China Signals Intervention as Hong Kong's Protests Intensify

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Source: Bloomberg

(Bloomberg) -- China sent the strongest warning yet of using troops on Hong Kong’s streets where Beijing says protests have turned into a “Color Revolution,” with water cannons and tear gas fired in skirmishes between police and demonstrators in the 12th straight weekend of unrest.

“It’s not only China central government’s authority but also its responsibility to intervene when riots take place in Hong Kong,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency said Sunday in a commentary, recalling comments by former top leader Deng Xiaoping saying Beijing has to act under such circumstances.

President Donald Trump on Aug. 13 said reports from U.S. intelligence agencies show the Chinese government is moving troops to its border with Hong Kong. A day earlier, Global Times, a Chinese tabloid run by the People’s Daily, reported that the Chinese People’s Armed Police were assembling in Shenzhen ahead of “apparent large-scale exercises,” where “numerous” armored personnel carriers, trucks and other vehicles of the paramilitary force were seen heading toward Hong Kong’s neighboring city.

In Sunday’s commentary, Xinhua said Hong Kong’s protests have turned into a Color Revolution aimed at overturning the Special Administrative Region’s constitutional institutions, a signal it was ready to take further action. Previously, Chinese officials had described the protests as having some characteristics of a “color revolution.”

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/china-signals-intervention-as-hong-kongs-protests-intensify/ar-AAGjnKT?li=BBnb7Kz

[Grasswire2]

1. ok, that makes going to sleep a little more difficult ... nt

[abqtommy]

2. My feeling is that the Chinese government

has been reluctant to go into Hong Kong due to the world focus on events there, but the Chinese patience is now wearing thin. Let's keep our attention focused and maybe that will help avoid a disaster for the protesters.

[Igel]

3. In the end, it's not like we matter.

Rank the criteria.

We matter, public opinion in general, because of niceties around the edges.

Outstripping public opinion in importance is their view of national irredentism.

Mussolini couldn't have expressed it better, nor Hitler: Any land that was Chinese land is still Chinese land; Chinese land must be united, the Western Pacific is a Chinese sea. Straight out of Mussolini's playbook--unite Italy, Italy is Rome in the present, the Mediterranean is a Roman sea, and they must look to Roman culture and ideas and not foreign ones. Could also be out of Iran's playbook. Or Turkey's. Or Russia's. Even Maduro in Venezuela has made the same sort of noxious noises.

Economics is important; identity is far more crucial.

Now, if actual blood was going to be spilled, that might be a different matter. Of course, they'd feel great humiliation, piled on top of their carefully cultivated and nursed humiliation (how Russian of them!). Only if military force was going to be imposed to help stop their squashing of whatever they want to squash would our opinion matter.

It was thus in Hungary, 1956. Czechoslovakia, 1968. And even in Crimea, 2014. Strong words with not a stick in sight mean little.