[agent00f]

These types of protests are largely encouraged by the West to deepen division within it's enemies, same as with sunni/shiites in the middle east, or gop/democrats by the Russians. You can tell because the West didn't give a single shit when hk wasn't democratically ruled by the Brits, but now democracy there is headline propaganda.

[magnusjonsson]

The PRC didn't exactly cooperate when the UK wanted to introduce democratic measures in HK well before the handover. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_development_in_Hong...

[throwaway44327]

The UK only tried to introduce it after they knew they couldn’t hold on to Hong Kong anymore. So they did it out of spite.

But the UK did try to convince Portugal not to offer the people of Macau citizenship, because they didn’t want to do the same for the people of Hong Kong.