Chinazism

Japan lists China as much bigger threat than North Korea

By Tim Kelly

TOKYO -- China’s growing military might has replaced North Korean belligerence as the main security threat to Japan, Tokyo’s annual defense review indicated on Thursday, despite signs that Pyongyang could have nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles.
The document’s security assessment on China comes after a section on Japan’s ally, the United States, the first time Beijing has achieved second place in the Defense White Paper and pushing North Korea into third position.
Russia, deemed by Japan as its primary threat during the Cold War, was in fourth place.
“The reality is that China is rapidly increasing military spending, and so people can grasp that we need more pages,” Defense Minister Taro Kono said at a media briefing.
“China is deploying air and sea assets in the Western Pacific and through the Tsushima Strait into the Sea of Japan with greater frequency.”

Japan has raised defense spending by a tenth over the past seven years to counter military advances by Beijing and Pyongyang, including defenses against North Korean missiles which may carry nuclear warheads, the paper said.
North Korea has conducted short-range missile launches this year that Tokyo believes show Pyongyang is developing projectiles to evade its Aegis ballistic missile defenses.
To stay ahead of China’s modernizing military, Japan is buying U.S.-made stealth fighters and other advanced weapons.
In its latest budget request, Japan’s military asked for 115.6 billion yen ($1.1 billion) to buy nine Lockheed Martin F-35 stealth fighters, including six short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) variants to operate from converted helicopter carriers.
The stealth jets, U.S.-made interceptor missiles and other equipment are part of a proposed 1.2% increase in defense spending to a record 5.32 trillion yen in the year starting April 1.
By comparison, Chinese military spending is set to rise this year by 7.5% to about $177 billion from 2018, more than three times that of Japan. 

Beijing is developing weapons such as stealth fighters and aircraft carriers that are helping it expand the range and scope of military operations.
Once largely confined to operating close to the Chinese coast, Beijing now routinely sends its air and sea patrols near Japan’s western Okinawa islands and into the Western Pacific.

The Defense White Paper said Chinese patrols in waters and skies near Japanese territory are “a national security concern”.
The paper downgraded fellow U.S. ally, South Korea, which recently pulled out of an intelligence sharing pact with Japan amid a dispute over their shared wartime history. 

That could weaken efforts to contain North Korean threats, analysts said.
Other allies, including Australia, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and India, feature more prominently in the defense paper.

Sina Delenda Est

White House deliberates block on all US investments in China

Eamon Javers

The White House is weighing some curbs on U.S. investments in China, a source familiar with the matter told CNBC. 

This discussion includes possibly blocking all U.S. financial investments in Chinese companies, the source said.
It’s in the preliminary stages and nothing has been decided, the source said. 

There’s also no time frame for their implementation, the source added.
Restricting financial investments in Chinese entities would be meant to protect U.S. investors from excessive risk due to lack of regulatory supervision, the source said.
The deliberations come as the U.S. looks for additional levers of influence in trade talks, which resume on Oct. 10 in Washington. 

Both countries slapped tariffs on billions of dollars worth of each other’s goods. 

The discussions also come as the Chinese government is taking steps to increase foreign access to its markets.
Bloomberg News first reported earlier on Friday that Trump administration officials are considering ways to limit U.S. investors’ portfolio flows into China, including delisting Chinese companies from American stock exchanges and preventing U.S. government pension funds from investing in the Chinese market.
Shares of Alibaba, Baidu and other Chinese companies plunged following the news. 

China’s yuan weakened to 7.15 against the dollar on the report.
The White House declined to comment.

Hong Kong's Magical Youth

Hong Kong’s older protesters awed, humbled by zeal of youth
By JOHN LEICESTER

Protestors shout slogans in Hong Kong, Sunday, Sept. 29, 2019. Protesters and police clashed in Hong Kong for a second straight day on Sunday, throwing the city's business and shopping belt into chaos and sparking fears of more ugly scenes leading up to China's National Day this week.

HONG KONG — Watching from a side road, Edmund Lau was struck with admiration and wonder as young protesters dressed head-to-toe in black whirled into action to deal with another volley of tear gas from Hong Kong riot police, kicking away the smoking canisters and rushing to aid the stricken who wept uncontrollably.
“Fabulous,” the 45-year-old nurse said of the now well-oiled tactics deployed by the massed demonstrators, many of whom were 20 years his junior.
“Very brave.”
With fired-up young people in Hong Kong pulling out all the stops to spoil China’s celebrations this week to mark 70 years of Communist Party rule, older generations in the former British colony that reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 are asking themselves: When we were their age, did we do enough to push for the full democracy and iron-clad liberties that legions of determined youngsters are now demanding?
Often, they answer their own question with a sheepish “No.”
“We were shameful,” Lau said.
“From this generation, I’ve learned the meaning of fraternity and solidarity. Adorable.”


John Leicester
✔@johnleicester
VIDEO: Hong Kong's protests, organized like clockwork

8:34 AM - Sep 30, 2019
Hong Kong's young protesters, looking out for each other and working hand-in-hand -- literally.

Support, even if just from the sidelines, that older citizens of Hong Kong are displaying for the tens of thousands of young demonstrators on the protest movement’s tear-gassed front lines is making an already complex problem for Hong Kong’s leaders only more delicate and intractable.
A further toughening-up of the police response, already widely decried as heavy-handed, to the months-long protests could turn bystanders into more active participants.
And although there are many in Hong Kong who resent the disruption to lives and businesses, the sprinkling of gray hairs amid black-clad young protesters means that the demonstrations cannot convincingly be dismissed as simply misguided youthful folly.
“This generation has helped us with our political awakening,” said Samuel Yip, a 54-year-old investment bank worker.
“This political movement has really given us a Hong Kong identity.”
Graffiti has become a widely used method of expression for fired-up Hong Kong protesters.

From his perch on an elevated side road, Yip watched in relative safety as young protesters brought usually busy business and tourist districts of central Hong Kong to a halt again Sunday, forming huge human chains along which, hand-to-hand, they passed water bottles, eye goggles, rolls of plastic film, gloves and umbrellas to comrades at the front, where the air stung with tear gas.
Another choking volley tipped Yip into a fury.
“This is worse than the triads,” he said, likening the police force to Hong Kong’s notorious criminal underworld.
“With the triads, we pay protection money, but here they’re using taxpayers’ money to buy the weapons — tear gas, rubber bullets.”
Many of the protesters are too young to have solid, or even any, memories of Hong Kong under British rule.
But older residents remember the 1980s, when Britain and China were negotiating the terms of the 1997 handover, and the 1990s, when the last British governor, Chris Patten, infuriated Beijing with a belated British push for fuller democracy and stronger guarantees for its civil liberties.
They also remember that there weren’t similar sustained, massive street protests like those seen week-in, week-out in recent months, and now daily leading up to Tuesday, when the Chinese Communist Party will celebrate 70 years in power.
In Hong Kong, protesters say they’ll again be wearing black, in mourning this time, and their posters are calling for a “Day of Grief.”


John Leicester
✔@johnleicester
Protest posters from Hong Kong's restless streets. Note how some protesters go out of their way to stamp on a likeness of Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam. AP's coverage full here: https://apnews.com/HongKong

5:36 AM - Sep 30, 2019
Hong Kong demonstrators have turned urban furniture into impromptu art galleries, covering bus stops, overpasses and shop fronts with posters.

Amid older demonstrators, admiration for the seemingly tireless zeal of young protesters is also tinged with regret that they weren’t as vocal when their futures were being negotiated.
Waves of people preferred to leave before the handover, a drain of wealth and talent spurred in part by the Communist Party’s militarized crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Although Hong Kong’s annual candlelit vigils to commemorate the bloodshed have long been well attended, the territory often seemed more preoccupied by the business of making money than free elections in the waning years of British rule.
“I blame myself, too. I didn’t do enough to protect Hong Kong’s freedom,” Jeremy Lin, 45, said at a large demonstration on Saturday that also ended with water-cannon sprays from police.
As a teenager, he followed his parents when they emigrated to Canada but later came back to make Hong Kong his home again.
At the protest, he wore a T-shirt emblazoned with “Hong Kong is home” in bold white characters.
“We could have done more,” Lin said.


John Leicester
✔@johnleicester
Notable echoes of Chinese Communist Party propaganda art


John Leicester
✔@johnleicester
A demonstrator's harmonica rendition of "Glory to Hong Kong," a protest movement anthem


5:36 AM - Sep 30, 2019
As well as with posters, demonstrators also express themselves in music, with a now popular anthem, "Glory to Hong Kong".

Others are kicking themselves for having had rosy visions in 1997 of life in Hong Kong remaining unchanged and for believing China’s promises that the free-wheeling territory would largely be its own boss, under a formula dubbed “One country, two systems.”
Beijing’s refusal to allow full democracy and, this year, a Hong Kong government proposal that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China for trials in Communist Party-controlled courts have blown away trust even among some of those who celebrated when 156 years of British rule ended with midnight’s stroke on July 1, 1997.
Recalling that momentous day, 69-year-old retired microbiologist Gloria Chao remembers most vividly how deeply proud she felt.
“We were jubilant,” she said, attending Saturday’s protest with her husband, Henry, a retired physician.
“We had cocktail parties.”
And now?
“I was so stupid,” she said.
Her father, a banker, fled southern China when Mao Zedong’s communists took power in 1949, finding safe haven in British-administered Hong Kong along with millions of others who came in waves, escaping subsequent decades of famine and purges.
Bearing witness: Bystanders outside a restaurant taking pictures of police water cannons.

Growing up in what she remembers as golden years for Hong Kong, Chao said she came to believe that the regime her father fled had changed and “the communists, communist China, are not the same anymore.”
“We are so dumb for not taking any lessons from our parents,” she said, watching avidly with her husband from a footbridge as thousands of young protesters yelled “Revolution now!”
“We feel sorry that we have put them in this situation, we have not done enough,” she said.
“So we owe it to them to support them now. I admire them for their courage, for coming out to stand up for themselves.”

Communist Cafe

Starbucks becomes latest target of Hong Kong protester boycott
AFP
A man cleans up graffiti put up by protesters on the front of a Starbucks coffee shop in Hong Kong on September 30, 2019, a day after the protest-wracked financial hub witnessed its fiercest political violence in weeks. 

Starbucks has emerged as the latest brand to fall foul of Hong Kong's pro-democracy protesters after a family member of the local restaurant chain that owns the local franchise spoke out against demonstrators.
Multiple branches were covered with graffiti over the weekend as the city convulsed with some of the most intense clashes between hardcore protesters and riot police in weeks.
One cafe in the district of Wanchai was daubed with slogans saying "boycott" as well as insults to the police and Maxim's Caterers, a major Hong Kong restaurant chain that runs Starbucks outlets in the city.
The boycott illustrates the huge pressures on international brands as Hong Kong is shaken by its worst political unrest in decades.
Beijing is piling pressure on businesses to publicly condemn the protests.
Those that do risk a protester backlash, but staying silent risks financial punishment on the mainland, a far more lucrative market.
The boycott campaign against Maxim's snowballed after Annie Wu, the daughter of Maxim's wealthy founder, delivered a speech earlier this month in which she condemned the protests and said Beijing's hardline stance against democracy advocates should be supported.
She was speaking at the United Nations' human rights council in Geneva alongside Pansy Ho, a billionaire casino magnate who made similar calls.
Their comments were seized on by protesters and portrayed as an example of how Hong Kong's wealthy elite are out of touch with public sentiment and in the pockets of Beijing.
Prominent democracy campaigner Joshua Wong was among those calling for a boycott of Starbucks since Wu's speech and more than 50,000 people have signed a petition asking the Seattle-headquartered company to sever ties with Maxim's.
“We herein urge the Board of Directors to consider whether Maxim's truly represents the social values of Starbucks and terminate the franchise to Maxim's immediately,” Wong wrote on Twitter on Friday.
Maxim's did not respond to requests for comment on Monday but it has previously issued statements distancing itself from Wu's comments and saying she is not employed by the company.
Other major brands have been rounded on by protesters, either for pro-Beijing comments made by owners or because the owners themselves are linked to the Communist Party in China.
Yoshinoya, a popular noodle chain, and Genki Sushi — also owned by Maxim's — have been repeatedly tagged with graffiti along with Bank of China branches.
Brands deemed to be sympathetic to protesters have also had a torrid time and faced boycotts on the mainland.
Authorities in China tore into Cathay Pacific after staff joined protests, forcing the company to go through stricter regulatory checks.
The moves led to major staff changes on Cathay's board, including the resignation of its chief executive officer, as well as multiple staff being fired for expressing pro-democracy sentiments, something some employees have described as a “purge”.

Hong Kong Is Winning the Global Public-Opinion War With Beijing

The city’s protest movement has unofficial representatives, crowdfunded advertising, viral videos, and much else that has caught Chinese off guard.

By CHRIS HORTON

The Hong Kong pro-democracy campaigners Joshua Wong (far left) and Denise Ho (left) testify in Congress.

TAIPEI—Months of protests in Hong Kong have pitted residents of all ages and backgrounds against their police force, local government, and the Chinese Communist Party, and there is no question of who is less powerful.
Yet in a parallel battle over international public opinion, it is Beijing and its minions that are outgunned. 

This weekend that mismatch was once again highlighted by the thousands of people in cities across Australia, Asia, Europe and North America coming out in support of Hong Kong, but also in a much broader sense, against the CCP. 

Here in Taipei alone, thousands of Taiwanese and Hong Kongers marched through the streets on a rainy Sunday, told by Denise Ho, one of the most visible faces among Hong Kong’s unofficial diplomatic corps, that her home and theirs shared the same fight against Beijing.
These latest worldwide, pro–Hong Kong rallies are the most recent iteration of what supporters of repressed groups in East Turkestan and Tibet, as well as those who back Taiwan’s sovereignty, have all struggled to do: Mobilize large communities internationally to denounce the Chinese Communist Party.

The relative success of Hong Kong’s protest movement is all the more significant because it’s occurring alongside Beijing expanding its propaganda efforts globally, as state-owned outlets trumpet China’s vision of the world in multiple languages. 

This global campaign is the biggest challenge to China’s rulers by the territory since 1989, when, still a British colony, its residents took part in demonstrations in solidarity with protesters in Tiananmen Square, while also providing financial and material support.
From Oslo to Osaka, Congress to the United Nations, Taiwan to Twitter, Hong Kongers have taken their DIY approach to protest to a global audience. 

Celebrity supporters testify in high-profile settings; highly targeted, crowdfunded media campaigns aim to keep the issue in the spotlight; and viral videos, catchy slogans, and even a movement anthem and flag help magnify the message on social media.

On September 17, a panel of witnesses including Ho and pro-democracy campaigner Joshua Wong testified before the Congressional-Executive Commission on China in Washington, the latest in a string of public appearances for the two activists around the globe. 

Ho has been especially active, shuttling back and forth between Hong Kong and elsewhere to promote her message of resisting Beijing to receptive crowds, especially in Taiwan.
Earlier this month in Taipei, Ho spoke and performed at the Asia installment of the Oslo Freedom Forum. 

Only days before, she had been in Melbourne, where she appeared in public with the Chinese dissident artist Badiucao, designer of the unofficial Hong Kong protest movement flag. 

In Taipei, Ho took the stage to a screaming crowd of hundreds of admirers, their phones raised to record her appeal to democratic Taiwan, whose way of life is also under threat from China. Describing the struggle of Hong Kongers, who cannot rely on their own government to counter China’s narrative, Ho struck a pragmatic tone. 

“When the system fails us,” she said to the attentive crowd, “we take things into our own hands.”
Wong, who rose to international fame as one of the leaders of the pro-democracy, Occupy-style Umbrella Movement of 2014, has also been busy on the diplomatic front. 

Prior to his congressional testimony, he stopped in Germany, urging its government to cease exporting crowd-control weapons to Hong Kong and to put human rights in Hong Kong on the agenda in Berlin’s trade talks with Beijing. (Germany's foreign minister, Heiko Maas, met with Wong on September 10.)
Wong’s German visit came after he and fellow activists visited Taiwan, where he implored the ruling party to pass an asylum law that would make it easier for Hong Kongers to seek refuge here, territory the CCP claims despite having never controlled it.
Although neither Wong nor Ho has been appointed by the current protest movement to represent it abroad—a remarkable feat of the demonstrations is that they have been largely leaderless—the general consensus in Hong Kong seems to be that they are well-known names and faces who offer the advantage of signal-boosting.
While in Taipei mid-month, Ho told me she thought of herself as a mediator or spokesperson for the movement at large. 

“I’m not seeing myself as a leader of any sort,” she said. 

“I am, on the other hand, one of the participants of this movement: I have been on the streets with these people. I have been teargassed.” 

She added that, as a “recognizable face,” she saw herself “as a conduit that can bring stories of these people to the world.”
In July, Ho scored one of the first public-relations victories abroad for Hong Kong’s protesters when, speaking at the United Nations in Geneva, she described growing police brutality against Hong Kongers and called on the UN to remove China from its Human Rights Council. 

During her remarks, she was interrupted twice by China’s representative to the body on procedural grounds. 

More recently, while in Washington, Ho and Wong were joined by other activists and congressional leaders for the launch of the Hong Kong Democracy Council, a D.C.-based lobbying group for the movement.
Ho and Wong are far from the only diplomats working on behalf of the movement. 

In June, a crowdfunding drive raised hundreds of thousands of dollars from more than 20,000 donors, paying for full-page ads in more than 10 major international newspapers, urging the G20 summit in Osaka to raise Hong Kong’s plight. 

How much impact the campaign had is unclear, but Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe did bring up Hong Kong’s protests with Chinese dictator Xi Jinping when the two met on the sidelines of the summit. 

Another crowdfunded ad campaign is under way, this time targeting papers on October 1 to mark the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic of China, a particularly sensitive date for the CCP. 

The campaign is not the only bit of rain to fall on the party’s parade—Hong Kong’s government announced on September 18 that it had canceled the fireworks show planned for the anniversary.
Unlike East Turkestan or Tibet, both of which the Communists forcibly took control of in the 1950s, Hong Kong was handed over peacefully by the British in 1997, following 150 years of colonial rule. 

At the heart of the agreement between London and Beijing was an arrangement whereby Hong Kong would maintain its separate political and economic system and enjoy “a high degree of autonomy,” with Beijing handling national security and diplomacy.
This “one country, two systems” arrangement has allowed Hong Kong to have a free internet, for example, whereas Beijing heavily restricts the web within China and even went so far as to either partially or completely shut down the internet in East Turkestan—the size of western Europe—for 10 months.
Today, many Hong Kongers worry that their internet access may go the way of China’s, adding a sense of urgency to their attempts to use it to organize themselves and to reach the outside world in order to spread their message and counter Beijing’s narrative. 

Twitter, in particular, has become an important virtual battleground for foreign hearts and minds.
The Chinese authorities appear to agree. 

On September 3, the Australian Strategic Policy Institute published an investigation into the methods used in a disinformation campaign aimed at Hong Kong that Twitter has attributed to Beijing, a first. “Efforts by the Chinese government to leverage Twitter to redirect and recast political developments in Hong Kong—both in terms of covert information operations and through its state media—highlight just how powerful Twitter is as a tool of statecraft,” Danielle Cave, deputy director of the ASPI’s International Cyber Policy Centre, told me.
Hong Kong’s protesters have also recognized the global influence of Twitter in the information domain and are themselves trying to use Twitter diplomacy to share breaking developments and to connect with journalists, Cave noted. 

This includes providing images and videos of events on the ground, often in real time, and generating new hashtags, including ones that highlight violent incidents and police brutality. (The protesters’ tool of choice for coordinating rallies has thus far been the encrypted messaging app Telegram, but that can’t match Twitter’s global reach or public-broadcasting capabilities, nor does it have the ear of global stakeholders that the protesters seek to engage.)
Hong Kongers have, so far, proved a nimble David to China’s clumsy Goliath. 

But the CCP does occasionally score points. 

Donald Trump, for example, parroted the Chinese government’s line on the Hong Kong protests when he called them “riots” in early August, a characterization that many viewed as a win for Beijing.
In other incidents, however, the tendency of Chinese nationalism to backfire on the foreign stage has hampered the Communist cause. 

Among these incidents are violent Chinese-student reactions to pro–Hong Kong demonstrations at Australian universities, with the Chinese embassy expressing support for the students’ actions on social media afterward. 

Debate in Australia regarding the ability of China to control public speech there has since intensified. Elsewhere, Montreal’s Pride parade excluded Hong Kong participants after receiving threats from pro-Communists.

At the parade, many onlookers were aghast when, during the moment of silence for those who have died from HIV/AIDS, Chinese participants sang their national anthem.
“The most basic weakness of the external communications of the Chinese party-state is the fact that foreign audiences, and their values and interests, are never truly considered,” David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project, told me. 

“Sure, the messages are directed at foreigners, but the language is still the internal and insular language of the party-state.”
In this sense, Bandurski said, these propaganda efforts are not really external at all.
“Try as it might to raise the volume on China's singular, restrained voice, the party-state is still talking to itself, or shouting at its own wall,” Bandurski said. 

“The louder that voice becomes, the more uncompromising and aggressive it sounds.”

'Burn with us': How police brutality pushed young Hong Kongers to the edge

More and more Hongkongers considered radical protests to be more effective in making the government heed public opinion
By Joshua Berlinger and Eric Cheung
Protesters light a Molotov cocktail after setting a makeshift barricade on fire on August 31.

Hong Kong -- Jim bent over, collapsed and started crying.
The 16-year-old didn't want to abandon the injured man next to him.
He applied gauze to stop the man's eye from gushing with blood, but he still was having trouble walking.
Jim tried to carry him, but only made it a few feet.
Clouds of tear gas were closing in.
Rubber bullets had been flying overhead.
The teenager's hours of first aid work on the front line had taken their toll.
Physically he couldn't carry the wounded man any more.
All he could do was cry.

Police clash with protesters during a demonstration outside the government headquarters in Hong Kong on June 12.

It was June 12.
Jim had never previously been to a protest.
Hours earlier, when he volunteered to help treat the injured, he had no idea that he'd be in the thick of what turned out to be a dangerous encounter with Hong Kong police.
Tens of thousands of protesters took to the streets that day to oppose a controversial bill that would have legalized extradition from Hong Kong to mainland China.
The bill was inspired by the city's inability to return the suspect of a grisly murder to Taiwan, but many Hong Kong citizens feared it would be abused by Beijing for political persecution.

Protesters move barricades to block a street during the June 12 protest.

Prior to June 12, Jim said he wasn't political.
He was a high school student who liked to play the violin.
The son of two medical professionals, he had aspirations to one day be a doctor.
A demonstration, he thought, would be a good opportunity to put some first-aid training to use.
The rally was given permission by authorities.
But by mid-afternoon a number of protesters decided to storm the entrance of the city's legislature despite the heavy police presence.
Police declared the protest a riot and used tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd.
Jim spent about three hours treating the wounded and said what he saw changed him.
He thought the Hong Kong police had used disproportionate and "unreasonable force."
Jim could barely sleep that night and when he did, he had nightmares.
He had an exam the next day but said his brain "was totally empty."
He sat down at his desk, rested his head on the table and slept.

Protesters run after police fired tear gas outside government headquarters on June 12.

Thousands of young people like Jim have spent the summer on the front lines of Hong Kong's longest sustained protests since the city returned to China in 1997.
Their movement started in opposition to the bill but quickly snowballed into a grassroots, decentralized crusade for universal suffrage and independent inquiries into alleged police misconduct.
They want to be able to able to choose their own leader, who is currently appointed by a Beijing-dominated panel.
The scenes have grown increasingly violent throughout the summer.
The streets of one of the safest cities in the world now regularly become battlegrounds with police firing rubber bullets and tear gas to disperse illegal demonstrations.

Hong Kongers' 5 demands

1. Fully withdraw the extradition bill
2. Set up an independent inquiry to probe police brutality
3. Withdraw the characterization of protests as "riots"
4. Release those arrested at protests
5. Implement universal suffrage in Hong Kong

Protesters say they have become numb to the chaos.
Many have become increasingly prone to violence.
Those who spoke to CNN about their experiences did so on the condition of anonymity, fearing that they'd be targeted by police or pro-government mobs.
Jim said for him, June 12 was the turning point.
He decided it wasn't enough just to volunteer first aid.
It was time to get in on the action, even though he had never been involved in politics or been in a fight.
He thought he needed to take a stand against what the police had done.

A police water cannon drives toward protesters on August 25.

July 1
On July 1, at 3 a.m. Jim snuck out of his parents' flat to meet the friends he'd be protesting with.
He was "excited and a little bit nervous."
"I was thinking that this time I will be with the guys who are standing on the front lines," Jim said. He wasn't just going to give first aid on the sidelines this time.
The day would end with part of the government's headquarters in ruin and tear gas in the streets, scenes previously considered unthinkable in Hong Kong.
Jim had become part of a "team" of about 20 protesters.
Small cells have become commonplace in the leaderless protest movement and replaced traditional top-down organization.
People join groups that decide what to do based on online chatter on Telegram, an encrypted messaging app, and an online forum called LIHKG that works like Reddit.
This makes it harder for authorities to track protesters and jail their leaders, a strategy often referred to here as "cutting off the head of the snake."
Jim joined his cell after meeting a member of the team, who according to Jim, seemed brave, eloquent and persuasive.
They all met up early in the morning on July 1, the anniversary of when Hong Kong was handed from Britain to China in 1997 under a "one country, two systems" framework that allowed the city more freedoms and its own legal system.
That arrangement is due to expire in 2047, when Hong Kong will come under Beijing's direct rule.


Passengers look out from a bus at a burning barricade lit by pro-democracy protesters during a gathering in front of Mong Kok police station on Sunday, September 22, in Hong Kong.

Pro-democracy protesters have continued demonstrations across Hong Kong, calling for the city's Chief Executive Carrie Lam to immediately meet the rest of their demands, including an independent inquiry into police brutality, the retraction of the word riot to describe the rallies, and genuine universal suffrage, as the territory faces a leadership crisis.
Before this year, pro-democracy protesters had peacefully marched each year on July 1 to mark the occasion.
"Protest is ingrained in the Hong Kong psyche. It's just a very normal thing to do," said Leslie, a 24-year-old protester and former English teacher.

Leslie isn't her real name. 

She asked that CNN change it due to fears of reprisals.
In 1997, 2047 was a long way off for a teenager. 

They'd likely be retired by then. 

But Jim and Leslie will be in their 40s and 50s, respectively. 

"The future of Hong Kong really depends on the next few months, maybe the next few years, and how this movement pans out," Leslie said.
With that in mind, more than 500,000 turned out for this year's July 1 rally which begins at Victoria Park each year, according to organizers' estimates.
Yet that's not where Jim and his team went. 

They met in Admiralty, outside the government's headquarters.
Calvin was already there by the time Jim arrived. 

The 18-year-old university student had spent the night sleeping on the ground nearby, with only a power bank to charge his phone and the clothes on his back. 

He wanted to be one of the first protesters there.

Protesters stand behind barricades outside the government headquarters the morning of July 1.

As the day went on, thousands more arrived.
People dressed in black and with masks covering their faces began pulling railings from the sidewalks to use as barricades. 

Some started to dig up bricks from the walkways. 

Calvin said that at about 2 p.m., a few proposed breaking into the government's legislative complex, known as LegCo.
At first, Calvin didn't think it was a good idea. 

His instinct was to push back against violence and destruction. 

And he didn't think the public would support it.
Neither did Jim. 

He didn't think violence was the answer.
"I've never seen this kind of stuff before," he said he thought at the time.
But both ended up doing what teenagers often do. 

They followed their friends.
"They're still my teammates," Jim said. 

"Whatever they do, I won't walk away."
Some of Calvin's friends were at the front, trying to break the glass doors leading into LegCo. 

He chose a middle ground: stand guard with an umbrella as other protesters smashed the doors with makeshift battering rams.

Protesters attempt to break a window at the government headquarters in Hong Kong on July 1.

Police standing inside the government headquarters look at protesters who tried to smash their way into the building.

With every violent push, the protesters chipped away at the barriers standing in their way. 

A handful of police officers stood on the other side of the glass. 

They warned people to stop or they would use force.

Protesters smash glass doors and windows to break into the parliament chamber of Legislative Council Complex on July 1.

By 9 p.m., the crowd finally made it inside. 

The police had vanished. 

Hundreds of protesters stormed in, cheering, waving their hands and celebrating their victory. 

They spray-painted "HK Gov f**king disgrace" on the wall.
"Liberate Hong Kong, the revolution of our time," they chanted.
Many thought protesters went too far by ransacking government property. 

Hong Kong is famously clean, efficient and safe. 

It boasts one of the world's lowest violent crime rates. 

Wanton destruction, mob violence and that level of vandalism are incredibly rare.
But as Calvin set foot in the building, he said he felt inspired.
With a successful strike at the symbolic heart of Hong Kong's unelected leader, Carrie Lam, Calvin thought the protesters were able to make an important point -- that the government has already lose its legitimacy.
Once they reached the building's second floor, some started battering the entrance to the legislative chamber. 

It took them 30 minutes to get in. 

Once inside, one protester ripped apart a copy of the Basic Law, which acts as Hong Kong's mini-constitution. 

Another climbed up and spray-painted the city's emblem in black. 

Then they erected the British colonial flag.

Scenes inside the occupied LegCo.

Jim stayed inside for about 45 minutes, helping those who were spraying some of the graffiti that would become symbols of the protesters' anti-government fury. 

Then news that police had warned of an impending clearance operation circulated through LegCo, which was trashed by this point.
"Everyone was scared," Jim said.
Protesters like Jim left on their own terms. 

But his team learned on Telegram that four protesters had stayed. 

So Jim and his friends chose to join hundreds of others who went back inside to convince those who remained to leave.
Everyone departed minutes before riot police arrived, firing tear gas toward the retreating crowd.
Jim felt like he belonged. 

At that moment, strangers felt like family.
"Even though we don't know each other, we have the same goal ... we can't leave anyone behind," Jim said.
"I nearly cried because it felt very touching."

Police fire tear gas at protesters near the government headquarters on July 2.

Joining the fight
Bobo watched the events of July 1 and June 12 unfold from Canada, where she was attending university.
The 20-something Hong Kong native had a cute little dog and hoped to stay in the country once she graduated. Maybe she'd teach children. 

For now, she liked to grab drinks with friends at night and play bar games. 

Darts was one of her favorites.
But she was enraged watching police fire rubber bullets at protesters.
"I cannot just study overseas without coming back to join this fight," she recalled thinking.
So in early July, Bobo left her beloved toy poodle with a friend and booked a ticket home to Hong Kong. 

She began administering a group on Telegram called Bobo, which means "baby" in Cantonese, and grew it into one of the biggest and most reliable Hong Kong protest channels -- with nearly 30,000 members to date.
On the group, she sends regular updates about gatherings, police movements and other real-time news. 

She asked that CNN not use her real name and just refer to her as Bobo, fearing that police would target her.
Bobo supported the protesters who stormed LegCo on July 1. 

She called them heroes.
Their actions, she said, were "a symbol to tell the others" that Hong Kongers would not accept the current government.
Bobo has a history of political activism. 

She -- and Calvin -- were both involved in the 2014 pro-democracy Umbrella Movement, when protesters took to the streets of Hong Kong seeking universal suffrage.
Those peaceful protests simply fizzled out without achieving any political change after the government waged a slow war of attrition. 

Many of the movement's top leaders were eventually jailed.
Calvin and Bobo both said they were angry after the so-called Umbrella Revolution ended. 

They had given peace a chance. 

Now it was time for something else, and many others agreed.
A series of on-site surveys of protesters conducted in June by several Hong Kong-based academics found that about half of the respondents "believed that peaceful, rational and non-violent protest was no longer useful."
"More and more participants considered radical protests to be more effective in making the government heed public opinion," it said.
Edmund Cheng, a professor of political science at Hong Kong Baptist University and one of the report's authors, said the research shows that even those who aren't thrilled about violence aren't going to stand in others' way.
"They may not approve of the violent actions of a small group of radical protesters, they still consider them as working toward a common goal," Cheng said.
The attack at LegCo on July 1 was a landmark moment for Hong Kong and its young people. 

The stage was set, and the summer was about to get more violent.

People walk past signs and posters outside the government headquarters in Hong Kong on July 2.
As the weeks turned to months, protesters graduated from throwing water bottles and umbrellas at riot police to bricks and Molotov cocktails. 

Police said rioters threw as many as 100 petrol bombs during the final weekend of August.
Protesters frame militancy as a necessary evil. 

They say their violence is only directed toward police and government. 

It's a far cry from lethal force and is escalated only if police escalate first, they say.

A Molotov cocktail is thrown by protesters in August.

Bobo and other protesters say Molotov cocktails and fire barricades are used to delay authorities and help protesters hold a line as others flee.
"We use them for self-defense, to maintain a distance between ourselves and the police. We all knew that we would be beaten up heavily if police were to come over," Bobo said.
On August 12 and 13, protesters stormed Hong Kong's airport. 

Hundreds of flights were canceled and chaos ensued. 

Two mainland Chinese nationals were detained by a mob on the second day. 

They were accused of being undercover officers. 

The mob stopped first responders from getting one of the men to an ambulance after he appeared to lose consciousness.
The second, who turned out to be a reporter for Chinese state media, was aggressively searched and then ziptied to a luggage cart.
Many protesters made an effort the next day to apologize.
"People are desperate, people are hopeless, so they want to try all the means possible that lead to victory," said Andy Chan, an independence advocate and the founder of the Hong Kong National Party (HKNP), which the government banned on national security grounds last year. 

Critics say the move was politically motivated.
"Things may turn ugly sometimes but the crowd is always be able to self correct," he said of the scenes at the airport.
Chan was arrested twice last month, first on charges of possession of offensive weapons and then for alleged protest-related offenses. 

He denied the weapons allegations in an interview with CNN before his second arrest.
His second arrest happened at the airport while he was on his way to a conference in Japan. 

Chan said he was then held 44 hours before being released on bail. 

He has not been formally charged and no court date has been set, but police are investigating the case.
Chan said that he believes it's time for protesters to fight back against increasingly heavy-handed tactics by police.
"In the past few years, we have experienced the violence of the police. Many of us agreed that we need to self-defend against the police," he said.

Protesters set a fire on August 31.

Almost all the protesters who spoke to CNN said this summer has changed the way they feel about police. 

Nearly every one brings up the incident in the suburb of Yuen Long on July 21, when police looked the other way while a mob beat up protesters and passersby at a subway station. 

Several said they now hated the police. 

Others spoke in even more vitriolic terms.
"When you go to school and you're very young, the teachers teach you that if you need help, you call the police," Jim said. 

"No one trusts the police anymore."
Leslie, the 24-year-old English tutor, expressed a similar sentiment. 

When it comes to violence, she said protesters will lose public support if they're seen as the ones escalating against police.
"Things that may be morally inappropriate may be necessary," she said.
"Nothing will change if the current situation continues."
Bobo went even further. 

"I will not cut ties with them even if someone kills a police officer," she said.
Bobo said that before this summer she trusted the police.
"But at this moment, they are worse than dogs. They are even worse than rats crossing the street," she said.
"Anyone with (a) conscience will not stay inside the police force. You are not a good person if you decide to stay."
The most extreme protesters want this to go further -- they want to take on the Chinese military. They're not scared by reports that the People's Armed Police, a paramilitary force, had been temporarily deployed across the border in Shenzhen. 

Nor are they worried about Beijing and Hong Kong sounding the alarm over "signs of terror."
They've embraced a philosophy of "if we burn, you burn with us," a phrase popularized by "The Hunger Games" books.

Graffiti outside Hong Kong's Tung Chung subway station reads "burn with us."

'It's just like a dream'
Bobo now goes to as many demonstrations as she can. 

Sometimes she's up until 3 a.m. or 4 a.m. keeping the Telegram channel up to date. 

She wakes up for work three hours later and goes to her desk job.
Nowadays, Bobo brings a will to protests should she be killed. 

In it, she calls on her fellow protesters to continue the fight.
"Every time when I go out, I worry that I may die," she said. 

"I worry about (losing my future), but I am more scared that Hong Kong will be lost."
Leslie, Jim and Calvin said they've been to most of the protests. 

All three say they're motivated not just by ideology, but by the camaraderie they find on the front lines. 

Protesters liken themselves to brothers and sisters in arms, fighting for freedom together despite not knowing one another. 

Many often say one day they hope they can take off their masks and embrace one another.
For now, Calvin said it's like he's living a double life. 

"I go to the protest, and it's just like a dream, and when I wake up, it just ends," he said.
Leslie quit her tutoring job to fully commit to the cause. 

When she's not at a demonstration, she's helping with the translation and publication of protest materials.
"I can't really remember what it was like in June now," she said.
For many protesters, the summer has taken an emotional toll. 

Leslie now goes to a demonstration expecting tear gas and rubber bullets. 

Much of the time, she said she's numb to the violence.
"But the amount of times I've broken down says I just haven't found the right outlet for expressing my emotions," she said.
Jim, the high school student, no longer fears taking on the police.
At a protest at the end of August, he said he found himself on the ground staring at a police baton after helping up a fellow protester who had fallen over.
A member of the Hong Kong police's Special Tactical Squad was standing over him, he recalled.

A police officer from the Special Tactical Squad, nicknamed the "raptors," arrests a protester on August 11.

These aren't your average police. 

They dress in black, head to toe, and it's their job to go in and aggressively pluck out protesters for arrest after riot police fire tear gas. 

The squad has earned a reputation for violence, so much so that they're known locally as "raptors."
As Jim locked eyes with this raptor, he vowed not to go down without a fight. 

Rioting convictions can carry up to 10 years in prison. 

He didn't want to spend his formative years behind bars.
"I just wanted to get away," he said.

An officer walks in the Tung Chung subway station on September 1.

First he went for the jugular. 

Jim said he grabbed the raptor's throat, only to find he was wearing protective neck gear.
So he went lower. 

Jim said he kicked the raptor in the groin, causing him to keel over in pain and giving the young protester enough time to make a run for it.
In the seconds he made his getaway, Jim said he saw a protester throw a Molotov cocktail.
People cheered. 

Police drew back, Jim said, effectively ensuring he was able to escape.
But that freedom wouldn't last.
Jim and several members of his team were arrested days later for possession of offensive weapons. Jim said all they had on them were a few laser pointers. 

Police have started classifying laser pointers as weapons because they've been used at demonstrations to distract officers and members of the media, but they can also blind people.
Jim called his arrest "unreasonable." 

He has since been bailed out.
The summer's events have surprised even Jim. 

In mere weeks, he transformed from apolitical student who just wanted practice first-aid to a passionate activist and frontline protester with a rap sheet.
"Before these events happened, I think actually I'm not quite important or political. Like, I'm just a student and I can't do anything on my own," he said.
"Now I know that everyone is very important, and when we have a lot of people joining together, we can be very powerful."

Chinazism

How Hong Kong protesters are defending their use of Chinazi

By Mary Hui

A new crop of symbols has emerged in Hong Kong’s protests in recent weeks: swastikas and the term “Chinazi.”
At a demonstration earlier this month, when protesters marched to the US consulate to urge Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act, a red flag with yellow stars arranged in the shape of a swastika was hung from a bridge, as the flags of Hong Kong and China fluttered overhead.

The Chinazi flag flying over a large crowd of protesters.

At another major march a week later (Sep. 15), one of the most widely seen posters was that of the “Chinazi” flag. 

Local pro-democracy party People Power also set up a small stage at the start of the march, putting up a banner that cast chief executive Carrie Lam as an unmistakable Hitler, giving her a the label “Butcher Carrie” against a backdrop of yellow swastikas.


Mary Hui
✔@maryhui
· Sep 15, 2019
This guy's writing calligraphy. He just wrote one that says 良知—conscience. The flyers are free to take.



Mary Hui
✔@maryhui
Banner by People Power, the pro-democracy coalition chaired by lawmaker Ray Chan.

23
9:15 AM - Sep 15, 2019

And this Sunday (Sep. 29)—coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the divvying up of occupied Poland between Germany and the Soviet Union—Hong Kongers are scheduled to host a large protest, alternately dubbed the “Global Anti-Totalitarianism March” and the “Global Anti-Chinazi March,” alongside dozens of cities around the world. 

Ahead of the march, organizers have shared a series of graphics on the event’s Telegram channel to explain the term “Chinazi,” drawing comparisons between, for example, the Holocaust’s concentration camps and China’s concentration camps in East Turkestan.
Making comparisons to Nazi Germany and the Holocaust has long been a sensitive issue. 

Adolf Hitler and the Nazis committed one of the worst atrocities ever in human history, orchestrating a state-sponsored genocide that led to the murder of millions of Jews.

Comparing China to Nazi Germany in fact predates Hong Kong’s protests, and traces its roots back to anti-China protests in Hanoi and Tokyo in 2011 and 2012.

First use of the term "Chinazi": Vietnamese protesters showed a banner depicting the late Chinese revolutionary leader Mao Zedong and Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler to compare China to the Nazis during an anti-China rally in Hanoi, Vietnam, on Aug. 21, 2011. 

Japanese people condemned Chinazism at a rally in Tokyo in September 2012.

Writing in the Times of Israel newspaper, Deborah Fripp, president of the Teach the Shoah Foundation, noted that “a well-placed comparison to the Holocaust can be a call-to-action, can help to highlight bias and create change.”
In August, for example, an Australian lawmaker compared the West’s approach to China to France’s failure to hold back Nazi Germany. 

Hong Kong protesters see the Nazi comparisons as necessary. 

One protester who identified himself as Johnson, and who is an administrator in the public Telegram group for Sunday’s “anti-Chinazi march” said in an interview conducted over the messaging app that he understood concerns over the use of the term “Chinazi,” but that “the atrocities committed by the [Chinese Communist Party] are greater than you originally thought of.”
“Making this term ‘Chinazi’ is to send a warning to the world: if we do not stop the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), the deaths and the tragedies will probably keep happening,” he said. 

“The victims may not only be the Chinese people, the Hongkongers, the Taiwanese, but may be you. The history of German Nazi may repeat itself.”
As of today (Sept. 26), Nazi imagery was still being deployed, with material featuring swastikas, the Chinazi term, and comparisons between China and the Holocaust still being shared on Telegram groups.

Western Civilization vs. Chinese Barbarity

China watchdog reveals monstrous allegations of mass forced organ-harvesting

By Martin M. Barillas

GENEVA — A human rights group reported to the U.N. that China harvests human organs from imprisoned dissidents, especially members of the proscribed Falun Gong religious group and Uighur Muslims.
Lawyer Hamid Sabi of the London-based China Tribunal told the U.N. Human Rights Council on Tuesday that China takes skin, kidneys, lungs, and hearts from members of the persecuted groups. 

He described the atrocity of “cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people.” 

Sabi told the assembled U.N. delegates that his group has proof of the atrocities and claimed that it has evidence of China’s crimes against humanity.

“Forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, including the religious minorities of Falun Gong and Uighurs, has been committed for years throughout China on a significant scale,” Sabi said in a video published on the China Tribunal website.
Sabi told the U.N. council that China’s organ-harvesting has led to “hundreds of thousands of victims” in “one of the worst mass atrocities of this century.” 

China Tribunal did not specify how many organs have been harvested by China, nor how many victims came from each of the targeted groups. 

In June, China Tribunal published a report that found that a “very substantial number” of prisoners were “killed to order” by the Chinese government. 

The report claimed that prisoners were “cut open while still alive for their kidneys, livers, hearts, lungs, cornea and skin to be removed and turned into commodities for sale.”
“Victim for victim and death for death, cutting out the hearts and other organs from living, blameless, harmless, peaceable people constitutes one of the worst mass atrocities of this century,” Sabi said. 

He added, “Organ transplantation to save life is a scientific and social triumph, but killing the donor is criminal.”
Speaking at the council’s headquarters in Switzerland, Sabi said the U.N. and other organizations should examine China Tribunal’s findings “not only in regard to the charge of genocide, but also in regard to crimes against humanity.” 

According to Sabi, member-states of the U.N. have a “legal obligation” to act in view of the release of the tribunal’s June report that uncovered “the commission of crimes against humanity against the Falun Gong and Uighur [minorities] had been proved beyond reasonable doubt.”
Sabi said in a speech that the targeting of minority groups, such as Uighur Muslims and members of the Falun Gong religion, makes possible a charge of genocide. 

Comparing it to other instances of extermination, he said, “Victim for victim and death for death, the gassing of the Jews by the Nazis, the massacre by the Khmer Rouge or the butchery to death of the Rwanda Tutsis may not be worse” than what China is doing. 

Saib told the U.N. Human Rights Council, “It is the legal obligation of UN Member States to address this criminal conduct.”
For its part, China denies that it is harvesting organs en masse. 

However, China has admitted to harvesting organs from executed criminals but claimed that it ceased the practice in 2015, according to Reuters. 

However, China Tribunal’s report said the organs are used for medical purposes. 

It cited short wait times for organ transplants in Chinese hospitals as evidence that China engages in harvesting. 

Sir Geoffrey Nice QC, an attorney who led prosecutors in the trial of former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milošević, chaired the tribunal, which heard testimony from witnesses, medical experts, and human rights investigators. 

According to its findings, China has been extracting organs from victims for at least 20 years and continues to this day.
The report asserted that there is evidence of organ extraction among Tibetans and some Christian communities. 

More than a million mostly Muslim Uighurs are currently subjected to “re-education” in prison camps managed by the Chinese government in northwestern East Turkestan colony. 

The tribunal reported that they are “being used as a bank of organs” and subjected to regular medical testing.
Speaking at a separate event on Tuesday, Sir Geoffrey Nice said the governments of the world “can no longer avoid what it is inconvenient for them to admit.” 

Israel, Italy, Spain, and Taiwan, as well as other countries, have placed restrictions on persons wishing to travel to China for organ transplant surgery. 

The International Coalition to End Transplant Abuse in China (ETAC) charity, which founded the China Tribunal, expects that legislation will emerge in the British parliament next month to halt unethical organ tourism.

The profit motive
Concerns over organ-harvesting date back more than a decade. 

In 2006, when hundreds of thousands of members of the outlawed Falun Gong group were imprisoned, the matter was raised by foreign ministers at a China–European Union summit meeting held that year. 

This came after Canadian human rights lawyers David Matas and David Kilgour investigated the deaths of Falun Gong members who were killed despite not having been sentenced to death by any court. 

They estimate that of 60,000 transplant operations in China between 2000 and 2005, only 18,000 organ donations in that period came from official sources, which is to say from posthumous donations or from formally executed death row prisoners. 

This leaves a shortfall of some 40,000 organ donations, which Matas and Kilgour supposed may come from forced organ extraction.
The profit motive is evident in the trafficking of human body parts. 

In 2006, the China International Transplantation Network Assistance Center in Shenyang carried a list of prices for body parts wherein a kidney was listed at $62,000, a liver or heart at $130,000, and a lung at $150,000. 

Currently, according to China Tribunal, the trade surpasses $1 billion each year.