Hong Kong and the Perils of Nativism

There's an old saying, that Paris would be lovely without the Parisians. I don't actually agree with that. They can be a bit arrogant, sure, but on the whole I find Parisian men quite civil and Parisian women classy and sexy. So I hope they stay.

There is one place though where that saying absolutely fits. Hong Kong. HK is a very cool city. It is a first world city built on a landscape of high tropical mountains, and you can see how the force of modern industry has made humans conquer the environment, fitting skyscrapers into the mountain bedrock and open-air escalators to reach them with ease.

https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1165490546883715074

Hong Kong also produced Hong Kong cinema, one of the few non Anglo film industries with a distinctive style and which aims to entertain and not preach to the viewers. There's also Hong Kong music, which...well, no, that's pretty bad. On the other hand Hong Kong has, in my view, one the best food industries in the world, or at least had until 5 years ago when mainland China started to up its game. All in all, Hong Kong is a great place. I used to go often and enjoy every visit.

But that doesn't mean it has a great people. Oh no. Hong Kong is indeed a cool city, but it would be much cooler if you just replaced its population wholesale. Hong Kongers are, generally speaking, a bunch of rude, uncultured, materialistic, annoying, semi-glossic, entitled twats with a chip on their shoulder, who think they're hot shit because they were lucky enough to be licking British ass while their fellow Chinese fell under the boot of Communism for 3 decades. Their average looks, famously the ugliest in China, don’t add to their appeal.

https://twitter.com/\_cyphe/status/1165291966202044417

So what's going on in Hong Kong? A massive riot sponsored and organized by the United States Government, that’s what’s happening. What we call a “color revolution”. Funds by USG’s National Endowment for Democracy have been revealed, US diplomatic staff have been found organizing the rioters, and the whole mass of Western journalists (i.e. half the Cathedral) have been pushing the most egregious propaganda for weeks. There’s nothing special, nothing unique about this. Color revolutions aren’t new. This isn’t the first one, and won’t be the last one. The day Germany grows a pair and starts to push back against US meddling in European politics, rest assured that Berlin will burn for weeks under a massive Antifa riot lionized by the US press.

That said, the US isn’t that powerful. Not that generous; the money USG is sending around isn't enough to motivate every single rioter to get out of home. USG isn't stupid and it only pulls the trigger in places where the powder is already plentiful and ready to burn. It needs a fifth column of people willing to burn it all, a place where people hate the status quo so much they’d rather sell their country to USG. Hong Kong is indeed such a place.

https://twitter.com/Gerrrty/status/1163136288792481793

How did that happen? To put it briefly, Hong Kongers think they are a superior people to the rest of China, and to the bottom of their hearts hate being ruled by Beijing. This isn’t about Communism or muh Freedom or muh Human Rights. This is a basic, deep problem of self-perceived social status. As I’ve said again and again, 90% of human concerns are about social status. Hong Kongers think China is low-status and hate every association with it. On the flip side, Hong Kongers think that Japan is high status. Also England. Well, the Anglosphere as a whole. So they revel in associating with it. Hong Kongers will spend 2,000 dollars to get on a plane on a Friday evening to fly 5 hours to Japan and spend the weekend there eating lame high-carb food and buying cosmetics that don’t really work just to be able to go back and say they've been to Japan again. That’s on Hong Kong where work hours are long and leisure time very precious. But that’s just part of the culture.

Why do HK people think China is so low status? Well because for a long time, and for a critical time period in Hong Kong history, the time period where Hong Kong’s population stabilised and its culture took form, China was indeed a poor shithole of peasants who shat in the street and were ruled by a bunch of retarded communists. Societies are just an aggregation of people, and people are dumb and stubborn. Memories taken as a child get fixed as culture, and are almost impossible to update after adulthood. Hong Kong collectively grew up being somewhat understandably disgusted by China's backwardness. That all that is 40 years in the past and Chinese living standards in most cities are by now higher than in Hong Kong just doesn’t register to them. They just won’t admit it, the same way old men never admit their experiences just aren’t relevant anymore. Things never change if that change results in lower status to oneself. That’s how human brains operate. Scale that to a whole society and it can be brutal.

https://twitter.com/spt1171/status/1161595680193839107

When shown that salaries in Shanghai are higher, the food is better, apartments are incomparably bigger and better designed, internet services are an order of magnitude better; Hong Kongers just double down and talk about Human Rights and Internet Freedom not because they actually care; but because that’s all they have left to justify their culturally engrained sense of superiority. Even if you get a HKer to admit that Human Rights is all bullshit he’ll just come and say that Cantonese is a superior language and Mandarin just isn’t as expressive. Which is rich, as Cantonese, which has for decades had a workable writing system, is almost never written in practice, because the local intellectuals never bothered to learn and spread it. All literature in Hong Kong is written in 1920 style Mandarin prose, read out loud in Cantonese but with Mandarin grammar. It’s as if all books in Italy were written in 19th century-style French but read out in Italian pronunciation, and all Italian kids learned to write in French at school, with Italian writing being an extremely low-class affair left for tabloids and shady internet forums.

Most Hong Kongers can't even type Chinese characters phonetically, resulting in typing speeds several times slower than in China, or people just typing in English because it’s easier on the hands. These aren’t people who really care about their linguistic culture. They're just arrogant chauvinists. It’s ethnocentrism at its most retarded.

https://twitter.com/qin\_duke/status/1161995495625113602

Hong Kong exists because the Hong Kong economy exists, and that exists because as China went communist, Hong Kong was the only sizeable place with a decent commercially-minded government and a land border with China. Hong Kong was the middleman for making business in China, and as China opened up and developed, the economic rationale for Hong Kong slowly eroded. Again, starting salaries for college grads in Hong Kong are already lower than in the richest cities in China. Hong Kongers aren't superior anymore, by any metric. The city is decaying, little by little, and there's nothing unnatural about that. Urban economies rise and fall, that’s just a normal result of economic cycles. Happens all the time in every country.

In normal circumstances when a city's economy starts to falter, young people just pack up and leave for growing cities. But HKers won’t do that. They may leave the country, move to the Anglosphere if they have a chance (not to Japan, that’s only suitable for LARPing in the weekends, the language is too hard), but the vast majority of HKers would hang themselves in the nearest lamp post before considering the logical option of just packing up and moving to Dongguan. Why? Because China is low status, and they are high status. Why? Because it has always been like that, Mommy and Granny told them so. So they will stay, and complain endlessly about why HK isn't as rich as they believe they're entitled to be. A life is not worth living if you can't live in a 50sqm apartment and hire a Filipina to clean it because you're too busy commuting to your corporate lawyer secretary job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUXowE-Futo

It doesn’t help that there’s much fucked in Hong Kong for it being a tax haven where all of China is parking their money in real estate, and the government is captured by Lee Ka-shing and fellow oligarchs. But hey, that's the whole point of Hong Kong. The day it stops being a tax haven run by oligarchs is the day the economy actually collapses completely. There’s just no other point to the place. People should stop whining and just move where their productivity can actually afford them human living standards.

But again, they won't move. Why? Because they think they're hot shit, they’re superior to those people living in places with lower rents. And why are they so fucking stubborn? Because Hong Kong is (or used to be) a city state, and it has its own culture. And culture is extremely hard to change. Basically impossible without organized, constant state intervention (i.e. violence) applied for decades.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1161398330079043585

This is the clusterfuck that is Hong Kong today, where basically a majority of higher educated young people have collectively become Antifa in a desperate attempt to retain a distinctive culture which is just destined to die. But culture dies hard, and cultures which give you a sense of status superiority are basically permanent. They won’t die, you have to kill them. The culture, I mean.

I could go on on how annoying and duplicitous and violent-yet effeminate and just outright evil the Hong Kong protesters are being, beating people to a pulp, throwing bricks and fire bombs into people’s houses, vandalizing the whole city while jumping in the air crying bloody murder like soccer players every time a policeman just but looks at them. Violently preventing foreign families with small children from going reaching airplanes to go home, justifying openly the targeting of policemen’s families. See at how HK rioters operate and (if you still had any) you will lose all hope in the power of rationality and debate. If the motivation is strong enough, people will lie, steal, hit and steal like there’s no tomorrow. Sociopathy can be induced. Very easily.

https://twitter.com/mibuxiaode/status/1160436543204425729

It’s quite the sight to see to what insane lengths Hong Kongers go to slander China and make it public that they just won't be associated with it. This in a city where the majority of population moved from China barely 50 years ago! See this Hong Kong “scholar” arguing that China is a cannibalistic culture, where eating human meat was just part of the usual savagery of life. Nothing to do with Hong Kong themselves, of course; the light of British enlightenment and bastardized Christianity (you really gotta check out local Christians for yourself, it’s hilarious) has purified them of all that yellow savagery.

But the Hong Kong riots have a deeper lesson than just how evil people can become when they want to, how a basic sense of honesty and decency go down the drain when a movement is allowed to be captured by its left-wing of sociopathic status maximizers. The deeper lesson here is about the Patchwork, this old libertarian concept about competitive governance inherited by neoreaction. The idea that bad government is the result of a lack of competition, that countries today are overall too large, and an ideal world would have city-state sized countries experimenting with different types of government and culture, and having them compete to develop the most effective ways of managing human affairs.

https://twitter.com/thespandrell/status/1161396428310241280

The problem with that is provincialism, the nativism of small places. Political units tend to develop particular cultures among the population. Humans all want to be high status. Absent obvious signs to the contrary, given enough time humans will convince themselves they are indeed high status. Smaller political units will do it just the same as bigger political units. Poor places will do it just the same as rich places. Hong Kong, historically a malarial rock with at most a few dozen fishing huts, think they are hot shit, a paradise of civility and hard work with the most moral people and the wittiest language in human history. North Korea, a miserable half of what already was a destitute slave nation of Chinese emperors for 2,000 years, a country which still struggles to feed its own population, thinks they’re hot shit too, heroes of anti-imperialism and the birthplace of everything worthwhile in Asian history.

A patchwork city who is underperforming economically compared to some neighbouring city isn’t just going to copy whatever government structures or cultural practices of a richer neighbour. Most likely it will just come up with some lame rationalization about how their backwardness is actually just a sign of their superior status, and before changing a iota of its own habits, will rather go to war with the richer city for having the audacity of not accepting the poor city’s cultural superiority. That’s just what humans do. That's exactly what all the Greek polis did until they were invaded and thrown to the dustbin of history by Macedon and Rome.

https://twitter.com/XinqiSu/status/1161233443809714176

Larger countries indeed can become complacent; but the mechanisms that produce that aren’t just about size, it’s just humans being humans and culture being stubborn. What a bigger size gives you is more time to decay until the whole thing collapses; while city states have less ability to be unproductive until they collapse or get invaded. But that’s the thing: Science advances one funeral at a time. The Invisible Hand of Capitalism works its magic through bankruptcies, redistributing idle capital into productive purposes. Underperforming city states in a patchwork must also be annihilated if the competitive principle is to work: but unlike libertarians who assume that underperforming city states would just lose their assets (its capital and population) and see it redistributed elsewhere, humans don’t work like that. People will stay and deny the decline until the bitter end. It will always end in violence, either through invasion and takeover by a foreign power, or if that is not an option, through the violent rebellion of the deracinate locals going full retard on nativism so they can assign status on their own without looking out of their own borders into the real world.

This is Hong Kong we’re talking about, the textbook example of rampant free market capitalism, a monument to the power of impersonal Capital, the unlikeliest of global cities, with its skinny skyscrapers built on top of a typhoon-prone tropical rocky island. And yet this very monument to rootless capitalism has evolved one of the nastiest and dumbest forms of chauvinist culture you can encounter on earth, and that provincialism, ignited by USG’s agitation machine, is menacing to bring down the economy now too, undergoing now the closest thing to a Cultural Revolution the world has seen since Mao’s days. And that one was a top-down conspiracy orchestrated by Mao and his cronies! Hong Kong youngsters are destroying their own city this on their own.

https://twitter.com/Birdyword/status/1161299001414578177

After the successful rebellion of the United States against Britain, there was this debate about the powers of the Federal government. One of the best arguments of the federalists, who won in the end, was the dangers of the dangers of local tyranny. The fact that a state is small doesn’t necessarily mean it will be better controlled by its citizens, it could very well be captured by a strong man or a few families and run as an effectively feudal state forever. They should have added the stultifying effects of local cultures without ease of movement of its citizens. That’s not so much of a problem in the Anglosphere, with a common language for 500 million people across 20 million square kilometres, but places with a more distinctive culture, especially if they have their own small language, can go full retard very easily. Even Scotland, which merely has a (admittedly strange) dialect of English, is going full retard in their cultural distinctiveness, again rationalizing its economic failure by reassigning status locally to be whatever it is that can make them feel superior to their neighbors.

Ever since I started this blog I’ve felt ambivalent about nation-states. I will readily agree that globalism is a plague and that different forms of government are suitable for different peoples, diversity in government being generally a good thing. And yet the pursuit of diversity and distinctiveness for its own sake has also always striked me as a conspiracy of academic collectionists. One thousand languages are dying every year! Big fucking deal. As a linguist I do feel sorry I’ll lose some potential objects of study, but my entertainment isn’t a good enough reason to keep alive things that are meant to die. Should I care if some yellow frog in the Amazon is going extinct? Hell no. Unless it tastes good, but if it did we’d be farming it already. Is it a world priority the conservation of the Latvian national identity? Would it be a big deal if Denmark were to disappear as a distinct unit? What about Ireland? Doesn’t seem that they care themselves that much about their own culture.

https://twitter.com/SFkUSLyimKiCvnG/status/1163665657403023361

Do the nations of the earth have a right to preserve their own culture? Many antiglobalists would instinctually answer “yes”. But the proper answer to that question is that there’s no such thing as “rights”. Some cultures are good, some cultures are bad; some nations make sense, some nations just don’t have the means to subsist, and so won’t, and should be allowed to dissolve, instead of insisting on keeping everything alive artificially, making the world a ethnic group zoo where every single distinct culture which existed at the end of World War 2 must be preserved as part of the American project to freeze everything at the moment where its power was at its peak.

What is a “nation” anyway? What is a “people”? The usual attributes are easy to spot: common language and folklore, self-perceived status as a unit distinct to its neighbors. But all those attributes didn’t come out of thin air. They evolved over time, and they evolved because they worked in their particular historical environment. If perceiving yourself as a distinct nation implied your annihilation after a few weeks, like, say, in the case of a Mongol subtribe under the rule of the Khans, or a small fief close to the Kingdom of France, well odds are you aren’t going to perceive yourself as a distinct nation, because the moment you do you get invaded and destroyed. If national status gets you money, women, and lionized in the international press as a Champion of Liberty, well odds are that the among the most impressionable people on earth, i.e. young men and women, who the West has the retarded habit of assembling daily in these places we call Universities, are going to feel like a nation very very fast.

https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1165416559122141185

In other words, ethnocentrism only exists when it pays. While many in the far right talk about pathological altruism and a lack of ethnocentrism dooming many white nations, it is important to understand under which conditions does ethnocentrism actually work to produce a powerful nation. Not always. Not at all.

Is China going to destroy Hong Kong the way France destroyed all its regional cultures? Not outright, that’s not how the Communist Party of China does things. The CPC are real believers in materialism. They really think that Uyghurs for example go into Islamism because they're poor, and the day they’re lifted out of poverty (through education, of course. The blind belief in Education is the one thing that the West learned from Confucians and then re-exported as one of the main tenets of Progressivism) they’ll just become deracinated hedonists like everyone else. The propaganda line about Hong Kong right now is that a lack of economic opportunity for young Hong Kongese, in addition to outright mobilization by the United States of the worst thugs and lowlifes in the city, is behind the riots. Which is completely missing the point. No amount of money is going to change the deeply engrained feeling of status superiority of the HKese towards China. It would only make it worse. The same way that more money would make Muslims even more arrogant and violent towards outsiders. The comparison with Muslims really is apt. Two million Hong Kong citizens demonstrated against the extradition bill. It doesn’t mean that two million people participated in the violent riots, the beatings of police and dissenting citizens, the physical wrecking of roads, the blockage of the airport. But they won’t condemn it either. “These kids are just too hot headed but their heart is in the right place”. The sort of thing that your average Muslim says about Al Qaeda.

The only effective answer to make Hong Kong a loyal city for China is one that nobody wants to hear: cultural genocide. It would basically take that to make a majority of Hong Kong residents stand up and sing the Chinese anthem with enthusiasm. But that takes decades of very unpleasant effort, especially in a time, as ours, where the prevalent ideology of the Anglo-Jewish elite ruling the American empire and its vassals is committed to the preservation of ethnic identity across the world as a supreme moral mission. A very crafty version of classical divide and conquer, but based on the Holocaust story. Discouraging Cantonese in schools would be tantamount to Auschwitz, HKers will tell you with a straight face.

https://twitter.com/OedoSoldier/status/1165202605640835072

Right now China’s propaganda department is putting videos of HK protesters with American flags shitting on China and beating up Chinese citizens 24/7, proving to mainlanders what a bunch of despicable traitors the HKese are. The victimist narrative is working wonders and a pretty massive boycott on everything Hong Kong has already started. China is gearing up to play the long game, as it can’t afford to get sanctioned by USG and its allies on trumped charges of “massacring students” as happened after June 1989 in Tian’anmen. Hong Kong isn’t that important.

It’s funny that Progressivism holds racism as the supreme evil, and yet spares no effort in supporting provincialism and ethnic chauvinism, which are basically the same primal xenophobic instinct, but applied in a narrower and much more irrational way. Races after all do differ in behavior in much larger ways than neighboring ethnic groups. But that’s how Bioleninism works: you’re allowed, even encouraged to hate your family, especially your smarter and more productive relations. What you’re not allowed is to hate complete strangers, especially the nastiest and most hostile ones.

https://mobile.twitter.com/EconGeopolTech/status/1165419636763938817

Great article. I agree that the HK situation is quite a reality check for neocameralism. Patchs simply won't admit that they have failed, and shutting them down from the outside will be bloody and painful.

Well-p, it seems like the point is "The strongest survives, the weakest dies, but because of American Empire - the weakest somehow survive". Still, I dont really get the idea of some details. If I do remember correctly (I may not), You said that to preserve European Culture, locals have to stop being pussies, grow a pair and kick out arabian/negroes invaders. Still, in case of Hong Kong, who are trying to preserve a shadow of their "cultural superiority" with that much arrogance, you say that the most preferable scenario is to crush them with Chinese tank treads. Still, they do just fight to assert their status. Moreover, I have a lot of questions about China's role in contemporary status-quo from the perspective of NRx (at least - your thoughts). Because, wellp, it seems that the CCP is just the same bone in the throat as the Cathedral, with the main difference of being a regional superpower (Asia Africa). If the main point is "They are bad cuz they are sponsored by status-quo Cathedral and American Empire" - that makes sense, though (even on intuitive level, at least for me and, probably, other NRx-collegues). But if not - are they bad only because they are arrogant, unnoble and trying to desperately protect their doomed culture? If I misunderstood something - I'm sorry.

Their cultural superiority is gone because mainland China has surpassed them by now. All they are now doing is adopting modern western SJW stuff so they can keep claiming to be superior on different grounds; they want to preserve that subjective superiority, not the objective cultural traits themselves. They're not waving Hong Kong flags, they're waving British and American ones. They could give up and accept their status as fellow Chinese; which would entail much less surrender to evil than white European nations are asked to do, with African invasion, gaymarriage, radical feminism and the whole SJW package which is now mandatory.

I actually agree with the majority of what you say, expect with a few caveats about Mainland vs Hong Kong differences, with the Hong Kong still ahead of the Mainland in many ways: Wages for the lower and middle classes are actually higher in Hong Kong than the Mainland, and in the case of the working class, much higher. Its just that Hong Kong cost of living is very high so quality of life may be better in the Mainland. On the other hand, the Mainland does have major quality control issues with a lot of everyday life consumer products. First world-quality products, including imports from just about anywhere in the world, are readily available, but everything is at a mark-up, and out of reach from the lower middle and working classes. Ole is such a chain in all sizable Chinese cities: Shanghai and Beijing specifically have specialty supermarkets specializing in Western or Japanese produce. Hong Kong doesn't have stifling censorship, but the Mainland does. This is a major annoyance, big enough to dent quality of life, if one needs frequent contact with foreigners, such as researchers, expats, or international businessmen. YouTube videos loading at 360p can be very frustrating after a while. There's much more detail being paid into infrastructure in HK than the Mainland. Mainland infrastructure is better from a macro perspective. The sheer size and beauty and complexity is hard to beat. It's the little things that Hong Kong do much better such as quality of signage, the cleanliness of bathrooms, the amount of lighting, and A/C. The Mainland has a penchant of barely turning on the A/C and using dim lighting and unpolished marble floors. At the HK-Shenzhen border, the HK side feels very first world: Its essentially British infrastructure but 50-50 Chinese and English. On the Shenzhen side, the building itself is just as nice as the customs building on the HK side, but you have little things like: Dirty bathrooms, dim lighting, a couple of taxi touts, the occasional comically translated Chinglish sign, or the funniest of all at the Futian checkpoint: To remind people to obey security checks, instead of using a proper PA announcement they just place a portable loudspeaker on a table with a pre-recorded low quality message that repeats over and over again (I kid you not). On the other hand, infrastructure built in the last 5 years are at Hong Kong standards. Older infrastructure in China is still very bad and mostly haven't been updated to first world standards. Also, in the Mainland, there's a lot of corner-cutting among the working class, much more so than the Hong Kongers: There's a reason why there's such a massive parallel trading industry not just in Hong Kong but also to a lesser extent South Korea, Japan, and even Australia: People in the Mainland trust overseas products much more so than domestic products. Up until the eve of the protests, many, many Mainlanders are rushing to study, work, and live in Hong Kong because of perceived prestige. Mainlanders are slaves to prestige and before the protests, Hong Kong was still considered more prestigious than the Mainland. This is why so many Mainlanders send their kids abroad: Its just so much more prestigious to have your kid living overseas, and overseas degrees are seen as prestigious even if somewhere like Tsinghua or Fudan is much more competitive and with higher quality education. There's also an international, first world vibe in Hong Kong that no Mainland city is able to replicate yet. But Shanghai is rapidly catching up. Even within the Mainland there's a sense of superiority: Shanghainese people write off the rest of China as country bumpkins and the rest of China considers Shanghainese to be arrogant pricks full of weak beta males. This has declined after Shanghainese has been banned from education since 1992, although a revival of Shanghainese has started around 2012: Kids born since then have regained the ability to speak Shanghainese. There's a lot of pride in holding Shanghai and Beijing hukous: pride in being natives of a superior city is what's reviving Shanghainese while dialects in the rest of the more transplant-heavy regions of China continues to wither away at alarming rates.

Well, if so - then, I understood everything correctly. Thanks :^) Also - yea, If they do wave American/British flag instead of Hong Kongian - what is the even sense of their existance as Hong Kongian? It is like if San Marinians wave Italian Flag, or Ukrainians waving flag of EU alongside with our own...? Wait...oh SHI The point is - I do try to say that protecting own sovereignty is a noble course, yet - you have to be able to protect it instead of selling it to some third party, ESPECIALLY if it is Cathedral. That truth is, for some reason, is barely understandable for politicians of young states. Maybe because they're retarts, most likely.

I think you have a point but you are too focused on that single point. Like you said, it's human nature to seek high status. But that high status and sense of superiority need evidence to back up, otherwise it's too cheap to worth anything. Millions of HKers cross the border daily to visit mainland China, do you really think that those HKers are so blind to ignore China's development and justify their sense of superiority? The Chinese government is right. The riots are mainly due to the lack of social mobility for young people (because of the ruling of the tycoon oligarchy), in addition to USG meddling. When the youngsters see no hope for home ownership ever and social mobility, some form of catharsis is just a matter of time. Ironically, the Chinese government isn't completely innocent at this outcome. After all, the HK basic law that has enabled the ruiling of real estate tycoon was enacted by the Chinese government and is supposed to last 50 years. The universal suffrage the rioters ask for doesn't seem that unreasonable given that the Chinese government could do nothing about the HK legCo until 2047. Look, everything you say about HongKong is more or less the same in Singapore except for the home ownership. Do Singaporeans hold such hostility towards mainland Chinese or even their own nondemocratic and authoritarian government?

Their cultural superiority is gone because mainland China has surpassed them by now. All they are now doing is adopting modern western SJW stuff so they can keep claiming to be superior on different grounds

SJW stuff is designed for that - it exists so people with no personal virtues can have the "virtue" of having the correct beliefs. Look at the situation in that light - HKers aren't better looking (I'll trust Spandrell's judgement on that point as the local expert), they're not richer, they don't have a great future full of interesting work - they just have the ugly reality of looking on as people they consider beneath them surpass them in every way. Does that sound familiar? So they adopt SJW virtues which have the side effect of totally wrecking the place (in the SJW's native environment they wreck the enemy's stuff faster than their own because that belief system lets its adherents parasite enemy orgs and they wreck the parasited org - not so in the China / HK situation where China continues along and HKers wreck their own city's ability to conduct business).

I'm still wondering why the cops don't shut down the more violent protests for good, maybe enjoying that sweet double overtime pay? As of a week or two ago, the mob instigator crowd was crying about how over 800 people or so were arrested and 1200 tear gas grenades fired over the span of 2 months, claiming this was police brutality. The numbers are meant to "shock" but the actions of the Hong Kong police are what a Western police force will use in a single day during a major riot. Lam's strategy of doing nothing and letting things boil may or may not be the wisest course of action, but as the saying goes, never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence. There aren't that many "hardcore" rioters, simplest thing to do is once engaged, move cops behind them and block the roads with vehicles. Use an armoured car or bulldozer to smash their zip tied barriers and them club them senseless and arrest them for rioting. Stops the madness on the streets and the rest can get on with their powerless bourgeoisie peaceful protests that everyone ignores.

Forgive me for what may seem like a dumb question, as I am not embedded in the Chinese sphere as you are. I've never even visited, though I hope to at some point. Is it true that China (even if we are just including the 1st tier cities) is in totality richer than Hong Kong? While I don't doubt that at the upper levels salaries are greater than or equal to those in Hong Kong, there seems to be a high level of income inequality within 1st tier cities. Is it not possible that life for the average uneducated person is, at this stage, better in HK? So a portion of the protesters actually do fare better in Hong Kong. Hong Kong does have a higher than average gini coefficient, it just seems that tier 1 cities have even higher ones than Hong Kong in the .7 to .9 range. https://www.scirp.org/pdf/ChnStd\_2018052914020102.pdf Of course this could be wrong, outdated, propaganda, whatever. It is very difficult to get accurate information about China as a Westerner who speaks no Chinese, having to sift through propaganda on both sides.

Great article, neatly boils down and explains a confusing phenomenon. I'm certain you're right about the HK mindset, their entire national consciousness seems to boil down to disdain for mainlanders, and they'll adopt whatever metric they need to uphold that superiority, even if they were actively aware that it would lead to trans kids, mass migration, and empowered wahmen (the wahmen are already pretty empowered though). It's pretty mind-boggling how 99% of the right, even the "dissident" right who claim to have at least a rudimentary understanding of how leftist power operates, is suddenly jumping into agreement with Cathedral journos thinking this is all about muh freedomz and muh human rights. You may be one of the only people I've seen with a better take. Partly related but mostly tangential: what do you think about the increased migration from Africa to China? Also, according to Western media, China's planning on introducing #metoo laws in their civil code. Does China have its own bioleninist cathedral, or are they paying lip service because they're not yet powerful enough to tell globohomo to fuck off?

Yes, or blocking entrance to the airport and trains. It's not rocket science.

Oh come on. Why ask for democracy if it's going to be dismantled by 2047? If Hong Kong is too expensive they should move to Guangzhou. I still don't buy that the tycoons are so evil and the whole thing easily avoidable. Look at Hong Kong. Every piece of flat land is already occupied. It's not like they have huge plots of empty land available to develop close to employment centers. Hong Kong is packed already.

HK protesters are routinely displaying Trump and Pepe the frog pictures. How does that make them SJWs? And Antifa in the US are marching with Chinese flags at the same time! I think Spandrell is very confused on that point. Otherwise, great article.

China has its own problems with feminism, mostly homegrown. Women earn good money now, lots of powerful men have only daughters, so the power balance has been tilting towards women for decades now. It's not too bad, and divorce laws are very male friendly as of now. And western style feminism is publicly acknowledged as being foreign interference. African migration to China is not really growing, and the Guangzhou ghetto has been mostly dissolved.

Living standards for middle and upper class people are higher in tier 1 cities in China; and probably tier 2 by now. People live in larger apartments, buy cars more often, work less time and enjoy better services. The working class may have a better deal HK as of now. There's just too many of them in China.

Japan has adult son adoption who subsequently marry their daughters. Wonder why chinese havent adopted that. If one cannot have son. One can still get a son-in-law who can be adopted as heir.

It does happen, but Chinese are much more familial than the Japanese. They like their own blood.

My travels in China have been limited to Hong Kong and Guangdong province, so perhaps my observations don’t apply to places like Shanghai and Beijing. But in comparing Hong Kong to Shenzhen, there are some points that need to be made, particularly since China’s stated plan in response to the protests is to “build up” Shenzhen and make it better than Hong Kong. It has a way to go in many respects. I agree with most everything AquariusAnon said above. Hong Kong food industries: Hong Kong and mainland have different food safety and quality standards. Food is more expensive in Hong Kong than in Shenzhen but it also tastes different. This is true of everything from expensive restaurants to McDonalds. There is also the issue of variety. Hong Kong has it, Shenzhen does not. If you go to an Italian or Mexican restaurant in Hong Kong, you get Italian or Mexican food. In Shenzhen, you get a rather pathetic imitation, with inferior ingredients. “Hong Kongers are, generally speaking, a bunch of rude, uncultured, materialistic, annoying, semi-glossic, entitled twats.” This is equally true of Shenzheners. The difference is that Hong Kong people actually have style and some sophistication, whereas mainlander tuhao look ridiculous and have obnoxious personalities, the result of having acquired money without ever acquiring manners or education. “Their average looks, famously the ugliest in China” Sorry but no way. Cross the border and compare Shenzhen or Guangzhou girls. But for the moment let’s chalk that up to personal taste and instead note that one of the things which makes Hong Kong girls better looking is their healthier skin. Why do they have that? Two reasons: better quality beauty products (which the aforementioned traders always grab) and better nutrition. The current chaos notwithstanding, Hong Kong generally has a sense of order. People know how to queue, and how to use a toilet rather than a sidewalk (even with a dearth of public toilets). Standards of cleanliness, both on the street and inside buildings, are higher than anywhere I've seen on the mainland. “the vast majority of HKers would hang themselves in the nearest lamp post before considering the logical option of just packing up and moving to Dongguan” - Because even if you have an apartment three times as big for one quarter of the price, you still have to live in Dongguan, which is a shithole. The little differences in Hong Kong add up to a lot in terms of quality of living. The attitude problem you identify in Hong Kongers is real, but that’s not the only thing keeping them from moving to Dongguan or Guangzhou. “It doesn’t help that there’s much fucked in Hong Kong for it being a tax haven where all of China is parking their money in real estate, and the government is captured by Lee Ka-shing and fellow oligarchs.” This is the root of the problem, which hardly anyone talks about. The stupid Murkans think Hong Kong wants muh freedumb and the stupid protesters think Beijing is the reason for all their troubles. Meanwhile, the city’s oligarchs are laughing. (And I have no doubt Murkan blackhands are fanning the flames and are responsible for the most violent protesters.) P.S. Hong Kong music bad? How can you not love melodramatic Cantonese renditions of American 80s power ballads? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxdecmjANMI

Many people in the Rightosphere talks about the Anglo American Empire and how it meddles in everyone's country with muh democracy and freedom. They are not wrong, but guess what? There is a group of ethnicity that massively eggs on these developments. And all for the interests of themselves or for their own clique within their ethnicity. I have partial ancestry from China, so what happens in China concerns me greatly. Hong Kong, like it or not, outperforms China on basic material prosperity, institutional and social trust, food safety and medical care, and many other reasons. You don't see as many Hong Kongers moving to China as mainland Chinese moving to Hong Kong to enjoy things you don't get in mainland China. And as someone who's in love with Chinese traditions, I cannot say that the current Chinese government are really doing their best to improve their own country, from a traditional Confucian perspective or from a modern economic perspective. I cannot and will not support the CCP under any circumstance. You need to look at how Chinese communist nationalists are protesting against the Hong Kongers and their supporters in Australia, Canada, NZ and elsewhere to see how drone-like and prone to violence they are. Of course there are violent protesters in Hong Kong too, but in the overseas field, the mainlanders are failing to show the world why they should support China, with their Communist flags, their Ferraris and big speakers blasting Chinese songs. Not to mention many of these protests are run by students who can't speak decent English, and prone to swear off. There is a lot more to say about the moral and spiritual status of most mainlanders, but I can't say they are the best of the Chinese race at the moment. Now, come to the Chinese government themselves. They recently did this : https://qz.com/1690276/chinas-state-media-compared-hong-kongs-protests-to-the-holocaust/. You see how they just buy easily into the "muh evil whitey Westerners" narrative? This is the same government that partnered up with the US decades ago via the arch globalist Kissinger. And Kissinger still enjoys star status in China. They have great relations with the Bidens and the Clintons. And lately, I have seen China partnering up with certain leftists from the anti-imperialist sphere (Venezuela, Iran, Russia) to portrays how the USA is racist and such, thus buying into the Cathedral's narrative. Such action will only contribute further to the destabilization of Western countries. Both the current Chicoms and the USG are the enemies of civilization. Everyone should be careful in supporting the Chicoms because they seem more "based" than the US at the moment. By the way, the Chicoms don't need to show the world how "inclusive" they are compared to the "racist" USA, yet this is what is on CCTV English: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZIAUfB2bwA . My recommendation is to support alt-Chinese folks who are racially aware and know the real history of the CCP, and alt-East Asian people, of which your acquaintance Augustus Manchurius is one. By the look of it, if China gets into a civil war (between say, Xi Jinping and Jiang Zemin), then the country will go into the cycle of disunion and reunion again. I'd say that, if that's the case and if you love China, you better find ways to build your local power and become a warlord who can bring order to chaos.

Supporting Manchurius? Seriously dude. Chinese separatists are all a bunch of crazies, but Dongbei separatism is just retarded.