Notice how there is next to no discussion about material conditions before and after China's tightened grip on HK other than a few people saying that basically nothing has changed and that the city is still perfectly fine for most people other than covid annoyances that exist basically everywhere now.
Also Americans have a weird amount of fixation on national flags, anthems, etc. I can guarantee you other than weird nationalist freaks next to no one else cares about political symbols this fucking much
I think partial culpability for the modern flag-worshipping in the US can be traced back to the Surge, when the US was planning on massively increasing troop size in Afghanistan and Iraq; as part of it, the military went waaay out of their way to force patriotism (particularly things like the anthem) into every place they could in an effort to drive recruitment and positive image, such as having the national anthem performed at sporting events, driving media coverage, massive increase in advertisements for military itself, and so on
It was definitely a thing before, but it really went insane after that
there isn't even less freedoms unless you consider working for a US funded institution to overthrow the CPC (while literally in China) a freedom
Even the guy explaining that Chinese people are satisfied with Xi is couching it in "there's no Democracy" BS. 70% of Chinese people describe their country as democratic, compared to about 50% of Americans.
These people unironically believe that the ideal democracy is one where everybody is mad at the government all the time because that means that neither "side" (as in, left and right-leaning people) is satisfied at the expense of the other. But this literally only works if you believe that the wealthy are part of regular society with the same interests and frustrations and concerns as the rest of us, instead of being above it and dictating almost everything - and they are pretty happy with the current state of things at the expense of 99.9% of people on this planet (and also the continued existence of advanced human civilization with bountiful ecology and a climate within tolerable limits).
imagine china taking over your city and not even getting a glorious people's revolution of affordable housing and working class power and instead you just have to continue to exist in this modern banal hellscape we've all grown accustomed to
a damning indictment of china if we are being honest
Didn't the Hong Kong Assembly recently decide to demolish golf courses in order to build public housing, and every developer there had to just sit down quietly and take it?
I think I remember reading that it caused a schism in the protest moment, since a lot of ordinary hong kongers are getting sqeezed by extreme rents, but they are also wary of saying anything that can be interpreted as a praise towards the mainland.
