Hong Kong, China, and The Silencing of Protestors


Image result for hong kong protests

Image result for hong kong protests
For over 13 weeks, massive protests have raged in the streets of Hong Kong. Demonstrators and police have clashed with shouts and riot shields, and the growing unrest between the people their government and China is close to boiling over.  The protestors, showing up in throngs of millions, demand two things from Hong Kong's government officials: one, that they cement their government into that of a democracy, a system that has hung in the balance since Britain released control of it in 1997; and two, that their government hold the past and present police officers who have used brutal force against the largely peaceful demonstrators.  These protests are occurring now because of the deal Britain made with China when they let go of Hong Kong, and that was that China would leave Hong Kong alone for at least 50 years.  China technically owns Hong Kong, but there are two governments and two peoples residing in the nation.  China, however, has started to tighten its grip on the city-state, and the inhabitants of Hong Kong do not appreciate that.  This led to the riots, and the riots led to "Chief Executive" of Hong Kong, Carrie Lamb, to impose emergency powers (which is a less-hostile term for martial law). 

 From my point of view, this is where the Media and free speech issues arise, as, according to Bloomberg journalist Shelly Banjo in her article “How Hong Kong Protests Could Lead to Internet Cut Off," these emergency powers Lamb has "covers 'the control and suppression of publications, writings, maps, plans, photographs, communications and means of communication.'"  In a sense, the leaders of Hong Kong could silence as many people as they wanted, which is a serious red flag when it comes to true democracy as I see it.  Overall, I think that Chief Executive Lamb faces an impossible task.  The right thing, from my perspective, would be to fully accept democracy as the governing system of Hong Kong and to discipline the police officers who have abused the citizens protesting for their rights.  But, doing so would invoke the wrath of the Chinese government, who does not have a very good history of tolerating people who stand up to them.  The other option would be to silence the people and try to forge her own path.  This, I believe, would lead to increased anger and distrust from her citizens, and would also start a slippery slope of conforming to the Chinese communist way of government.  Carrie Lamb is stuck in a very tight space in which to find a true solution, and the walls are slowly closing in.


Article by Shelly Banjo:  https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-30/how-hong-kong-protests-could-lead-to-internet-cut-off-quicktake   
   

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Whistleblowers: The Hard Part of "Freedom of Speech"

Image
For the past couple months, and really the last three years but this is just the newest thing, the mainstream news outlets have been showing 24 hour coverage of the Trump-Ukraine hearings.  This started when an unnamed whistleblower, now known but not confirmed as Eric Ciaramella, leaked information regarding President Trump and a conversation he had with representatives from Ukraine.  This sparked the latest in a long line of impeachment queries that have been launched against Trump since even before he was sworn in as president; and, as the evidence has been flushed out, it now seems that Ciaramella never had any firsthand knowledge of the claimed incident.  While this is a bad example, it is an example nonetheless of whistleblowing: the act of alerting the masses and news media of wrongdoing by an official or their administration.  Chelsea Maning, Edward Snowden, and Daniel Ellsberg are names that generally come to mind when people talk about whistleblowing.  These are people
Read more

The Rise of the Computer as a Household Object

Image
  For class this past week, we were divided up into groups and each presented on a form of technology that has changed or helped progress communication.  I chose the Personal Computer.  As I researched all the history of the personal computer, I was reminded how far we've come in the advancement of technology over the past half a century.  People from my generation, myself included, take the fact that we have access to computers and the internet whenever we want it for granted, and doing this research presentation really reminded me of that.  Without going into a full history of the PC, it started out as a glorified calculator.  The idea of a machine   that could send messages, play games, or even just have a color screen was foreign to early PC developers.  It came in pieces that you had to assemble yourself, and when it was complete, it looked like a pile of thrown together parts when compared to todays computers.  But, in a day and age when computers normally took up an
Read more

The Radical Idea of a Court By The People, For The People

Image
  As we have talked about the founding of our nation, and especially our form of government, it has further astounded me that the Founding Fathers had enough foresight to form the government in the way they did.  Three separate branches, keeping each other in check, all getting their power to operate from the people, was an idea the world had never heard of before.  One of the aspects that I did not know much about was the supreme court.  The two videos we watched for class that are linked below really explained the courts in simple ways and had one main theme: the judges are Americans just like the rest of us, and they get their power from the people in the same way that the other two branches do.  When talking about the history of the supreme court, the fact that the courts receive their power from "public faith," as the video puts it, is possibly the most radical idea to come from the Founding Fathers.  A people who decides their own laws, and petitions the court to
Read more