The problem is Beijing looks down their condescending noses at hong kong when hong kong was always a better place to live and work than beijing and always will be, this is going to get much worse, and will never get better, their will not be a light at the end of the tunnel, just chaos im afraid.

If you read the Global Times (it's much entertaining), since a little while, they worry about a "colored revolution" movement, like those that popped up in the 2000's in ex-USSR satellite states like Georgia or Ukraine. They go on about how it can not work and how silly those democracy & rule-of-the-law activist are. Other medias (South Morning Post for example) also mention this kind of things, with a reported beaten here, an activist breaking stuffs there. Not sure if it's a campaign to scare people and demonize any activist, even the quiet ones, or a string of feces hitting the proverbial fan.

I just hope Hong Kong will have better support from the West than what the UK did when China recently visited. 

Nothing to worry about. It's just integration going full steam.....

This topic is seriously depressing me at the moment.

Hong Kong has been home to amongst the brightest, most independent, educated, civilised, sophisticated, self-aware, highly informed people in the world. It has enjoyed constitutional law, independent, informed and objective media, an excellent standard of education, and all the advantages of being an unrestricted center of commerce and culture, run by competent, switched-on, forward-thinking people.

All of which Beijing knows, so they have to take it away. They want a nation of dull-eyed, incompetent, ignorant, self-satisfied, morally inert morons, and will feel no sense of shame in reducing the most modern, civilised and cosmopolitan part of China to the same status. Letting other people have good things isn't what they do.

Journalists and editors of independent papers being attacked in public by hired thugs. Publishers being blackmailed and writers arrested and detained. Beijing initiating massive cyber attacks to stop its own people from holding referendums, stating that "rule of law" is a threat to security, and that the justice system should not protect the people, but be a tool for the government.

Does any mainland Chinese person ever wonder what the end goal of Communism is? When reading about the CCP's stance on Hong Kong, do any of them have the slightest glimmer of awareness that maybe their government doesn't have the people's best interests at heart?  .... No?

God damn it.

The most glaring thing I see is that if Beijing goes heavy handed on Hong Kong. That might be the nail in the coffin so to speak in reconciling with Taiwan. Also Hong Kongers can and will get the hell out of dodge if it comes to that. That would leave Beijing with a hollow shell if the best and brightest start packing up and moving.

A number of Hongkers already left definitely to the US, Canada, UK or else before the handover in 1997, more are leaving since them, the only Hongkers who will stay are the ones who are too poor to emigrate and the ultra-rich who couldn't care less about the city and only see it as an opportunity to build more and more high rises.

But I doubt that there will ever be any uprising against Beijing.

A Chinese friend of mine and I talked about this once. He said that a lot of Hong Kong’s electricity is supplied by the mainland and that they would simply shut it off if worse came to worse. I have no idea if this is true, but the man is pretty knowledgeable. Can anyone confirm this as fact or is it fiction?

People get the government they deserve they say, and Beijing knows this. Most mainlanders seem happy enough with a Fascist dictatorship as long as they can buy an apartment or two.

Hong Kongers are,not happy about that, they have already tasted freedom, and are as such not keen on having all the crap that's going on in China forced on them. Problem is of course, the relative size of these two, China can use force towards Hong Kong and the West will sit quiet, the Chinese economy will take a hit but should bounce back. I fear this might be a small price to pay in the eyes of the CCP to show who's boss.

However China is still dependant on HK for FDI and finance markets so I can't see them being too willing to put the nail in the coffin quite yet. I see the development of Shanghai as a finance center as part of that.

All in all the situation in HK is bad, and the future looks worse. The only good thing I can see, globally, not for HK is that all the smart and ambitious HK'ers will move to the West and help improve the economy there.

As long as Beijing will need its own little tax haven, and they will for a very long time, Hong Kong will be kinda safe.

Yeah yeah HKers can play democracy as much as they want as long as it stays in mouths and newspaper. Let'em light candles, who cares, they'll never make it into the news of their target audience. The chance of Hong Kong is that Beijing is just too dumb and too much a facewhore to operate a subtle take over people won't see coming. One thing they'll never learn from the US.

As much as I like Hong Kong, you got to admit it's not really hard to have a super functional system with efficient public services when you are de facto Asia's money laundry facility.

...Especially since they're not as functional as you see them to be. Ever wondered why housing is so expensive? Always thought this is because of lack of space? Think again, it's mainly because locals living on social welfare illegally re-rent the apartment they got for free. Massive fraud that has become the standard for housing market. Granted it would be expensive anyway, but my point is, rename them like you want, they're still Cantonese at heart. With British characteristics but for how long anyway. The Hong Kong middle class doesn't live too well, it's just unusual for many of us to see Chinese acting like modern citizens of something so we tend to get a little emphatic.

China has to focus on the neighboring countries for the time being...

For now it has its eyes on the waters only..maybe later it will shift its attention towards land..

HK still serves a really valuable function for the mainland because you can move money around and contracts are enforceable. You talk to tons of business owners (big and small) here they take in all revenue to their HK subsidiary and then dole out money to mainland factories on an as-needed basis. Removes the problem of profit repatriation and gives you a little more peace of mind.

Hong Kong is something that China really has going for it in terms of manufacturing...a really easy place to set up shop that also has reliable institutions. Bangladesh doesn't have that, nor indonesia, malaysia, vietnam etc.

If China compromises that, they're only hurting themselves. China isn't the lowest cost anymore, what they have going for them is that they have good freight transportation network, good port facilities, steady electricity and...Hong Kong to safely handle the financial end of things. If i'm sourcing stuff there's really no reason to stay in China if one of those things goes away. So let's hope they don't break a system that works pretty well for everyone. HK lets them have it both ways.

a bit of reading

http://chinadailymail.com/2014/06/24/hong-kong-has-nothing-to-learn-from...

the original Fortune article 

http://archive.fortune.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1995/06/26/...

It seems like Beijing tolerates HK's protests and criticisms as long as it seems like it's just token effort... as long as Hong Kong people look down on mainlanders and insist that they're separate and different the government has the ammunition they need to discredit these movements among mainland Chinese- Chinese people won't hear about  protests and criticisms and think that the HK people have a point- they'll think 'f***king Hong Kongers are at it again' 

I'm not sure... I'm not sure how stupid the CCP and Beijing really can be. Unfortunately, I think the answer is 'really stupid'... after all, they've been pushing for war with Vietnam and Japan... wouldn't surprise me if they're stupid enough to stamp down on HK - just because they can, and they want to show how 'powerful' they are! I also think they're stupid enough to spite themselves this much - to lose the biggest and best thing they've got going for them... just to show off, and to control something.

And, as a way to show the west that they don't care what anybody else thinks, they're still going to do what they choose to do.

Taiwan is watching all of this closely with great interest.  Beijing wants to sign a "one country, two system" pact with them also.  If they screw this up, there will be two fires to put out domestically.  It really looks like the CCP had dug a deep whole for itself. They can't seem to understand that freedom, once given, is very hard to snatch away again. Now they are opposed on multiple fronts. It's neighbors are unhappy with them, it's territories are unrest, some even attacking them.  I can't really see a good outcome for this regime.  Not that I'm on anyone's side accept the Chinese people.  It's just I can't see the logic in their politics.  More and more, I'm convinced this is a plane without a pilot.

Every year the tensions seem to increase and Hong Kongers and Big Red each keep pushing the envelope.  It will eventually boil down to some ultimatum and when face is involved, there will be some martial law action taken and a massacre would be inevitable as Hong Kong people will NEVER go backwards. They are too proud and intelligent to appease the control freaks.

The current regime seems very bullish.

They've managed to alienate themselves from almost everybody in a very short space of time.

Until recently China was a vague place far far away.  But not now.  Now it's in everybody's face.

They clearly have a plan....but what's their plan?  To have all the countries of the world look on them as a powerful entity...a bully?  Or just as a (whinging, whining, pathetic) joke?  What?

Live Blog from todays protest

http://answers.echinacities.com/question/am-i-only-one-worrying-about-po...

Let's hope Hong Kong sends a clear message to the world that it doesn't like the childish games Beijing plays.