Comments by "canto_v12" (@canto_v12) on "China’s Rebel City: The Hong Kong Protests" video.

  1.  @icebreaka1969  Hong Kong previously sourced from the UK and the US. I believe they currently buy from a mainland Chinese supplier because the other two have suspended sales for political reasons.
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  2. He wanted a fight and I'm glad he was filmed being the scummy journalist that he is. Karma will bite him.
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  3. The same tear gas suppliers for police forces worldwide. There aren't that many.
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  4. In Hong Kong, live rounds were never used against protesters. All 3 incidents were in response to assault and ambush.
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  5. As a HKer I hope this helped you understand the complex problems Hong Kong faces, and refrain from the hateful stances propagated on social media--and I trust that your next visit will be a more pleasant one. Please visit again when things have calmed down, HK is really a great place and will remain so.
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  6. The brave ones were the extradition bill protesters. Most of them went home when the extradition bill was cancelled. The dumb ones were those who didn’t want to stop after that win.
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  7. Is that what CSA leaders shouted as they attempted to unilaterally secede from the US so they could keep their slaves?
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  8.  @walx274  SCMP is a privately owned media outlet with a diverse editorial staff (the chief editor is Tibetan). I mean you just have to take it for what it is, like any other media. They offered the footage, interviewed people from various perspectives, I'm not sure what else you would ask for. Also, FWIW, media directly controlled by any national government is clearly marked by YouTube.
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  9. Yes, super shady journalist. If he doesn't get arrested for aiding and abetting an assault, I hope his agency at least fired him.
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  10. Jimmy Sham sounds emotionally unstable. On one hand he acknowledges that we all must put down our hatred to move forward, but ten seconds later he says he cannot let go of his hatred. That lack of maturity makes him unfit to lead or represent anybody.
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  11.  @demxdevil5774  I think the cops could do a little more PR to admit that some of their officers acted out of line, and it won't hurt their image. Hong Kong people in general are too uppity and refuse to look in the mirror.
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  12. Where is the brutality? All I see is protesters complaining about brutality. Dozens of alleged “victims” refused to identify themselves and one even sued to make her hospital records private, while claiming she was blinded. You can’t just make up the existence of victims.
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  13.  @nanaa9074  Did you even watch the video?
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  14.  @sherlockholmes8105  ironically Taiwan doesn’t want the murderer. Accepting the murderer’s extradition for trial would mean tacitly acknowledging Hong Kong’s law enforcement and justice systems, and the current administration in Taiwan spent all of 2019 telling its voters that Hong Kong is no longer a place of laws.
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  15. It proves the point that journalists are not under threat and the cops give them a LOT of room. But some of them are disguised rioters with the goal of provoking an "assault on press freedom." The youngest "journalist" was found to be 13.
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  16. Just look at his eyes.
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  17.  @johntakiya8015  about 20 have been killed in unrest in the US since the Floyd protests began. Hong Kong’s death toll is 0.
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  18. It's been 2 years now and zero officer-involved fatalities in Hong Kong. Not quite the same thing as the genocide of 6 million people.
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  19. Yeah that was some pretty poor wording. Should be "the government has lost the ability to communicate with the people."
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  20.  @rheejin9987  I think the fervent supporters of the protest movement shout the loudest online. Sadly, that's how social media works, boxing us all into echo chambers. People are much more calm and realistic in real life, and that's how we get things done. As for me, I keep my social media quiet about the unrest in Hong Kong. It's for my own sanity. Hong Kong will heal, we will move on and the people in power will either help fix HK, or get voted out.
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  21. Exactly. Congratulations rioters, you wanted attention, you got it!!!
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  22.  @MrEvan1932  I think politicians in most countries have a hard time admitting their mistakes.
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  23. It's becoming more and more toxic and social media is fanning the flames. Colonial Hong Kong was a dictatorship until the early 1990s, I didn't see anyone riot against the UK. The root cause of civil unrest is economic inequality.
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  24.  @kxi4878  Yup, HK American here and I'm so sick of the unrest. They literally hijacked a legitimate protest (the extradition law is long gone, credit goes to the peaceful protests) to express their own hatred against China, and look what they got in return. New national security laws written just for people who hate their own country, congratulations!! Just because they're vocal on social media doesn't mean that they represent all of us normal people.
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  25.  @bobshranty2806  Whether a government is "sufficiently representative" is not for an individual citizen to judge and apply as a criterion for mounting an insurrection. For what it's worth, the people who invaded the Capitol also felt underrepresented.
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  26. The police were all hands on deck for a riot going on in Central (literally the other side of Hong Kong). That’s why the New Territories divisions, where this brawl occurred, had no manpower and the call centre was overwhelmed. Hope that provides some useful context as to why the cops showed up late. Yeah everyone is shouting conspiracy but you would have to have evidence to prove that, and they did end up catching quite a few of the gang members later on.
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  27.  @janejung7439  I can kind of understand your sympathy, but I still don't think his feelings are directed at the correct target and in the correct manner. He has a feeling of hatred against the cops, who by definition enforce the laws as written. Cops have no power to change the laws--they are just the most convenient target because they are easily found on the streets.
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  28.  @crispinkane5231  another Hong Konger here. Please protest peacefully next time and I will defend your right to do so. I don’t want your riots and your assaults and your threats and your “yellow/blue shops.” Your violence is what doomed your movement, and you took from us the same freedoms that you said you were trying to defend.
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  29.  @zhaviator  The rioting kids desperately want someone else to shoot some guns for them. They're too scared of the cops it's actually funny in a pitiful way. The only things they'll "revolt" with are sticks, bricks and keyboards.
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  30.  @notmatt964  there is a lot of conspiracy theory going on amongst the protesters, but they have not been able to name a single death at a protest event in over 1 year of unrest. I find it, honestly, not credible.
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  31. Hats off to you sir. You exercised the appropriate analytical methods to separate the original goal of the peaceful protests, and the violence that escalated after the government actually CONCEDED and killed the bill. Cheers, A Hong Kong-American
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  32. "Beating and incarcerating hundreds of people for protesting peacefully" is a story sold by the riots to justify their rioting. This did not really happen in Hong Kong if you actually kept up with the daily happenings. Every "protester" arrested will claim that he or she was just passing by, or rallying peacefully. Then those caught on video get nailed with assault or rioting charges. You could say I made all this up, but that wouldn't explain why so many of them plead guilty.
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  33. That the 100-ish village mobsters did not get prosecuted is an absolute scam perpetrated by the protest movement to make the justice system look bad. Over the course of nearly a year after that incident, 60+ of the village gangs were prosecuted and at least 8 convicted—keep in mind that like the protesters, it’s impossible to build the evidence to convict every one of the people that appeared that night, with irrefutable evidence of an actual crime. A conviction rate of about 10% for an event of mass disorder sounds about right for a developed society with capable law enforcement and an effective judiciary. Similarly, I would estimate that about 10% of the Hong Kong rioters ever got caught.
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  34.  @educateyourself3872  I am very familiar with the laws as I read the entire document. Trial outside of Hong Kong is for when Hong Kong’s justice system has been compromised or does not have jurisdiction over things like classified military information. So far, not a single Hong Konger has been moved outside of Hong Kong for trial.
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  35. Commander Dover was responding to the insane propagation of conspiracy theories that the cops killed thousands of youth protesters. That is the level of bullsh*t that we have to deal with as Hong Kongers. An inept government with terrible outreach skills, a group of extreme right wing fascist rioters and several big media bullsh*tters propagating their conspiracy theories for cheap political points. Nobody is missing a family member, friend or classmate, yet in 2019 my Facebook feed was inundated with nameless “missing” people and random copy-paste photos. It’s an utter sh*tshow from all sides.
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  36.  @ares6054  I watched the videos of the riot cops. They had a tough situation and didn’t act perfectly. But 1.5 years without a single death is a pretty decent record in my book. If you were unjustly hurt in a peaceful protest, please hire a lawyer and sue. Most of these kids were rioting and resisting arrest.
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  37.  @lmlmlmz  I'm in full agreement. There's something wrong with your movement when half of the protesters are minors and some of them as young as eleven, same with these underage "freelance journalists" who are only interested in spinning propaganda and not neutral reporting.
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  38. Are you saying Hong Kong handled it the same way? Because I didn't see any tanks or even any deaths here...
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  39. People will see what they want to see. That includes those who lived through this in HK. All that matters is that society is no longer in chaos and people, including the government, have a new chance to fix the deep, historic problems that led Hong Kong to such frustrations. Hong Kong is not a simple “somebody built it and somebody else wrecked it.” That’s just the convenient story sold by those with bias and a short term understanding of history. The way Hong Kong was managed for the past half century, both under Britain and under China, plus external changes in the world and Hong Kong’s failure to adapt to them, all added up to the recent unrest.
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  40.  @NomSauce  Thank you, as a Hong Konger, it heartens me when someone gets the complexity and the exploitation that has been forced into the narrative. Yes, without Covid, PROTEST ALL YOU WANT peacefully about even the most ridiculous issues. That is a universal human right. But do not riot, do not threaten those of us who don't want to participate, and do not tuck tail and cry freedom when we call the cops on you. If you need violence to shore up your support, it's because your platform is not appealing enough. You failed to sell your movement to us, so stop forcing us to be in it.
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  41. I for one am excited to return to Hong Kong. It’s important to remember that the biggest sour grapes (the remnants of the defeated movement) are the most vocal. The rest of us are burdened with cleaning up their mess like grown-ups do.
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  42.  @Cursed_Mark  I don't want to talk about Xinjiang because 1) I am not knowledgeable about the subject, and 2) it's beyond the scope of this documentary.
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  43.  @Cursed_Mark  Like I said: You want to talk Xinjiang, I am not the right opponent and this is not even the right venue. This is a documentary about Hong Kong.
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  44.  @Drocoh  All I'm suggesting is that phrase is overused and generally not applicable in peacetime. Even in America, there are countless examples in daily life where we give up freedom for security.
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  45. ^this +100. The alarmist rhetoric over Hong Kong is honestly tiring.
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  46.  @shivtime3077  I'm super at debunking your BS.
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  47.  @shivtime3077  Semi-autonomy, fixed that for ya :)
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  48. They did drop the law, however. That did not placate the unrest because the goalposts were moved.
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  49.  @Denis-Maldonado  that is just poor governance and a risk of mutiny by the police. Human rights are important, but without law and order those rights will never be safe.
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  50. @CHU Yan Yick Lucas朱恩懌 Which police officer sounds like a psychopath? Because the police interviewed in here sound much more stable and rational than Jimmy Sham and that other guy with the altered voice.
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  51. @Finlay Holland It's a special territory with a nearly fully autonomous government and closed borders. In other words, a very different society from the rest of China, yet it's also a part of China since 1997.
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  52.  @psycorus3236  I'm not knowledgeable about affairs in Xinjiang, and it's not really applicable to the issues in Hong Kong.
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  53.  Cake yummy  Bruh, nobody has "gone missing" in Hong Kong.
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  54.  Cake yummy  You probably missed the part where they weren't in trouble for selling books in Hong Kong, but for mailing banned books into mainland China. One moved to Taiwan, three voluntarily returned to mainland China (all recorded on camera in case you don't believe me) after closing their cases in Hong Kong. The other guy, Gui Minhai, is not really a HKer anyway. You can still find those books in Hong Kong if that's the kind of stuff you're into.
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  55. As long as we remember that not all Hong Kongers think alike.
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  56.  @pinoyfudanshiii5523  HK is a place where both occur in parallel. And that is why it's so polarised. Also, the protesters put too much trust in sensationalised journalism, blindly believing the latest horrible rumour that "cops killed 30 people last night."
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  57.  @yuty0428  demonstrably false by reviewing the copious amounts of protest footage available on YouTube. The vast majority of violent clashes are when police order a gathering to disperse, and the crowds ignored the repeated warnings.
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  58.  @gojira4036  Nobody is getting killed, you might want to look at how things are going in Myanmar though. People are getting killed there.
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  59.  @roycecx3335  Yeah you're right. It's simply a call to war, which was a price the American colonies were willing to pay for their independence.
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  60. You have to first demonstrate an injustice in order to fight for justice.
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  61. And in Hong Kong we were scared to comment against the protesters of 2019, for fear of retaliatory assault. The rioters literally took away the very freedoms that they claim China took and we're glad to have them back.
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  62. I would say both generations have something to learn. The parents and the blue ribbons must understand that HK has some very serious societal problems. The poor government structure and the unbalanced political reform need to be addressed. The entire economic model and housing policy are out of date. We can never go back to the economic growth of the 1980s just by shipping cheap Chinese products--China has its own port cities now and their products today are not even that cheap. At the same time, the youth and the yellow ribbons must understand that like it or not, HK's destiny is with China and not any other country. Stability will breed the right conditions for favourable constitutional reform--Beijing will be much more receptive to HK's needs (including political reform) when HK is stable and peaceful. China is a big country and will NOT be threatened by one angry city--that's not a political statement, that is cold hard reality.
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  63.  @VWYL900802  you use the term “domestic violence” as if the Chinese army ever physically harmed a Hong Konger. As for the “abusive relationship,” we’ll agree to disagree. I view HK’s problems as mostly local and related to an outdated government structure that came from the colonial era and is no longer capable of keeping up with the city’s problems. The executive-led model worked in the 1970s when people were poor, but is tone-deaf in the 21st century when people are affluent and educated.
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  64. I don't want to live in an armed society, where everybody has a tool to end the life of anyone they don't like. No thanks, you can build that gun-loving utopia of yours somewhere very, very remote.
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  65. You can’t call anything with no deaths a “massacre”…
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  66. My peeps in HK are fine, the Falun Gong stand at my local subway station is still there. But hey, the 2019 movement has achieved literally nothing for Hong Kong--can't be surprised that they are still salty.
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  67. In the end if you're a grown-@$$ person, you need to be responsible for your actions, even if you were misled. That's why education is so important. I can see the hypocrisy of the rioters from 6000 miles away.
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  68.  @leonhamburg8672  OK, and what does all that have to do with Hong Kong? Are you saying that there are death camps in Hong Kong?
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  69. You wouldn’t have been pursued, unless you willingly participated in the unrest. I can say this as somebody who still frequents Hong Kong. The cops are fine as long as we let them do their jobs, as in our own countries. Don’t stress them out with a year of mass unrest and they’re usually very nice folks.
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  70. I think SCMP's editors know that they will face threats if they portray the unrest too negatively. Right now it's about a delicate balance because HK is so polarised. I know their editor-in-chief is a protest critic, and he has gotten threats in the past year.
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  71. It's only a catch phrase that makes them think they're cool, like referring to the train system as 黨鐵。Completely baseless allegation, but they love it. No meaning or substance whatsoever, just like everything else those rioters do.
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  72. I support all peaceful protest. In fact they got what they wanted, originally. I stopped supporting this movement when they refused to renounce violence, and when they began to try to tell us where we can eat and buy things. Then they tried to threaten us for critiquing some of their poor behaviour. They became the very enemy that they claimed to fight against--dictatorship.
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  73.  @truth4293  they are paid decently. Not lavishly. Same as many other countries.
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  74. Interviewing protesters is not against the law.
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  75. True. Unfortunately, the protesters began to dress as “neutral” people like paramedics and journalists, and using those disguises to obstruct the cops. This led to the police being more aggressive and demanding even towards those neutral parties. Fortunately for neutral parties, this trick of disguising did not last very long as the protesters made a huge strategic error in November of 2019, losing most of their violent rioting members to police custody in a poorly planned resupply run at several university campuses. There were no more significant violent riots afterwards.
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  76. It'll get better. Had to skip my annual trip because of Covid but I will probably be going again next year.
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  77.  @nerd2544  Yep it's a really sh*tty tale all around. Oh well, they bear the brunt of the consequences and the rest of us move on.
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  78. There's a bit of language barrier here. "Control the narrative" is an inaccurate term used to express the situation that fake news and exaggerations got disproportionate airtime during the height of the unrest. I can personally attest to this, because my FB feed blew up with some pretty ridiculous "news" stories, many written with the professionalism of a sixth grader.
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  79. Society always loses when violence rules.
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  80. I'm about to finally head back to this "disgusting" city you are referring to. Thanks for the love; do consider visiting someday. It's a great place despite the ups and downs.
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  81.  @oldjose9110  What a freakin' nutcase. I don't want him representing me.
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  82. Mass graves and mass cremation are the quickest ways to get rid of dead bodies. So, if you don't see either happening in China with your multitude of earth observation and military spy satellites, then it probably isn't happening.
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  83.  Cake yummy  they returned, and then went back to the mainland again, out of their own free will, after cancelling their missing persons cases at the police station in Hong Kong. It’s all on video. I can only suspect that they had questionable business in the mainland that they can’t let go of. They won’t tell us Hong Kongers what it is so who are we to care about their faraway troubles?
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  84.  Cake yummy  I think you've got me mixed up. I'm a HK-American in California. I would be the last person to tell you I'm interested in China's model of governance, my only goal is to dispel myths about the unrest in Hong Kong which are frustrating and embarrassing.
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  85.  Cake yummy  my take is, the protesters will always claim to represent “the people.” We have that problem here in America too.
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  86.  Cake yummy  You, and anyone in Hong Kong, are certainly well within your right to support peaceful protest.
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  87.  @giftzwerg7345  Need to differentiate between a "protest" and an outright "assault." Live rounds were NEVER used on peaceful protests, that would be ridiculous. Live rounds were used in 3 separate incidents during the 2019 unrest. All three were specific incidents of assault with weapons, or life-threatening ambush on officers. All 3 incidents are widely viewable on YouTube for your verification.
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  88.  @terrified057t4  they had to draft other departments into the riot teams because of the scale of unrest. All that was left in the stations were skeleton crews who could not abandon their posts.
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  89.  @juwzgaming2539  In Hong Kong that's true too, but you can't maintain that in a violent city-wide emergency. In hindsight they should have lessened the response to the riot at Central, so that other districts would not have run out of staff like what happened in Yuen Long.
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  90.  @LivingLonger  "Freedom" is subjective and its definition changes between countries and cultures.
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  91. As usual, the media amplifies and sensationalises its coverage for views.
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  92. Yes, the police can shoot an 18y boy whose group ambushed the cops with metal pipes. The boy was lucky not to end up in the morgue. It’s all on video.
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  93. It’s also important to note that the government made concessions including the single demand of the original protests: cancel the extradition bill. It did not quiet the movement and instead emboldened the violent factions. That’s why it spiralled into a total sh*tshow.
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  94. I think Beijing struggled to understand this protest movement, but they're getting better at understanding what really happened. They say some provocative things (as their diplomats are known to do), but their actions have been very restrained. Some mainland officials were skeptical of the extradition bill and Beijing should have advised against it, but we can't turn back time so here we are.
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  95. I generally agree, but only 1 innocent person has been killed by rioters. Many others have been injured though.
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  96.  @jp9403  Of course, nobody wants to have their lives controlled. I find myself feeling no less free in Hong Kong than in other countries, including the US.
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  97.  @Cursed_Mark  When a cop asks you questions, you answer. You don't run, especially at a scene of civil unrest. As a Californian, she got exactly what she asked for by legal standards and law enforcement procedures.
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  98.  @Cursed_Mark  Why don't we share how we would act then. Do you run from a cop if you haven't committed a crime? I don't, I answer the questions asked of me, and if they don't want to let me go, I lawyer up.
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  99.  @Cursed_Mark  At some point a particular tactic will get played out and no longer be effective. Extradition bill: win. District Councils: win. They kept going, and it backfired. Now they got the NSLs. All I can say is, it's better to quit when you're winning.
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  100. @Herbert Lye I think for a specific issue, a limited amount of rioting enhances the effect of a protest. But for this crowd, they got it all wrong. The protests WON last year by scuttling the Extradition Amendments. They made a huge mistake by expanding their demands and becoming more violent. By constantly moving their goalposts and eventually developing hate for their own country as a recurring theme, they guaranteed their eventual loss of widespread support.
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  101.  @isaacwilliams2147  refining the extradition law would have made sense in an ideal world, but there wasn’t an opportunity to change the protest narrative in the short window before the violence escalated into full-on rioting. By the time the riots went mad, social media was already full of outlandish myths like “cops killed 6000 protesters” and the protesters exploited these fabrications to make the cops look bad (and recruit more young, gullible rioters). The sheer noise and hatred quickly made reasonable compromise nearly impossible.
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  102.  @SamS-fq5yw  ^^ found the rioter!
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  103. Only on a very small scale. Currently any gathering is prohibited due to Covid-19, but also most of the student rioters were caught in the college campus incidents a year ago.
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  104.  @vertie2090  No, HK has been mostly free of tear gas since the end of 2019. The bulk of the violent radicals were captured when they trapped themselves inside two college campuses in late 2019. Covid-19 also put a damper on protests as all gatherings have been prohibited since around March--the only significant protest event this year was on the handover anniversary on 7/1/2020. Minor vandalism such as graffiti can still be seen popping up, but the days of violent destruction and arson on "non-supportive businesses" are gone.
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  105. It's a reference to the protesters' own "be water" terminology, a quote from Bruce Lee as someone else already said. They failed to "be water" when they trapped themselves inside school campuses to stock up on Molotovs.
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  106. Rioter: "Are you a Communist?"
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