[theseadroid]

Non violent actions such as strikes brought us many human rights improvements such as 40 hour week and safety and health regulations. Many societies reformed after their citizens striked extensively. I'm curious why there's no sweeping strikes in Hong Kong yet?

[mdorazio]

Can you provide an example of a time peaceful strikes worked against a well-organized, massive, and authoritarian government like the CCP? I don't think comparing wins in civil rights in Western democracies is a good basis for policy here.

[wenc]

Well... I can think of two:

Korean protests in 1987 (against a military strongman)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_Struggle

Carnation Revolution in Portugal 1974 (against dictatorship)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnation_Revolution

[jcranmer]

Solidarity, leading the way to the Polish revolution of 1989 and ultimately the restoration of democracy to the Warsaw Pact?

[mdorazio]

That's an interesting one, but mostly because it's tied to the collapse of the Soviet Union at the same time. China is not anywhere near the same state of affairs. Poland was also a relatively small economy and war power.

[me_me_me]

That is the best way of achieving long lasted change - solidarity mentioned.

However China is different cup of tea. They don't care about image as they can suppress and buy PR - Tibet.

They massacred their own youth, organized mass organ thief etc. They have different approach to (de)valuing human life.

I am afraid that HK is under a CPR steamroller slowly crushing the resistance.

[AnimalMuppet]

> They don't care about image as they can suppress and buy PR - Tibet.

Yes and no. China is almost crazily touchy about their image. They claim that it's an insult to their nation if anyone admits that Taiwan exists as a separate entity. You can't even mention Winnie the Pooh in China, because some people use it as a derisive label for Chairman Xi. (Imagine having the NSA notice every on-line mention of "Orange Man", and ordering the hosting site to remove it.)

Now, they may not care about their image as much as they care about suppressing Hong Kong. But the rest of the world can make them pay a price in terms of image - a price that China seems to find rather painful.

[jtjbdhsjjdnd]

Just for info sake. Only memes with Xi and Winnie are banned. Literally the first thing I saw in China were Winnie the Pooh images in Hainan airport toilet.

[lordlimecat]

Their concern for their image isn't egoism, it's propoganda. With Taiwan for instance, if you get everyone to agree for long enough that Taiwan does not exist internationally, Noone will care when you roll in and squash it.

[mannykannot]

Maybe they throw a hissy fit at the mention of Taiwan, but do they give a shit, really?

[theseadroid]

The non violence movement in India against Imperial Britain? You can argue the particularity of every historical event but to me striking is one of the immediately reachable weapon against CCP that is not employed. With the same logic we can say protesting is not effective against CCP yet ppl still do it?

[jerf]

Imperial Britain is still not China of today. There are some cultures that will simply read your nonviolence as weakness and stomp over you.

Our modern tendency to compete on who can most hyperbolically denounce Western Imperialism strips us of any ability to calibrate between cultures. Do you know what Imperial Rome would have done to the nonviolent Indian revolt? They'd have executed it at its infancy and it would be a historical footnote. They wouldn't have even waited for it to become a big movement; the death penalty would have been used early and often. To some degree, even as entertainment.

My read on China is closer to first-century Rome than 20th century Britain. YMMV.

[theseadroid]

And a single city with guns would be able to topple Rome with modern weaponry?

To be clear, neither I or you are certain what the majority of HKers want to trade for democracy. Realistically if they want democracy so bad, what else they can do other than the protesting they are doing? Long term striking seems to be something they can do TODAY, RIGHT NOW. Equiped with weapons or not, one of the bet they have to make is that the international community would not sit idlely while many HKers get killed.

[jerf]

"And a single city with guns would be able to topple Rome with modern weaponry?"

I don't know how that's relevant to anything I said. My point is about culture. Nonviolent protest requires you to be protesting an amenable authority. There have been plenty of examples in history of authorities that will just spill as much blood as it takes. To my eye, the only constraint on China doing that is their fear that people might stop paying into their economy.

Bear in mind that if China decided to roll into Hong Kong and simply kill everybody there, it would only increase the current Chinese government's death toll against their own people by somewhere between 16% to 40%. It wouldn't even double it! This is the government that brought you the "Great Leap Forward" in which they killed 18-45 million of their own people. This is a government being credibly accused of engaging in ethnic cleansing.

Are you sure advising "nonviolent protest" against that is a good idea?

"one of the bet they have to make is that the international community would not sit idlely while many HKers get killed."

That is not something I'd advise anyone to bet their lives on.

[theseadroid]

I thought it was relevant because my initial reply was to someone saying

>They are too scared of weapons and (justified, defensive) violence to make Chinese occupation unviable.

To that end I felt striking is probably a better option to try before more violent forms of fighting get involved. Maybe nonviolent protest is not a good idea, but it's probably not a worse idea than violent ones.

>That is not something I'd advise anyone to bet their lives on.

Say without international community support, is there any winning strategy you can think of?

I personally think once the confrontation becomes more heated, at least a dozen western countries would allow HKers to immigrate to their countries, which doesn't require too much resources to do? One example is last year Sweden has already started granting China's Uighurs refugee status.

[throwaway_2047]

They did. For 6 months since last June at least, every single day.

[theseadroid]

not long term striking. most protesters are students.

[akamaka]

How often do violent uprisings turn out well? A thorough reading of history shows that they aren’t very effective, either.

[roosterdawn]

A thorough reading of history shows that violent uprisings are de facto _what_ is effective, and certainly in post-industrial modern times. Empires cede control of territory when they become too expensive to maintain. Usually, that is in terms of violence, which threatens mercantile stability and integrability.

Unfortunately, the violence and instability that often accompanies secession doesn't always end up resulting in prosperity after independence. That is because violent or not, uprisings do not necessarily upset the power balance between the colonizer and the colonized. Some say the alphabet agencies that form the worldwide practice of SIGINT operate on this inertia -- well, I don't want to speculate about what I don't know about, but I think that at least my own country's declassified documents are telling. The USA has had a hand in kingmaking much of LatAm and the Middle East. Historically, I think this kind of proxying only ends when the empire itself shrivels.

[akamaka]

There have been many successful insurrections, but have you truly taken into consideration all of the failed ones?

We obviously can’t make a long list here, but here is one that might be relevant to think about:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_28_incident

[roosterdawn]

As it pertains to statecraft, what is the point of bringing up "insurrections"? It just seems like a pedantic red herring to avoid discussing war. Insurrections are either aborted attempts to start wars and brutally suppressed, or they become protracted wars, which folds into the empire cost benefit analysis I pointed to. When it comes to wars, I think that territory, violence, the threat of it, and its costs are the attendant free variables in which decisions are made.

[jki275]

Worked in the US and France as I recall.

[akamaka]

The US is a great example to consider: compare the odds of success of a violent secessionist movement in Hong Kong to those of the Confederacy winning the Civil War.

Or perhaps a French example might be more relevant, with a single city at stake: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Commune

[jki275]

Revolutionary war. Not civil war.

[akamaka]

Call it what you like: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Names_of_the_American_Civil_...

[atomi]

Strikes can also have the opposite effect; like Bacon's rebellion which ushered in an era of racial tensions that are felt to this day [1].

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion