Anyway, I dislike analogies for political discourse because they over simplify the issues at hand.

That analogy doesn't work for the Falklands neither, the only people ever living there are British. There never was a native nor an Argentinian population there.

EDIT: Except for long abandoned French (the very first) or Spanish settlements.

The "kidnapping" in your example happened in 1949. It's no longer about the hypothetical daughter, but more likely her grandchildren. Given the passage of time it's farcical to insist on reversing this.

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