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 Post subject: Fallout
 Post Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 7:47 am 
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The one year anniversary of the start of the Occupy protests went by a couple of weeks ago. We accomplished nothing, and China has been slowly turning the screws.

In May, the democrats in the legislature vetoed the government's constitutional reform plan that would have let us vote for Chief Executive as long as Beijing got to choose all the candidates (Iranian-style democracy, you could call it). The propaganda machine was ready to smear them for "blocking democracy", but ended up having to go into damage control mode because the pro-government lawmakers botched it - they attempted to delay the vote by walking out of the chamber for reasons unknown, but not enough of them did to nullify the quorum, so the vote went ahead, and they missed it. So everyone got to laugh at the government's incompetence for a couple of days. That was a rare bright spot in an otherwise depressing year.

The government has tried its hardest to turn the narrative from "what's wrong with the government?" to "what's wrong with the youth?" Because you if our youth weren't unemployable ne'er-do-wells corrupted by foreign influences, none of this would have ever happened. They fired the education minister. They needed a fall guy.

There have been smaller-scale, sporadic angry protests against the Mainland's influence. They aren't talking about democracy anymore because after the veto, the question's become moot. Instead they're over things like parallel trading (a polite term for cross-border smuggling). A number of well-funded and aggressive "astroturf" patriotic groups have sprung up and invariably turn up to counter-protest the protests. Shoving matches and fist fights periodically break out. No prizes for guessing who the police always side with. The judiciary seems to be OK - for now.

The one halfway decent English language newspaper has been hemorrhaging experienced reporters and independent-minded columnists like a gaping headwound. Whereas it could once claim to be relatively balanced (in the sense of mindless he-said-she-said-lack-of-critical-thinking balance), the range of opinion in it now goes from "blandly pro-government" to "obnoxiously pro-government". Similar things are happening at other media organizations.

The Powers That Be have also attempted to Make An Example of a certain college professor who was really only a minor figure in the protests by leaning heavily on the university's governing council to deny the man a promotion. They suddenly decided he was unqualified even though he was the only candidate identified by the search committee. It's all nudge, wink, whisper, plausible deniability, while the students and many of the professors are up in arms about it, to the point of storming a council meeting and leaking confidential discussions. Of course they are met with counter-accusations of "GAWD LOOK AT THESE POLITICALLY MOTIVATED TROUBLE-MAKING YOUTH!!!"

Bottom line - while our government's incompetence and sucking up to corporate interests was once self-inflicted, now everything bears Beijing's grubby fingerprints. Beijing's basically realized that it made a mistake in letting the big tycoon families rule Hong Kong as proxies. But instead of easing up and letting us govern ourselves, their answer has been more direct control. You guys don't like the tycoons? Fine. You're getting bureaucrats from the Central Liaison Office pulling the strings instead.

So now we face these questions.
- Is it better to go along quietly and try not to provoke the bear in the room, or to go down kicking and screaming?
- Against an opponent that fights dirty and then puts on the mask of respectability, is it acceptable to fight dirty back?

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 10:32 am 
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Is it better to go along quietly and try not to provoke the bear in the room, or to go down kicking and screaming?


Provoke away. So far, it's clearly resulted in a change in how the leadership works - as in, the intermediary layer of tycoons has been replaced by an intermediary layer of bureaucrats - so as long as people keep pushing, changes can be expected to continue, until Beijing finds some way to make changes that stop the pushing. (This can be done either by installing a system that people are actually happy with, or, unfortunately, by clamping down hard enough. But clamping down only works for a time...)

But the way I see it, a lack of provoking means a lack of beneficial change; in fact, a complete lack of provoking might lead to someone saying "We can push harder, no-one's complaining yet".

So, for society as a whole, it's probably good to keep up a healthy level of provoking. In a civilised manner, of course.

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Against an opponent that fights dirty and then puts on the mask of respectability, is it acceptable to fight dirty back?


Generally no, because once you fight dirty back, you can no longer claim the moral high ground. Fighting dirty is a step only to be taken with very careful and extremely thorough consideration and only when there is really no alternative. We don't remember Ghandi or Mandela for their dirty fighting (though Mandela was part of Umkhonto we Sizwe, so he did on occasion do so when he felt it unavoidable).

Rather, I'd think that publicising those times when your opponent fights dirty would work better (may be tricky when said opponent takes control of the media organisations).

That's my armchair opinion about the answers to those questions, anyhow...

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 12:52 pm 
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Just from generalizing the situation, without knowing much of the details:

Kick and scream enough, that the goverment is unhappy, so that they want things to change. Give that impression, that concessions, that the goverment (or a faction within it) could make without much cost to themselfs, could make you stop kicking and screaming, to make sure, that making concessions looks like a good option to them.

I don't think thinking in terms of dirty or clean is the best way. First think about, if some tactic is actually going to help your cause, or if it just feels good, and what collateral damage you do and if that is worth it. In a conflict with a strong propaganda angle a lot of dirty tactics get sorted out that way. There are still some underhand tricks that you can use, such as for instance making a compromise suggestions, that sounds very sensible, technically fulfills that demands of your oponents, but it still would be costly for them to agree, but they have a hard time to explain why.It's a lot harder to come up with something like that though, then come up with some dirty revange action, where you shoot yourself in the foot, but that feel good at the time.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Tue Nov 10, 2015 7:45 pm 
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That's the problem though. Beijing is completely uninterested in any sort of compromise that would er, compromise their ability to control our leaders from behind the scenes. They're a one-party state. They cannot countenance another political party or non-biddable independent ruling on their soil. So they've offered us "we'll let you vote as long as we get to vet all the candidates", and they could easily set that up so that there really only is one viable candidate. They'd allow one publicly acceptable (but undoubtedly loyal) person to be nominated, and another complete idiot to run against him and lose.

That's as far as they're willing to go. I mean, from their point of view it's a huge concession, considering the only elections they allow in Mainland China are for neighbourhood committees and village heads, and even those are carefully stage-managed.

And on the other side, our democrats are saying that this is completely unacceptable. They want free nomination. The "radical" ones what completely free and open public nomination. Even the most moderate of them will only settle for a vetting procedure that might allow a pro-democracy candidate to slip through.

There is no compromise to be had, so the government figures the kickers and screamers must be ignored, marginalized, and ultimately defeated. "Why won't you troublemakers stop banging your heads against a brick wall? All you're doing is bothering the neighbours and giving yourself a headache."

As for tactics - hooboy. Most of the democrats still adhere to the principles of non-violence and peaceful demonstration (although many of them are now open to civil disobedience). But there is a fringe movement who think that peaceful methods have been exhausted and now it's time to fight. I mean, nobody's talking guns or bombs, but "fighting" means deliberately getting into shoving matches with the riot police. It means screaming abuse at misbehaving Mainlanders on the street in minor acts of obnoxious vigilantism.

Example: Due to the relatively open border with the north, and the obvious difference in the quality of our food and safety regulations, we now have hordes of petty traders going back and forth every day wheeling suitcases of ordinary consumer goods like baby milk formula, chocolates, toothpaste, shampoo and cosmetics up north for resale. They clear out the supermarket and drugstore shelves, clog up public transport with suitcases, and generally are a nuisance. There's also a roaring trade in gold jewellery (perfect for your money laundering and official bribery purposes). There's parts of town where all of the shops have turned into drugstores and jewellery shops, and little else.

The localists hold protests where they go up to these traders and scream at them. Recently there was a controversy where the subway company was accused of unfairly enforcing oversized baggage rules against students with musical instruments while ignoring the hordes of traders with their gigantic suitcases. The localists descended on a subway station and started surrounding suspected traders, preventing them from leaving, and demanding that the subway station staff measure their luggage. That's the sort of stuff they're doing.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 1:36 am 
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But there is a fringe movement who think that peaceful methods have been exhausted and now it's time to fight. I mean, nobody's talking guns or bombs, but "fighting" means deliberately getting into shoving matches with the riot police. It means screaming abuse at misbehaving Mainlanders on the street in minor acts of obnoxious vigilantism.


It's fascinating how polite your protestors are. We recently had a lot of students protesting over the rising cost of university fees over here (a far smaller issue), and they've been burning tires and throwing fruit at university staff. (The burning tires were pretty much from the start, the fruit-throwing was... yesterday, I think, after they'd already won 0% fee increases this year). And when people protest about how services are not being delivered fast enough, there's almost always a small percentage of people doing some looting on the side.

Mind you, I do think that it's a good thing that your protestors are so polite. I'm just wondering how long they'll stay so polite if no concessions are made.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 7:06 am 
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Yes. It was considered an absolutely shocking development in last year's protest when a small group deliberately smashed the glass doors to the legislative building. It was bullet proof glass so it took 20 minutes of focused hammering with cinder blocks. GASP! Property damage!!!

And even when our protesters are deliberately mobbing the police, they're pretty non-violent by international standards. Nobody chucks bricks or molotov cocktails. They wear hard hats, armour themselves in rubber mats and goggles, and persistently push back police lines while wielding umbrellas like shields against batons and pepper spray. Their weapon is sheer force of numbers and bloody-minded refusal to disperse. They scream and swear at the cops a lot. On a few occasions they've managed to outnumber police, chase them back into the police station, and then lay siege for a few hours.

And it's an open question how long they're willing to stay unarmed, if this keeps up. But well, we have the legacy of Tiananmen. In a perverse way, non-violence is our only shield. We know the Chinese government would not mow down non-violent protesters. For the last 30 years, our politics has been based around activists claiming to be as non-threatening and respectable as possible in order to be taken seriously by the establishment. This era is coming to an end.

There was a bomb plot foiled last May, just before the vote. But it was so comically absurd that many wondered if it was a set-up. If it wasn't outright fraud it was clearly the work of amateurs. Badly written, ideologically confused slogans? Check. Maps with red circles labeled "target" left lying around in their secret base? Check.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 9:29 am 
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One pattern how goverment vs protesters conflicts sometimes go, is that the goverment rather hacks it's arm off, then is seen to give in to protesters, but they are quite willing to slip the same demographics some other goodies to pacify them, as long as they can sell it as "the goverment hands out benefits" rather then "the goverment gives in to demands". So while protests are often hopeless against already anounced goverment programs, they still can shape future goverment policy.

Often a major factor that keeps conflics going is the matter of who looses face. It leads to factions being dug in and holding positions, even after they know that they will not get anything out of it anymore. The way out of that would be what around here is usually called an Austrian solution. Some elaborate wording and factually useless riders, to allow some faction concede in spirit but not in wording or the other way round.*

Usually the factions need first to exhaust their stamina, and i have no idea how far that is in this conflict. And often faction internal politics are more important then what the opposing faction actually does. Like if some faction leader needs maneuver room to move against a faction internal rival.

I really don't know enough of the parameters of the conflict, but maybe the "iranian" election system stays, but the office becomes a powerless figurehead and real power goes to a body, that is elected but sounds like a neighbourhood comittee. Or Beijing still decides who gets printed on the ballots but write in candidates become possible. Then most likely (if they do their machiavellism right) still printed candidates will win almost certainly, but they need to run candidates, who at least somewhat bother about the agenda of likely write in candidates. Or maybe some provisorial solution, that essentially hands the problem to the next generation of leaders.

* Don't know if it is an urban legend, but a classic example is that the Austrian secret service after having been ordered to destroy some files they wanted to keep, did file the following work report: "Files have been destroyed, after copies have been made".

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Wed Nov 11, 2015 10:41 am 
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Beijing is not stupid enough to allow write-in candidates. They didn't even allow the option of having "none of the above" on the ballots because they didn't want to be publicly shamed if none of their chosen candidates appealed to the public.

Nor are they foolish enough to allow their chosen leader to become a figurehead with the legislature becoming the most powerful body. They went out of their way to hobble the legislature years ago - the public only elects about half of the members. The rest of it is filled by corporate lobbyists and various paid-for allies who can be counted on to vote the right way. They even devised complicated procedures to make it much more difficult for bills proposed by legislators to pass than bills proposed by the government.

They are control freaks. That's what dictatorship means.

Anyway, it's moot now. The democrats vetoed the bill, which means we're stuck with the old system, in which a committee of 1,200 lackeys and lobbyists (yes, the same ones who choose half the legislature) "select" the leader they are secretly told to vote for. I think the democrats basically figured Beijing's proposal was poison and they'd rather have no democracy than a fake one. They don't want to be giving Beijing the political cover to curtail civil liberties under the guise that this is what the majority voted for.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 1:13 am 
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It's official, the police state is here, they're disappearing people for speech crimes.

Five muckraking booksellers abducted. Vanished without a trace, in some cases across international borders.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 9:30 am 
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Kea, I hate to say this...

Run...

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 1:31 pm 
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Considering that the one fellow apparently managed to phone his wife after being disappeared, it seems that they are being disappeared somehow non-lethally, which is a pretty bad case, but not the worst possible case. (Given how polite your protesters are, I'm wondering if your secret police are similarly polite...)

This is, however, the sort of news that does make it sensible for anyone with outspoken opinions to seriously consider leaving and be outspoken from outside the borders.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 5:58 pm 
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Yeah Kea. Would posting anti-Beijing sentiment on an obscure forum based around a web comic constitute a speech crime? Be careful! I suppose it helps that the web forum in question is somewhat anonymous.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Mon Jan 04, 2016 8:28 pm 
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CCC wrote:
(Given how polite your protesters are, I'm wondering if your secret police are similarly polite...)

They're not our secret police, they're Mainland Chinese secret police. They are anything but polite. Known for torture, forced confessions, "mysterious" prison "suicides", the whole nine yards. The question is who ordered it. If the order came straight from the top, those guys are !#%*ed. If instead it was a panicky underling trying to please the boss but instead causing more embarrassment for him, then there's a chance they might be released after some kind of face-saving measure. They might be sent home after "serving as witnesses in an investigation", "rescued" from "gangsters", or "discovered" in a "random" brothel raid.

CCC wrote:
This is, however, the sort of news that does make it sensible for anyone with outspoken opinions to seriously consider leaving and be outspoken from outside the borders.

That didn't help the guy who was abducted from Thailand, did it? I'm all right though. There's plenty of bigger fish to fry than me. Half the population's guilty of posting things on the internet, and they can't very well arrest us all. They've gone after those five guys not just because they said something critical, but because their muckraking might have hit upon some genuinely sensitive information about top leaders or their families.

These are depressing days though. From what I've been hearing, President Xi Jinping is one paranoid mofo. He's becoming the Chinese Putin. Concentrating power in his own hands, getting rid of enemies and rivals, suppressing dissent, surrounding himself with suck-ups, churning out propaganda about how great he is.

I mean, it probably sounds like splitting hairs to you guys, all dictatorships sound alike, but Chinese government was supposed to have sworn off strongman politics in favour of rule-by-committee after Mao ruined the country in the 60s. Now they're backsliding. This is a bad sign.

When that happens, the entire bureaucracy becomes about brown-nosing. It's just going to be a gigantic competition to get your name into the Spreadsheet of Loyalty, because you really want to avoid being anywhere near the Ledgers of Perfidy. Which means they're going to double down on bad decisions because there's no way to admit that they were bad ideas, there is only "you didn't do it hard enough".

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2016 12:25 am 
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The USA might not be in the best shape it's ever been in and I also happen to live in redneck hell, but if you ever feel the need to GTFO and need somewhere, anywhere, to stay, I have a long couch big enough for two people I can put you and Ngau up on for a time. At least until you can find better lodgings.

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 Post subject: Re: Fallout
 Post Posted: Tue Jan 05, 2016 2:36 am 
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Thanks man, but rest assured, Ngau and I have exit strategies if they're ever needed.

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