Two important points: 1. The Hong Kong protests are not a separatist movement, though they have been consistenly mischaracterized as such. 2. Any Chinese NBA fan who supports Hong Kong is not free to say so without reprecussions. That's why you only hear the pro-government line https://twitter.com/SopanDeb/status/1181053758505127936 …
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Replying to @Pinboard
Nobody uses the word separatist, but they are burning the Chinese flag, booing the Chinese anthem, singing a HK anthem, describing their movement as a revolution, and rejecting Mainland rule wholesale... If it didn't start out as separatist, it's *become* separatist now.
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Replying to @keith_ng
All your observations are true, but it's not separatist. People are pretty clear about what the demands are! There's a nationalist identity that's been awakened, but people know how to look at a map and no one except an absolute fringe is calling for independence.
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Replying to @Pinboard
What the movement *shows* it's about is as important as what it says it's about. It feels like independence was a third rail which was too dangerous to touch, so there was always lip service paid to it. But now, I'm not sure why we're still afraid to use that word.
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And more to the point, I don't think there is any doubt that Beijing is treating this as an independence movement. We are already sitting naked on that third rail.
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An analogy I use in my mind is the Solidarity movement in 1981. Any dissident who was asked said "of course Poland will stay in the Warsaw Pact no matter what". Nobody wanted to do stay, but people recognized a geopolitical reality. That's why it was never made an overt demand.
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