[adventured]

We have a lot of examples of that occurring in the past decade. There's no need to speculate (the "you'll see" part). The op's statement was obviously correct about speed of action. In the US protests about something tend to build and stretch out over many days or weeks more typically. See the prominent example of the famous Chick-fil-A protest (which went on for months). It took Walmart a month to take measures recently regarding guns (open carry in their stores) in reaction to the shooting that occurred in El Paso and it also wasn't government forced.

If it were Beijing, you'd have comprehensive action occur within a day or two and it would be a strict policy enforced by the government. All Chick-fil-A locations would be shut down immediately and whatever was upsetting would be removed (or the chain would never reopen); and while the authorities are at it, they might go ahead and engineer a forced ownership transfer for good measure.

I'll note that Chick-fil-A is booming in the US. It's now the third most successful chain in the US by sales behind McDonalds and Starbucks. That's despite their non-PC position on gay rights.

[yourbandsucks]

This has already been going on for months, though. It's gotta be front-of-mind over there.

The image of English-speaking westerners talking about "liberate hong kong" is a bit triggering for the average Chinese person, due to Hong Kong and England's history. It must be incredibly easy for CCTV to point at that and say that it's just the western imperialists trying to take HK away.

[mlyle]

This is a strawman. Morey did not tweet anything containing "liberate Hong Kong". (That was subsequent, different events, by different people).

China promised 50 years of "one country, two systems"-- people in Hong Kong want to cash that check.

[yourbandsucks]

I wasn't trying to take sides on the HK situation itself, though, so it can't really be a straw-man on that topic.

The topic was whether the outpouring of sentiment from mainland China could be 'organic' rather than some immediate government dictate.

[mlyle]

Picking something that is more extreme than what was said, and asserting that this could prompt swift Chinese organic reaction... does nothing to address whether the reaction to what was actually said was organic.