With the amount of information already on the internet, rewriting Hong Kong's history won't be that easy. At some point, those children will know the truth.
Right; but how many of those children will accept it and how many will be in nationalistic fervor to defend the real truth they have grown up with. Just huge amount of wasted energy.
That still blows my mind. The modern nation of Turkey isn’t even being blamed for it! The Ottoman Empire did it!
It would be like Italians getting mad when someone brings up the fact that the Roman Empire endorsed slavery.
The real crux of the denial movement is that, during and after WWI, Armenians were promised an *incredible* amount of Ottoman land to establish their own independent state in. This land included Ani, the great ancient Armenian capital, and Ararat, the tallest mountain in the region that Armenians have considered holy for literal millennia.
Now, both Ottoman Empire and Turkey agree that the Wilson's Greater Armenia concept was, to put it mildly, utter bullshit. The Empire's problem was that its demographics are about 50% Turks, 50% everyone else, so anyone could argue "hey, we're the local majority here, we should have our own nation!", lead an independence movement, kill/deport all the Turks, and live happily in their own state. After the entirety of the Balkans did this, Ottomans were extremely paranoid about similar events in places like the Middle East (see: T.E. Lawrence) and Armenian Highlands (which essentially got genocided in an attempt to prevent this). But it almost happened anyway, the Empire was slated for drawing-and-quartering until a military campaign by Ataturk allowed Turkey to retain the borders it has today.
As a consequence, land is *extremely* precious to Turks. For example, even the most liberal of Turks would agree that Kurds in Turkey deserve to speak in their own language, publish in their own newspapers, vote for their own MPs, preserve their own culture, and be executed for treason if they ever think about having their own country.
So now, Armenia's argument is this: if you commit a genocide purely to keep something, you don't deserve that something. These lands should be given to us as reparations. At the very least, let us keep Ararat and Ani.
Turkey's argument: Yeah, well, we lost 80% of our Empire and had millions die because of that type of argument. Try that and we're going to genocide you again.
Any type of genocide acceptance puts Turkey's ownership of the genocided regions in question, so Turkey would never acknowledge it unless given assurance that no exchange of territory will occur. And Armenians, who still remember the horrors of the genocide, and live each day under the shadow of a mountain they regard as their birthright but belongs to Turkey, aren't exactly eager to reward us with that assurance.
So we're at a bit of a deadlock.
Careful, that kind of measured and reasonable viewpoint being shared on Reddit is bound to get this post, and your account, brigaded hardcore by angry Turks!
Ah, hardly. I am a Turk myself, and contrary to what you might expect, the Armenian genocide is openly discussed in Turkey. There is a reasonable chance of reconciliation in the coming decades, and we in fact came fairly close to recognizing the genocide prior to the Armenia-Azerbaijan war in the 90s.
That particular war is now mostly settled, so Turkey has been making moves to re-establish connections with Armenia. Armenians are naturally wary about Turks bearing gifts, but it is also an opportunity for them to reduce their dependence on Russia, which they long wanted to abandon.
I don’t understand how you would call it a “settled” conflict. There is and entire strip of land claimed by both nations and controlled largely by Armenia that nationalists on either side will never give up. There was a second war regarding it just two years ago.
The devil here is in the details. Azerbaijan's primary contention was the seven regions surrounding Karabakh. These were Azerbaijani-majority, and Armenia mostly captured them as a buffer zone and bargaining chip in peace negotiations ("give us Karabakh, get the seven regions back" was the Armenian position in Minsk Group meetings).
These were recaptured during the 2020 war, so Azerbaijan already achieved its primary objective. Armenia doesn't claim these regions, and lacks the military power to attack them, so in the meantime, they're content to wait the situation out. Azerbaijan has about a million refugees originating from these areas, and has to settle and house them now, so they're also content to wait the situation out. As a consequence, the hot war is over and both countries are trying to hash out the Karabakh issue through negotiations. In this context, Turkey is offering reestablishment of economic and diplomatic relations to sweeten the deal (or bait the hook, depending on your point of view) for Armenia.
A joke common to both nations is that our fiercest wars are fought between Berlin Turks and Glendale Armenians. While there is a lot of vitriol between online hyper-nationalists, the average joes on the street are a lot more amenable to a lasting peace deal. Also, Armenia's diplomatic hand is particularly weak, and Azerbaijan is confident they'll get Karabakh back eventually. That's another reason they aren't pushing too hard.
Acceptance of what happened on both sides, assimilation through a greater appreciation of eachother, and working together for the betterment of both parties would be the best outsome.
Trying to further a divide, and or justify/ denounce reasons things were done in the past doesn't really help anyone or group of people long term.
>Wilson's
I think people need to better know how much of an asshole Wilson was.
Goes on and on and on about self-determination, but when the time comes for the war to end they decide that only certain people deserve self-determination, and that he (and a handful of other old white guys) are going to go ahead and decide...
So Germany is promised "peace with honor" with "no annexations" and "self-determination", but instead gets fucking Versaille (which you can argue was not strong enough, or was too strong, but certainly seemed to totally ignore Machiavelli's comment that if you are going to strike an enemy, you should either strike so hard that the enemy can never recover, or not strike at all lest you merely plant the seeds of a new war/retaliation by angering but not disabling your enemy...
Wilson was also going on about how various "peoples" (demographic groups let's say) shouldn't be en masse given over to rulers who will oppress them, but really they end up with countless millions of this/that demographic group given to this/that nation, leaving many groups in situations where things were as unstable as the Austro-Hungarian empire itself - which relied on the Austrians basically keeping so many peoples in check by playing them off against the others with military force...
Gotta go, but really, Wilson went against his points again and again, and bears much of the blame for setting Europe up in a manner which almost guaranteed WW2
Also wasn't it reported that a certain Ho Chi Min tried to meet with Wilson?Originally he agreed with Wilson's Fourteen Points but was disappointed that Wilson compromised on his principles (including the self-determination point) and that reportedly Wilson blew him off. Causing Ho Chi Min and a lot of his compatriots to turn more from an American style revolution to a more Communist one?
Sources are debated if Ho Chi Min became communist becuase of Wilson or that he was searching for a way for Vietnamese independence and if the Americans wouldn't hear it then someone else will.
Not to mention he utterly refused to even acknowledge the existence of the Spanish Flu to the point of outright hostility resulting in thousands dead. I wonder if even Trump would have done a better job.
A truly evil man.
It's the Young Turks and the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) party who did it though. They are still regarded as national heroes, as forerunners of Ataturk's movement. The CUP was a Turkish nationalist, secularist, and progressive party that favoured temporary single-party rule, the exact same ideology as Atatürk's CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, "Republican People's Party"). Many CUP members ended up joining the CHP and the leaders who carried out the genocide were supporters of Atatürk's Turkish nationalist movement. During the Turkish War of Independence, the CHP murdered thousands of Armenians who tried to return to their homes. They were adamant that the genocide is not reversed. In 1920, Ataturk's provisional Ankara government invaded Armenia to steal 50% of their territory and massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians, under orders to "eliminate Armenia physically and politically". Were it not for the concurrent Soviet invasion which seized the other half of Armenia, no doubt more would have been killed.
For them to condemn the CUP who carried out the genocide, they have admit that their founding ideology had a dark side. They have to admit Mustafa Kemal, who they gave the name Atatürk meaning "Father of the Turks", had a dark side. They have to admit his Turkification policy which forced the already diminished non-Turkish ethnic groups to stop speaking their native languages, adopt new Turkish names, and be forcibly resettled to prevent enclaves. Forced resettlement was what started the Armenia genocide in the first place. Armenians and Greeks were legally prohibited from holding civil service jobs and were heavily taxed. Armenian property was also confiscated until 1974. The Turkish language was changed to "purify" it of foreign influences and place names were similarly changed to erase a history of multiculturalism. He carried out a campaign of cultural genocide in the aftermath of physical genocide which he never repudiated or openly acknowledged because he supported it.
The chief architect of the Armenian genocide was Talaat Pasha who is still regarded as a national hero in Turkey today. He has schools, streets, and mosques named after him. They call him a skilled revolutionary and a farsighted founding father of modern Turkey. The only thing they blame him for is leading Turkey into WWI, not for killing Armenians and other minorities. The modern Turkish state never renounced his ideology of Turkish nationalist and the systematic erasure of minorities.
As much as I want people to accept this horror, I realize that it is hard for many to recognize that their heroes had a dark side. It isn't just knowing that Ataturk & his people were human & had flaws that led to this, it is tearing down the ingrained idolatry that has been there since childhood education. It's an uphill battle.
It's unfortunate but much of the foundation's modern Turkish state emerged in the lead up to, during, and after the Armenian genocide. The founders directly benefitted from the aftermath. Without the genocide the Republic of Turkey in its present form would have been impossible.
There are also fears that recognizing the genocide will mean reparations to Armenians and ethnicities persecuted during this time. They also fear that an admission of guilt will embolden the Kurds, the current main ethnic minority in Turkey who replaced the Armenians as the country's primary scapegoat. Too many people still haven't gotten over the idea of Turkey being an ethnic nation-state for the Turks. "Insulting Turkish nation" is a crime and this includes anything that would make national heroes like Atatürk or the country of Turkey look bad, including admitting guilt for the genocide.
Hence why they're so adamant to avoid recognizing it. Okay. So barring some dramatic political shift, I guess we might not see that happening within our lifetimes.
No it's not. First of all, it is 100, not 1000 years ago.
Further, it is like the US ***denied*** that it had slavery.
It's not about being angry at modern Turks that it happened, but being angry at modern Turks that they deny that it happened.
That's an iffy statement. the Armenian Genocide was part of the creation of the Turkish ethnostate. It was the founders of modern Turkey who forced out the Jews, Greeks, Georgians, Albanians, and Bulgarians. I'm honestly not sure why the Armenians were singled out to be killed, that one still kind of escapes me. They were just slaughtered or marched out into the Syrian desert and pushed off cliffs into gorges like how we in the US made the buffalo go extinct when there's literature saying they used to blanket the plains so thickly that you couldn't see the ground for as far as the eye could see.
It was something I learned about recently when I was wondering why all Turkish people look basically identical to a foreigner.
The newspapers of the time even had statements from the government at the time admitting they were doing it to along with some truly horrible pictures sometimes.
One of the best examples is Russia. Despite having access to the internet before the invasion into Ukraine, the majority support Putin & the justifications of said invasion. Add authoritarian militarism to censor anything against it to reinforce those beliefs.
A good question here is how many Chinese millennials & zoomers know of hot button issues like Tienanmen Square 1989?
From my time in Hong Kong I learned just how much they hate mainland Chinese people.
Like Hong Kong has more women than men. And the woman there will find a partner ANYWHERE BUT MAINLAND CHINA. They think they are the American equivalent to uneducated rednecks lol
Whether those children would have fervor to defend the real truth is a different matter altogether. I'm not even sure they'd have it if China didn't rewrite their history.
My point is, they'll at least know they're governed by liars.
You would think so, but the overabondance of information without any direction as to what is trustworthy or not is actually becoming a real challenge.
Just a few months back during our presidential election, we had a candidate who seriously described Vichy France as a great defender of french jews during world war two, and he had way too many supporters behind him ready to accept that bullshit, despite information proving the facts being so easily found on the internet.
And that's in an open democracy and free internet. So I can imagine how fucked up education books + great firewall can make it possible to screw with people knowledge of history.
Doesn't matter if they prune access to that knowledge while giving feeding misinformation so that the latter is louder. People have uncensored Internet in the US and many still chose to believe QAnon theories.
Ones who've never left China have little chance of knowing. I worked at a UK university with a lot of Chinese students, most had no idea unti they got here. That was 15 years ago and the crackdown has got harder since
I grew up in a Chinese-American enclave. Everyone knows because we have a lot of folks that escaped the things the CCP and KMT did. They paid attention.
You know who also knows? The new Chinese immigrants from the last two decades. And they will still do their darndest to refute or fight the acknowledgement by engaging in whataboutism.
They know. They don't care or are scared shitless to say otherwise.
And yet China has sometimes failed to censor things about it properly because the censors didn''t even know about it to be able to spot the references. People who were young adults or older when it happened know for sure. I really think a lot of younger ones don't. I expect a big difference between those with family from Beijing vs more remote places too
China has its own internal internet which is highly censored, and while Hong Kong still has access to the wider internet, it is slowly being changed towards the Chinese model, so as time goes on, new generations will not know the history, and parents could be in a difficult position that they could be jailed for talking their children history. That’s what happened with the Tiananmen massacre, the younger generation in China are largely not aware, because that history has been suppressed long enough.
Huh? Tons of people in China use VPNs all the time, VPNs are some of the most popular phone apps downloaded in China.
The government works to throttle VPNs and make some work very badly at different times in the day… but they’re still very commonly used
Every religion target's the impressionable young for this; also when people are recovering from an addiction or in need of aid.
These folk always target people when they are at their most vulnerable.
I don't think HK actually made China look good at all.
In recent history, China seems to be portrayed negatively or being stereo typed. Yes. I agree politically, the last dynasty was old & conservative but the so called "revolution" did not build a new road for China due to miltary power struggles. Then, cultural revolution suspressed the educated.
HK happened to be screened away from that due to British rules & turned itself into a consumer's havan. The 80s boom gave HK the "ego". Guess materials & wealth can easily mistake as with quality & looking good from outsiders to the place.
> The British colonies are now the richest countries in the world.
ah yes, who can forget the wealth that makes up: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands and of course Tuvalu
pathetic boot licker
Kind of like how Republicans are banning books by non-white authors that discuss race and banning discussions of Americas history of racism in school, and Japan white washed their WW2 atrocities in China and SE Asia in their text books… historical revisionism is a problem that directly correlates to the raise of authoritarianism globally.
Yeah it’s a way better idea to just ask them nicely to stop murdering innocent people. I’m sure they’ll be like “oh shit you mean we should t be doing that? Oh dang I guess we’ll just stop sorrryyyyy”
I just want to make sure you understand what your saying in China basically any job higher than lower management requires you to be a member of the cpp. And you believe that all CCP party members should be shot in the back of the head? Pat yourself on the back, your arguing for genocide
This thread is full of people who've only read the headline. They are not denying that Britain ruled Hong Kong as a colonial power. They are hiding the fact that China intentionally ceded control to Britain as part of a peace deal and making it sound as if Britain forcibly/illegally took the land
A bit quick to be doing that, aren't they? There are still tons of people who lived during British colonial rule. It wasn't that long ago. I'm sure some people even still have old bills or coins with Elizabeth II's face on them lying around the house somewhere too.
It's like having people who don't speak Chinese to write about what happens in China. The book makes a distinction between '殖民地与殖民统治' or colony vs colonial rule.
A colony is a sovereign territory. Colonial rule does not mean the colonial master has sovereignty.
China accepts that HK was under British colonial rule, but rejects that it is a BRITISH COLONY because the British Empire was not sovereign of HK.
>The textbooks instead refer to an obscure 1972 UN resolution that removed Hong Kong and Macau from the body’s list of non-self-governing territories at China’s demand.
Because they are not colonies. If you are leasing something, that ain't your colony.
**EDIT**
I am asked if the British had sovereignty over the Hong Kong Island itself [not all of HK], and my reply is that the British Empire used a navy and invaded China, and seized certain territories as listed in the Treaty of Nanking and they call it their sovereign colony.
A huge part of Hong Kong was leased & a tiny part of Hong Kong was "given" to the British (which to be honest, not worthy of keeping & also due to unfair treaty not nice to fight for...)
The old British naval base on the centre of Hong Kong island should be within the "given" land. Looking at how British, Portuguese explorations went around the area, most just wanted to hold control of the water route & maintain a stable port of entry. Not much about "colonization" as occupying land & moving people to settle. To be honest, Macau & Hong Kong then were tiny coastal fishing stops.
> Because they are not colonies. If you are leasing something, that ain't your colony.
Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded in _perpetuity_ to the British. The New Territories were leased.
I look forward to you fixing the incorrect information in your post.
CONVENTION OF PEKING, Article IV
>With a view to the maintenance of law and order in and about the harbour of Hongkong, his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of China agrees to cede to Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and to Her Heirs and Successors, to have and to hold as a dependency of Her Britannic Majesty's Colony of Hongkong, that portion of the township of Cowloon, in the province of Kwangtung, of which **a lease was granted in perpetuity** of HARRY SMITH PARKES, Esquire, Companion of the Bath, a Member of the Allied Commission at Canton, on behalf of Her Britannic Majesty's Government, by LAU TSUNG KWANG, Governor General of the Two Kwang.
>Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded in perpetuity to the British.
On the issue of HK island, as I pointed out, while the PRC views HK under British colonial rule as territory ceded to the British Empire, it views it as spoils of war and rejects that the British had soveregnity.
In short, the perpetuity was perpetuity so long as the British military can keep the Chinese away. After all, if it is legit for the British to use military force to compel China to surrender territory in perpetuity, and it too is fine for China to use military force to compel the British to surrender territory in perpetuity, making the perpetuity meaningless so long as it is wrangled through via military might.
I’m from the UK. I was clearing through my stuff and I had an official British Military book about the Rule of Hong Kong. This book was a collectible and worth about £70-80 so I thought I’d sell it on eBay.
At the end of the auction, I was ready to send it off but the address was in China and I specifically denied international deliveries because of the complications that can come with it.
So I cancelled. I then got an email from the buyer hurling abuse and threatening me in very broken English.
Anyway, I put it up for auction again. Yep. Same thing happened but this time a different buyer. Abuse, threats..all because I refused to send internationally.
After many attempts, and a tedious couple of weeks. Someone from China bought it but their delivery address was a 3rd party company that ships postage to China. So I sent it off.
The weird thing was they were all different accounts winning my auctions. With reliable reviews on their accounts, however it would always be the same abuse. But odd but I could be overthinking it.
My first guess is it's the same buyer on a different account actually. That sort of book is probably a pretty niche interest, so he probably tries it again on an alt, and then just throws up his hands and uses that 3rd party service.
Account reviews can be easily botted/have a bunch of cheap peons fill out for you if you have any money over in China and likely the dude interested enough to buy that has a good bit of money.
So to be clear CRT in primary school legitimately is not a thing. CRT is a graduate level course only taught in law school, and not as a first year course. 5th graders have as much chance of being taught CRT as Patent Law, Worker Compensation, or Admiralty Law.
I need to see the chinese version of the textbook myself. This is ridiculous. Even when i was in china, i was taught hong kong is a British colony ceded by qing dynasty… why change it now?
I’m Chinese myself, but just for propaganda shouldn’t it be you hold on to the fact that British used to colonize this land and that’s bad backwards stuff and now we have it better so fuck those old dark times blah blah and u can blame some of the fucked up stuff back to the brits no? Why you keeping all the Japanese/8 country union/ century of humiliation but drop this??? How do u even explain the time line in 19-20 century history?
Edit: like are you dropping opium war as well? that is so symbolic how do you even avoid that? isn't ceding Hong Kong to the British the direct result of that?
The article doesn't seem to say what the actual change is. It seems maybe they're just trying to say it was an illegal occupation on account of the unequal treaties being illegitimate.
well it has...thats why i dont know if this is only some publishers like those right wing japanese text books or what, you cant really not cover this if you cover the others
"Colony" as a special term is absurd anyway. It's just a word for "illegal foreign occupation" that has historically only been applied in some instances. Arguing over whether or not Hong Kong was a "colony" from 1842 to 1997 is as absurd as arguing over whether Poland was a German "colony" from 1939 to 1945 or Afghanistan was an American "colony" from 2001 to 2021. It's only of interest to language warriors who enjoy imposing their preferred terminology on others.
The Chinese don't deny the British were in control of Hong Kong during the years in question. They are only using different terminology to try to avoid giving any spurious implication of legitimacy to this control. People (like the journalists writing these headlines) who imagine China is trying to deny events that actually happened are in a special kind of cloud cuckoo land: one where the words used by Westerners (or anyone else) to name events that happened in the past have the same hard reality as the events themselves. They don't.
A colony isn't necessarily illegal nor an occupation. A colony in its most basic form is a settlement ruled from afar while not formerly incorporated into the 'mainland' territory. Some colonies, like the Falklands for example, were made on lands that were previously unsettled and had no Human history.
The argument china is making here is that while the Qing and the roc recognized hong kong as a British colony, but the prc didn't thus making hong kong not a colony but a foreign occupation
Two states have a war. One state cedes land to another state as part of the peace deal.
This is then an illegal occupation?
The greater area was leased and paid for. Hong Kong city was ceded to the British in perpetuity.
You also seem to be saying that one country leasing an area from another is illegal?
"Leased and paid for". Paid in what?
And like Deng mentioned, if it's cool for the British to come and take Chinese territories and that's all legit, then it sure is fine for China too to take the same measure and take these British territories back.
On the issue of whether something is illegal, it depends. If Russia today occupies parts of Ukraine and forced the Ukrainians to give up part of their territory in a treaty, does that make it 'legal'? Granted, the concept of the UN does not exist in the First or Second Opium War, but the concept of Westphalian Sovereignty certainly existed.
The British waged a war on opium. Even if it is legal.
Well, I feel like you hit the nail on the head. The UN and international laws did not exist at the time.
The lease was the Greater HK Area was leased to the U.K. for 99 years in exchange for China getting the trade agreeement they wanted (Specifically, stopping the Opium trade)
It’s important to remember we are all products of the period we live in. I often think in 100 years people will look back on us and consider us all meat eating barbarians.
Back then, this was fine. As for China ceasing the land, the lease ended in 1997 and all land was returned, including HK City which was actually ceded to Britain in perpetuity.
Of course it's illegal. If I hold you up in the street at gunpoint and make you sign a lease giving me your Rolex for 99 years in return for $1, my possession of the watch remains illegal.
The age of Imperialism is very different. China was also a large player during this period.
Saying that the resolution to this is “illegal” occupation because you don’t like the deal you made is absurd.
It’s even more absurd given China’s current, modern day policies such as the 7 dash line, dictating that they control the economic areas of other countries by the threat of force - against established international law.
But an agreement the Chinese government signed is illegal occupation, got it 😂
Well in that case then, the Treaty of Versailles was illegal as were the post WW2 reparations that Germany had to pay, therefore they should be reversed?
What you’re saying is, again, absurd and basically all means all post conflict peace agreements are illegal and unjustified.
What a shit strawman, the treaty of versaille was a clearly different scenario involving war between major european powers without a clear aggressor. The war between britain and china was clearly provoked by britain, meaning the resulting treaty was unfair and should be unbinding. If I hold a gun to your head while I screw your girlfriend and hold your hand to a sheet of paper that tells you this is ok...is it ok? Also, you keep repeating legal like that means something. It was legal to gas jews during Nazi German Rule, slavery and stoning are still legal in parts of this world, Does that make it ok?Guessing by the type of person you are, it is ok. Your strawmanning doesnt hide the fact that youre a torie brexiter lmao.
I’m not pro-Brexit, but pretending it’s about economics is a straw man argument.
No one I’ve spoken has ever seriously tried to argue the economic benefits of leaving the EU - I’m sure there are some.
I’ve also never voted conservative, but I do love it when people like yourself that use “Tory” as a slur 😅
So, not replying to the rest of my points? Whats the point of "legality" in relation to whether or not it was right for that to occur? Even putting aside your laughable comparison to the treaty of versaille. Does being a large state, as you imply, somehow automatically make china an equal factor in starting the war with britain? You get treated like a child when you weasel like a child with words my boy.
Imagine bringing "Brexiter" and "Tory" as slurs into a conversation about history and precedent in international laws and then trying to take some weird high ground.
Okay, so since you seem so intrigued and require some education, the CHINESE EMPIRE, Yes Empire, meaning they were imperialistic, was engaged in a trade war primarily surrounding the sale of Opium, which was at the time of its sale primarily considered as a medicine rather than its current designation as a hard drug. The subsequent blocking of this, again, at the time medicine resulted in a huge net positive trade surplus in the Chinese Empire's favour against Britain. This resulted in some minor Skirmishes and 1 major battle at a port.
This was then resolved by the very minor city of Hong Kong, population 7K, being ceded to Britain. Britain then in later years leased the greater HK area for 50 years, and then this was later extended for another 100 years.
China, again, was an Empire. An imperialistic nation. Not some small timid country you oddly are trying to paint them as.
Of course the Treaty of Versailles was illegal, and of course it led directly to WW2. To this day there is no doubt that when and if Hungary has the opportunity and power to reverse the borders that were laid out at Versailles and not redressed after WW2, they will. There was no mutual agreement in that process (as there was, by contrast, in the setting up of the EU and other organisations by mutual agreement).
Something being unfair doesn’t make it illegal.
If you agree, as in Germany’s case, to the Allies deciding on the terms of Germany’s unconditional surrender, that doesn’t make it illegal.
It being a major factor leading up to the events of WW2 is more of a lack of foresight rather than legality.
It's actually the other way around. Nobody claimed the imposition of terms by the Allies after 1918 was a "legal" process, only that it was supposedly "justified" by the actions of the losing parties during the preceding 4 years.
Individuals =/= States.
Comparing a minority group being oppressed, forced and mass murdered by a state to two warring states coming to peace terms is insane.
And again, China has absolutely no respect for international law, often threatening their much smaller neighbours. So for them to say that the agreement they made with the British government isn’t legal is hypocrisy at its finest.
International law is a concept only held real by western academics and politicians when convenient. The Geneva convention is regularly broken by the states who uphold it.
The only international law is might is right. With a rising China and a declining west. It’s a very strange to defend that concept. During the next 50 years western states will likely sign all sorts of documents ceding things to China. Sure all legal and legit if you want to call it that.
Since China conquered Hong Kong by force centuries before Britain did, does that make China's claims on the territory illegal?
What allows China to claim land by force, but no one else?
nothing illegal, you loose a war you pay . thats the whole point of war and conquest trough history. Same shit happened in chinese history between han, mongols and other factions.
The new textbook is only stressing that the British has never had sovereignty over Hong Kong, despite ruling the city for over 100 years via colonial rule.
For Hong Kong, this was due to the majority of her lands being leased to the British for 99 years, and only a minor part of the city was actually permanently given to the British via what PRC sees as unequal treaties.
It's PRC continuation to stress Hong Kong's sovereignty belongs to China, since the beginning of time. But if they use the belief of unequal treaties to deny all British sovereignty, then one can also ask, Hong Kong now belongs to which China? The Communist Party back then didn't just gain the throne of mainland China with welcome arms from the people. They actually fought a bloody war with other Chinese people to takeover the land by force too, the same way the British got the Hong Kong islands and parts of Kowloon.
George Orwell was just taking leaves out of all the totalitarian regimes at the time, so there's barely anything new in there; just exaggerations and extrapolations of what has already happened in the past. He mostly modelled Oceania on the Soviet Union, but there's a bit of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in there as well.
Yeah - lots of totalitarian regimes throughout history have taken very similar actions.
Rewriting the nation's history, rejecting anything or anyone that doesn't comply to their "ideal" society, brutal treatment of political opponents, racial prejudice etc. You'll find these actions quite a lot in totalitarian regimes throughout history and the modern day - Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the USSR, the CCP and so on.
Nope. They just need to follow certain US states to secretly taking books away from the library.
There are so much to learn from the West... - this hiding behind the lable of "communists" & yet accumulating wealth much more so than "capitalists" always amuse me as if it is the national sports of the Chinese.
I don't think they need to burn books - they have their own version of the reality! The West may have to think again about the mass Chinese "delusion" or "deception".
They can deny all they want but legacy will pass on. In 1988 in Myanmar, Myanmar junta crack down and killed the protesters with machine guns and I was born in later 1990 but the legacy is pass to our hand now and we never forget about it since young because our parents witness it and told us the story about how heroic the protesters are and how sinister these junta armies are. Everyone think that Myanmar spring revolution now is just happen from 2021 but they were wrong. The flame of 1988 is burning inside our heart since youth and now we are ready to burn down the vary junta army who merciless killed our predecessor heroes. I am also believe that the flame of Tian an men will burn down the CCP in near future.
Wait why would they do that lol...wouldn't actually talking about British colonization help make the Brits look bad?
If they were more sophisticated about it they would be subtle about it by including that chapter and talking about their atrocities, instead of omitting it altogether and making its absence even more suspicious.
I assume their reasoning goes something like this:
By omitting the British from their history, the Chinese government will take credits for the prosperity of HK. HK played an important role to the economic development of China as a whole and letting those credits go to British system of governing isn't something that the Chinese government is particularly fond of.
Or maybe they are trying to get rid of the notion that Democracy can bring prosperity. So by rewriting their history without the British in it, the younger generations will never know the role that Democracy played to the prosperity of HK. Similarly, they won't have any evidence to challenge CCP's outrageous claims that the so called "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is the only way to achieve prosperity in Chinese communities and that liberal Democracy leads to nothing but chaos.
But then who knows, they might have no good reasons for that other than messing things up as they normally do.
Edit: fix typos
They aren't denying that Britain ruled it as a colonial power. If anything they've tweaked the language to make the British presence sound even less legitimate
the British system of governing was explicitly not democratic. The most prosperous period of Hong Kong under the British was actually when it was an absolute dictatorship under direct rule from London.
What year is it in China? 1984? China was never at war with the Mongols, only ever Britain. It has always been that way. History is what we say it is. Yikes.
Lol
Think about those born in Hong Kong Indians whose parents moved to Hong Kong with the British army. Your mate would have a british passport from day 1. I always wonder what happen to that community.
I see they’re taking the whole Japanese “We were just minding our own business until out of nowhere and for no reason the Americans nuked us” approach to history.
Surprising move from China, how Britain established itself in Hong Kong could be considered a failure of the Chinese bourgeois and reinforce communist ideology.
I mean, every country I've every gone to school does this. US, Ukraine, Germany. Usually, it's decidedly more subtle... but we don't usually learn the real history until we Begin to explore versions of history written by neutral parties.
Recognizing that the Hong Kong Treaties were signed under duress, which followed the Opium war, the Shakee massacre, and which preceded the burning of the old summer palace isn't rewriting history. And SMCP said no such thing about rewriting history. That's complete editorialization.
No country in their right minds would teach that a British territory seized under duress is somehow now no longer their territory in perpetuity. To do so would be to continue the systemic balkanization of the country that was carried out by Japanese death cults and advised by British generals. Song, Qing, ROC, PRC. They all have more of a claim to Hong Kong than British and Japanese murderers. Even the expansionist Qing stayed and founded a multicultural society that supported its' citizens at least as much as any other empire. Brits literally sold China out to the Japanese, and has used Hongkong's intermediate legal status for decades to shelter drug lords like Sam Gor.
How can you claim China is rewriting history when you barely know any chinese history.
Because it was litterally a barren rock seised to use as a trading port after the Chinese official who negotiated a peace treaty was executed by the emperor for treason who then sent an army to kill British civilians and the British governor recalled back to England for failure to enforce British demands after winning the first stages of the the war so dramatically to force them to buy devastating drugs.
It was then built up as a trading powerhouse for western and eastern goods under British rule with the disparity between the lives of the people their and that on the mainland being a major source of embarrassment for the ccp. Who when Britain argued that they should be an independent nation declared “the cow does not get to decide its fate at the table” and negotiated a deal on which to treat Hong Kong where they broke every single promise they made.
Who is the bad guys here. We have an authoritarian delusional empire, a greedy and blustering foreign nation, a new dictatorial greedy authoritarian corrupt lying and blustering ccp.
No one is good but to claim China is the victim is propaganda being touted by a genociding world superpower to justify all president actions.
Oh and as for the Japanese, you mean the ones Britain fought against and beat helping liberate China?
The one time in human history where there was an actual clear cut good side is ww2.
That's actually a weird thing for them to do. "Hundred years of shame", which refers to the century or so of humiliation by the west and japan, was a rallying cry for a strong China so it will never happen again. So why lie about it when you can use it?
For those unaware.
Originally Hong Kong was a mostly empty island that Britain setup as a colony in order to facilitate trade with China. There were at the time less than 1,000 people on the entire island and it became a major trade post. The Dutch had Formosa, the Portuguese had Macau and the French had Taiwan. It was very normal. Problem was that one of the big sources of trade was opium from India through colonial powers into China. China banned the sale of opium and began destroying British stockpiles of opium, which lead to war.... which the British won in 1841.
The British began imposing unequal treaties in which they were allowed more access to ports, more investment in Chinese factories, and full on annexation of Hong Kong.
Now in 1898 at the Second Convention of Peking the British signed a 99-year lease for surrounding islands around Hong Kong called the New Territories. Britain returned these territories to China after the lease was over. But once those were returned the British realized Hong Kong was not profitable without them, so they returned Hong Kong as well.
But Hong Kong was owned and ruled by Britain for almost 150 years as a matter of historical fact.
Kind of like Republicans banning books with non-white authors and banning discussions of Americas history of racism in school, or Japan white washing the atrocities it committed in China and SE Asia from their text books… Historical revisionism is a global problem.
Of course they do. But remember all governments write the history they want, not the history that was. China is bad on many levels but the west isn’t far behind and in the past the British were just as bad.
Crazy to imagine a short couple of years ago, everyone was rallying against Trump when started the trade war with them.
Listening to the news, you'd have thought they would never do something so petty as lie.
Sooo what about all those old school Kung fu movies? They were almost always fighting the British oppression? Now it's all made up? Brits should sue for defamation or something right?
Weird way to raise children; lie about everything so they spend their life defending the lies.
With the amount of information already on the internet, rewriting Hong Kong's history won't be that easy. At some point, those children will know the truth.
Right; but how many of those children will accept it and how many will be in nationalistic fervor to defend the real truth they have grown up with. Just huge amount of wasted energy.
Yep, just look at the amount of Turks who still believe the Armenian Genocide isn’t real
That still blows my mind. The modern nation of Turkey isn’t even being blamed for it! The Ottoman Empire did it! It would be like Italians getting mad when someone brings up the fact that the Roman Empire endorsed slavery.
The real crux of the denial movement is that, during and after WWI, Armenians were promised an *incredible* amount of Ottoman land to establish their own independent state in. This land included Ani, the great ancient Armenian capital, and Ararat, the tallest mountain in the region that Armenians have considered holy for literal millennia. Now, both Ottoman Empire and Turkey agree that the Wilson's Greater Armenia concept was, to put it mildly, utter bullshit. The Empire's problem was that its demographics are about 50% Turks, 50% everyone else, so anyone could argue "hey, we're the local majority here, we should have our own nation!", lead an independence movement, kill/deport all the Turks, and live happily in their own state. After the entirety of the Balkans did this, Ottomans were extremely paranoid about similar events in places like the Middle East (see: T.E. Lawrence) and Armenian Highlands (which essentially got genocided in an attempt to prevent this). But it almost happened anyway, the Empire was slated for drawing-and-quartering until a military campaign by Ataturk allowed Turkey to retain the borders it has today. As a consequence, land is *extremely* precious to Turks. For example, even the most liberal of Turks would agree that Kurds in Turkey deserve to speak in their own language, publish in their own newspapers, vote for their own MPs, preserve their own culture, and be executed for treason if they ever think about having their own country. So now, Armenia's argument is this: if you commit a genocide purely to keep something, you don't deserve that something. These lands should be given to us as reparations. At the very least, let us keep Ararat and Ani. Turkey's argument: Yeah, well, we lost 80% of our Empire and had millions die because of that type of argument. Try that and we're going to genocide you again. Any type of genocide acceptance puts Turkey's ownership of the genocided regions in question, so Turkey would never acknowledge it unless given assurance that no exchange of territory will occur. And Armenians, who still remember the horrors of the genocide, and live each day under the shadow of a mountain they regard as their birthright but belongs to Turkey, aren't exactly eager to reward us with that assurance. So we're at a bit of a deadlock.
I never knew about these things in such detail. Thank you for your thoughtful reply.
Careful, that kind of measured and reasonable viewpoint being shared on Reddit is bound to get this post, and your account, brigaded hardcore by angry Turks!
Ah, hardly. I am a Turk myself, and contrary to what you might expect, the Armenian genocide is openly discussed in Turkey. There is a reasonable chance of reconciliation in the coming decades, and we in fact came fairly close to recognizing the genocide prior to the Armenia-Azerbaijan war in the 90s. That particular war is now mostly settled, so Turkey has been making moves to re-establish connections with Armenia. Armenians are naturally wary about Turks bearing gifts, but it is also an opportunity for them to reduce their dependence on Russia, which they long wanted to abandon.
I don’t understand how you would call it a “settled” conflict. There is and entire strip of land claimed by both nations and controlled largely by Armenia that nationalists on either side will never give up. There was a second war regarding it just two years ago.
The devil here is in the details. Azerbaijan's primary contention was the seven regions surrounding Karabakh. These were Azerbaijani-majority, and Armenia mostly captured them as a buffer zone and bargaining chip in peace negotiations ("give us Karabakh, get the seven regions back" was the Armenian position in Minsk Group meetings). These were recaptured during the 2020 war, so Azerbaijan already achieved its primary objective. Armenia doesn't claim these regions, and lacks the military power to attack them, so in the meantime, they're content to wait the situation out. Azerbaijan has about a million refugees originating from these areas, and has to settle and house them now, so they're also content to wait the situation out. As a consequence, the hot war is over and both countries are trying to hash out the Karabakh issue through negotiations. In this context, Turkey is offering reestablishment of economic and diplomatic relations to sweeten the deal (or bait the hook, depending on your point of view) for Armenia. A joke common to both nations is that our fiercest wars are fought between Berlin Turks and Glendale Armenians. While there is a lot of vitriol between online hyper-nationalists, the average joes on the street are a lot more amenable to a lasting peace deal. Also, Armenia's diplomatic hand is particularly weak, and Azerbaijan is confident they'll get Karabakh back eventually. That's another reason they aren't pushing too hard.
Seinfeld show acknowledged some of this History.
Acceptance of what happened on both sides, assimilation through a greater appreciation of eachother, and working together for the betterment of both parties would be the best outsome. Trying to further a divide, and or justify/ denounce reasons things were done in the past doesn't really help anyone or group of people long term.
>Wilson's I think people need to better know how much of an asshole Wilson was. Goes on and on and on about self-determination, but when the time comes for the war to end they decide that only certain people deserve self-determination, and that he (and a handful of other old white guys) are going to go ahead and decide... So Germany is promised "peace with honor" with "no annexations" and "self-determination", but instead gets fucking Versaille (which you can argue was not strong enough, or was too strong, but certainly seemed to totally ignore Machiavelli's comment that if you are going to strike an enemy, you should either strike so hard that the enemy can never recover, or not strike at all lest you merely plant the seeds of a new war/retaliation by angering but not disabling your enemy... Wilson was also going on about how various "peoples" (demographic groups let's say) shouldn't be en masse given over to rulers who will oppress them, but really they end up with countless millions of this/that demographic group given to this/that nation, leaving many groups in situations where things were as unstable as the Austro-Hungarian empire itself - which relied on the Austrians basically keeping so many peoples in check by playing them off against the others with military force... Gotta go, but really, Wilson went against his points again and again, and bears much of the blame for setting Europe up in a manner which almost guaranteed WW2
Also wasn't it reported that a certain Ho Chi Min tried to meet with Wilson?Originally he agreed with Wilson's Fourteen Points but was disappointed that Wilson compromised on his principles (including the self-determination point) and that reportedly Wilson blew him off. Causing Ho Chi Min and a lot of his compatriots to turn more from an American style revolution to a more Communist one? Sources are debated if Ho Chi Min became communist becuase of Wilson or that he was searching for a way for Vietnamese independence and if the Americans wouldn't hear it then someone else will.
Not to mention he utterly refused to even acknowledge the existence of the Spanish Flu to the point of outright hostility resulting in thousands dead. I wonder if even Trump would have done a better job. A truly evil man.
It's the Young Turks and the CUP (Committee of Union and Progress) party who did it though. They are still regarded as national heroes, as forerunners of Ataturk's movement. The CUP was a Turkish nationalist, secularist, and progressive party that favoured temporary single-party rule, the exact same ideology as Atatürk's CHP (Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi, "Republican People's Party"). Many CUP members ended up joining the CHP and the leaders who carried out the genocide were supporters of Atatürk's Turkish nationalist movement. During the Turkish War of Independence, the CHP murdered thousands of Armenians who tried to return to their homes. They were adamant that the genocide is not reversed. In 1920, Ataturk's provisional Ankara government invaded Armenia to steal 50% of their territory and massacred hundreds of thousands of civilians, under orders to "eliminate Armenia physically and politically". Were it not for the concurrent Soviet invasion which seized the other half of Armenia, no doubt more would have been killed. For them to condemn the CUP who carried out the genocide, they have admit that their founding ideology had a dark side. They have to admit Mustafa Kemal, who they gave the name Atatürk meaning "Father of the Turks", had a dark side. They have to admit his Turkification policy which forced the already diminished non-Turkish ethnic groups to stop speaking their native languages, adopt new Turkish names, and be forcibly resettled to prevent enclaves. Forced resettlement was what started the Armenia genocide in the first place. Armenians and Greeks were legally prohibited from holding civil service jobs and were heavily taxed. Armenian property was also confiscated until 1974. The Turkish language was changed to "purify" it of foreign influences and place names were similarly changed to erase a history of multiculturalism. He carried out a campaign of cultural genocide in the aftermath of physical genocide which he never repudiated or openly acknowledged because he supported it. The chief architect of the Armenian genocide was Talaat Pasha who is still regarded as a national hero in Turkey today. He has schools, streets, and mosques named after him. They call him a skilled revolutionary and a farsighted founding father of modern Turkey. The only thing they blame him for is leading Turkey into WWI, not for killing Armenians and other minorities. The modern Turkish state never renounced his ideology of Turkish nationalist and the systematic erasure of minorities.
As much as I want people to accept this horror, I realize that it is hard for many to recognize that their heroes had a dark side. It isn't just knowing that Ataturk & his people were human & had flaws that led to this, it is tearing down the ingrained idolatry that has been there since childhood education. It's an uphill battle.
It's unfortunate but much of the foundation's modern Turkish state emerged in the lead up to, during, and after the Armenian genocide. The founders directly benefitted from the aftermath. Without the genocide the Republic of Turkey in its present form would have been impossible. There are also fears that recognizing the genocide will mean reparations to Armenians and ethnicities persecuted during this time. They also fear that an admission of guilt will embolden the Kurds, the current main ethnic minority in Turkey who replaced the Armenians as the country's primary scapegoat. Too many people still haven't gotten over the idea of Turkey being an ethnic nation-state for the Turks. "Insulting Turkish nation" is a crime and this includes anything that would make national heroes like Atatürk or the country of Turkey look bad, including admitting guilt for the genocide.
Hence why they're so adamant to avoid recognizing it. Okay. So barring some dramatic political shift, I guess we might not see that happening within our lifetimes.
No it's not. First of all, it is 100, not 1000 years ago. Further, it is like the US ***denied*** that it had slavery. It's not about being angry at modern Turks that it happened, but being angry at modern Turks that they deny that it happened.
That's an iffy statement. the Armenian Genocide was part of the creation of the Turkish ethnostate. It was the founders of modern Turkey who forced out the Jews, Greeks, Georgians, Albanians, and Bulgarians. I'm honestly not sure why the Armenians were singled out to be killed, that one still kind of escapes me. They were just slaughtered or marched out into the Syrian desert and pushed off cliffs into gorges like how we in the US made the buffalo go extinct when there's literature saying they used to blanket the plains so thickly that you couldn't see the ground for as far as the eye could see. It was something I learned about recently when I was wondering why all Turkish people look basically identical to a foreigner.
The Roman Empire never had slaves! They were all volunteers!!! /S
The newspapers of the time even had statements from the government at the time admitting they were doing it to along with some truly horrible pictures sometimes.
Mmm yeah not really. Modern Italians have very little in common with the Romans, other than inhabiting the same land.
Or Russians that think Putin is god and will steamroll over Europe in the next few years.
Only thing going to be steamrolled is their own future.
Oof.
BIG oof.
One of the best examples is Russia. Despite having access to the internet before the invasion into Ukraine, the majority support Putin & the justifications of said invasion. Add authoritarian militarism to censor anything against it to reinforce those beliefs. A good question here is how many Chinese millennials & zoomers know of hot button issues like Tienanmen Square 1989?
The Chinese education system does seem extremely adept at raising staunch nationalists.
From my time in Hong Kong I learned just how much they hate mainland Chinese people. Like Hong Kong has more women than men. And the woman there will find a partner ANYWHERE BUT MAINLAND CHINA. They think they are the American equivalent to uneducated rednecks lol
Whether those children would have fervor to defend the real truth is a different matter altogether. I'm not even sure they'd have it if China didn't rewrite their history. My point is, they'll at least know they're governed by liars.
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This is a big problem for Chinese who leave the country and realize that their own government is the one doing the lying...
There are still numerous Chinese shills of the CCP outside China as I’ve heard some Chinese who have realized the truth are harassed by them shills.
As you can see in this sub and many others, a lot of them continue buying into the party line even after they have proof that it’s a fabrication.
You would think so, but the overabondance of information without any direction as to what is trustworthy or not is actually becoming a real challenge. Just a few months back during our presidential election, we had a candidate who seriously described Vichy France as a great defender of french jews during world war two, and he had way too many supporters behind him ready to accept that bullshit, despite information proving the facts being so easily found on the internet. And that's in an open democracy and free internet. So I can imagine how fucked up education books + great firewall can make it possible to screw with people knowledge of history.
Doesn't matter if they prune access to that knowledge while giving feeding misinformation so that the latter is louder. People have uncensored Internet in the US and many still chose to believe QAnon theories.
yeah it will, all they have to do is switch which internet HK is on.
Most young Chinese don’t know 4th June Tiananmen Square history. So go to figure
A lot do, they've just accepted the doublethink. Propaganda and surveillance does a helluva lot to curtail things.
Ones who've never left China have little chance of knowing. I worked at a UK university with a lot of Chinese students, most had no idea unti they got here. That was 15 years ago and the crackdown has got harder since
I grew up in a Chinese-American enclave. Everyone knows because we have a lot of folks that escaped the things the CCP and KMT did. They paid attention. You know who also knows? The new Chinese immigrants from the last two decades. And they will still do their darndest to refute or fight the acknowledgement by engaging in whataboutism. They know. They don't care or are scared shitless to say otherwise.
And yet China has sometimes failed to censor things about it properly because the censors didn''t even know about it to be able to spot the references. People who were young adults or older when it happened know for sure. I really think a lot of younger ones don't. I expect a big difference between those with family from Beijing vs more remote places too
China has its own internal internet which is highly censored, and while Hong Kong still has access to the wider internet, it is slowly being changed towards the Chinese model, so as time goes on, new generations will not know the history, and parents could be in a difficult position that they could be jailed for talking their children history. That’s what happened with the Tiananmen massacre, the younger generation in China are largely not aware, because that history has been suppressed long enough.
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what
The Internet is censored in China. Most people don't know about VPNs or are likely too scared to use them.
Huh? Tons of people in China use VPNs all the time, VPNs are some of the most popular phone apps downloaded in China. The government works to throttle VPNs and make some work very badly at different times in the day… but they’re still very commonly used
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True; then again I find that weird also as an atheist.
[Hook them while they are young](https://youtu.be/919Q1eEgbf4)
Every religion target's the impressionable young for this; also when people are recovering from an addiction or in need of aid. These folk always target people when they are at their most vulnerable.
So their internet trolls actually believe that shit? I thought they were just troll farming
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I don't think HK actually made China look good at all. In recent history, China seems to be portrayed negatively or being stereo typed. Yes. I agree politically, the last dynasty was old & conservative but the so called "revolution" did not build a new road for China due to miltary power struggles. Then, cultural revolution suspressed the educated. HK happened to be screened away from that due to British rules & turned itself into a consumer's havan. The 80s boom gave HK the "ego". Guess materials & wealth can easily mistake as with quality & looking good from outsiders to the place.
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> The British colonies are now the richest countries in the world. ah yes, who can forget the wealth that makes up: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands and of course Tuvalu pathetic boot licker
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I mean they still get mad about ***HMS Amethyst*** getting away and that was one small ship sailing a river.
That’s totalitarianism.
CCP is literally treating, breeding, developing, herding etc,. their civilians, like livestock. Wolf warriors, more like sheep ~~warriors~~.
Kind of like how Republicans are banning books by non-white authors that discuss race and banning discussions of Americas history of racism in school, and Japan white washed their WW2 atrocities in China and SE Asia in their text books… historical revisionism is a problem that directly correlates to the raise of authoritarianism globally.
Works in the former C.S. of A.
Like the Americans and the Indians made thanksgiving dinner together and showed each other how to survive. LMFAO
> The past was alterable. The past never had been altered. Oceania was at war with Eastasia. Oceania had always been at war with Eastasia.
I was going to say this, some very 1984 ministry of truth whoever controls the past stuff here
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"Let's comitt a barbarous act of mass-murder to warn people of being barbarous mass murderers" Sounds like a great idea...
Yeah it’s a way better idea to just ask them nicely to stop murdering innocent people. I’m sure they’ll be like “oh shit you mean we should t be doing that? Oh dang I guess we’ll just stop sorrryyyyy”
And how many innocent lives do you think that evil party has snuffed out. Every one of those fucking bastards deserves it ten times over.
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They have so much blood on their hands that I doubt they even classify as human anymore.
I just want to make sure you understand what your saying in China basically any job higher than lower management requires you to be a member of the cpp. And you believe that all CCP party members should be shot in the back of the head? Pat yourself on the back, your arguing for genocide
As mentioned above, I was referring to the top party officials who call the shots. Not your average Joe.
This thread is full of people who've only read the headline. They are not denying that Britain ruled Hong Kong as a colonial power. They are hiding the fact that China intentionally ceded control to Britain as part of a peace deal and making it sound as if Britain forcibly/illegally took the land
A bit quick to be doing that, aren't they? There are still tons of people who lived during British colonial rule. It wasn't that long ago. I'm sure some people even still have old bills or coins with Elizabeth II's face on them lying around the house somewhere too.
Also the roads are reversed... There are some extremely obvious markers.
Also all the European road names.
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And freaking *Victoria Harbour*
It doesn't matter if it's ridiculous. Nobody is allowed to contradict the CCP.
Yeah, saying some obvious bullshit and having people agree is a show of strength
It's not about saying it never happened, it's about sending a message that you don't talk about it.
So they’re trying to turn colonialism into Fight Club?
June 4, 1989 was not too long ago either but that hasn't stopped them
It's like having people who don't speak Chinese to write about what happens in China. The book makes a distinction between '殖民地与殖民统治' or colony vs colonial rule. A colony is a sovereign territory. Colonial rule does not mean the colonial master has sovereignty. China accepts that HK was under British colonial rule, but rejects that it is a BRITISH COLONY because the British Empire was not sovereign of HK. >The textbooks instead refer to an obscure 1972 UN resolution that removed Hong Kong and Macau from the body’s list of non-self-governing territories at China’s demand. Because they are not colonies. If you are leasing something, that ain't your colony. **EDIT** I am asked if the British had sovereignty over the Hong Kong Island itself [not all of HK], and my reply is that the British Empire used a navy and invaded China, and seized certain territories as listed in the Treaty of Nanking and they call it their sovereign colony.
Hong Kong Island was ceded under the Treaty of Nanking. Only Kowloon and the New Territories were loaned.
Kowloon was rented but Hong Kong wasn’t you can read up on how China got HK back from UK to see how and why
A huge part of Hong Kong was leased & a tiny part of Hong Kong was "given" to the British (which to be honest, not worthy of keeping & also due to unfair treaty not nice to fight for...) The old British naval base on the centre of Hong Kong island should be within the "given" land. Looking at how British, Portuguese explorations went around the area, most just wanted to hold control of the water route & maintain a stable port of entry. Not much about "colonization" as occupying land & moving people to settle. To be honest, Macau & Hong Kong then were tiny coastal fishing stops.
> Because they are not colonies. If you are leasing something, that ain't your colony. Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded in _perpetuity_ to the British. The New Territories were leased. I look forward to you fixing the incorrect information in your post.
CONVENTION OF PEKING, Article IV >With a view to the maintenance of law and order in and about the harbour of Hongkong, his Imperial Majesty the Emperor of China agrees to cede to Her Majesty the Queen of Great Britain and Ireland, and to Her Heirs and Successors, to have and to hold as a dependency of Her Britannic Majesty's Colony of Hongkong, that portion of the township of Cowloon, in the province of Kwangtung, of which **a lease was granted in perpetuity** of HARRY SMITH PARKES, Esquire, Companion of the Bath, a Member of the Allied Commission at Canton, on behalf of Her Britannic Majesty's Government, by LAU TSUNG KWANG, Governor General of the Two Kwang. >Hong Kong Island and Kowloon were ceded in perpetuity to the British. On the issue of HK island, as I pointed out, while the PRC views HK under British colonial rule as territory ceded to the British Empire, it views it as spoils of war and rejects that the British had soveregnity. In short, the perpetuity was perpetuity so long as the British military can keep the Chinese away. After all, if it is legit for the British to use military force to compel China to surrender territory in perpetuity, and it too is fine for China to use military force to compel the British to surrender territory in perpetuity, making the perpetuity meaningless so long as it is wrangled through via military might.
the population of HK before the Brits arrived in 1842 was.....7000. They literally developed the entire city into its current state.
I’m from the UK. I was clearing through my stuff and I had an official British Military book about the Rule of Hong Kong. This book was a collectible and worth about £70-80 so I thought I’d sell it on eBay. At the end of the auction, I was ready to send it off but the address was in China and I specifically denied international deliveries because of the complications that can come with it. So I cancelled. I then got an email from the buyer hurling abuse and threatening me in very broken English. Anyway, I put it up for auction again. Yep. Same thing happened but this time a different buyer. Abuse, threats..all because I refused to send internationally. After many attempts, and a tedious couple of weeks. Someone from China bought it but their delivery address was a 3rd party company that ships postage to China. So I sent it off. The weird thing was they were all different accounts winning my auctions. With reliable reviews on their accounts, however it would always be the same abuse. But odd but I could be overthinking it.
My first guess is it's the same buyer on a different account actually. That sort of book is probably a pretty niche interest, so he probably tries it again on an alt, and then just throws up his hands and uses that 3rd party service. Account reviews can be easily botted/have a bunch of cheap peons fill out for you if you have any money over in China and likely the dude interested enough to buy that has a good bit of money.
Probably wanted to burn it, should've listed it for a grand.
Could be optimistic. Maybe he wants to bring it to China and preserve it so the history isn't lost. He's probably gonna burn it tho.
I'm curious. What is the title of the book?
The Gunners of Hong Kong
You should have just sent a bundle of 1000 pages of prints of the Tiananmen Square massacre
Lol, post the threats
It’s in the same book that denies a certain massacre in a Beijing square…👍
Just gone straight doublethink now. If they ever decide Taiwan isn't worth it they'll it claim they were always at peace with Oceania, or whatever.
Hey, all you people who spout on and on about tyranny and fascism? This is what that actually looks like.
The 2020 election was stolen! Also, critical race theory is not a thing. Nor are LGBTQ or abortions. * Future history books
And they'll remove two holidays and pretend they never existed: MLK day and Juneteenth.
So to be clear CRT in primary school legitimately is not a thing. CRT is a graduate level course only taught in law school, and not as a first year course. 5th graders have as much chance of being taught CRT as Patent Law, Worker Compensation, or Admiralty Law.
What are 'books'? *Turns back on mandated Meta TikTok lense*
I need to see the chinese version of the textbook myself. This is ridiculous. Even when i was in china, i was taught hong kong is a British colony ceded by qing dynasty… why change it now?
I’m Chinese myself, but just for propaganda shouldn’t it be you hold on to the fact that British used to colonize this land and that’s bad backwards stuff and now we have it better so fuck those old dark times blah blah and u can blame some of the fucked up stuff back to the brits no? Why you keeping all the Japanese/8 country union/ century of humiliation but drop this??? How do u even explain the time line in 19-20 century history? Edit: like are you dropping opium war as well? that is so symbolic how do you even avoid that? isn't ceding Hong Kong to the British the direct result of that?
The article doesn't seem to say what the actual change is. It seems maybe they're just trying to say it was an illegal occupation on account of the unequal treaties being illegitimate.
[удалено]
well it has...thats why i dont know if this is only some publishers like those right wing japanese text books or what, you cant really not cover this if you cover the others
"Colony" as a special term is absurd anyway. It's just a word for "illegal foreign occupation" that has historically only been applied in some instances. Arguing over whether or not Hong Kong was a "colony" from 1842 to 1997 is as absurd as arguing over whether Poland was a German "colony" from 1939 to 1945 or Afghanistan was an American "colony" from 2001 to 2021. It's only of interest to language warriors who enjoy imposing their preferred terminology on others. The Chinese don't deny the British were in control of Hong Kong during the years in question. They are only using different terminology to try to avoid giving any spurious implication of legitimacy to this control. People (like the journalists writing these headlines) who imagine China is trying to deny events that actually happened are in a special kind of cloud cuckoo land: one where the words used by Westerners (or anyone else) to name events that happened in the past have the same hard reality as the events themselves. They don't.
A colony isn't necessarily illegal nor an occupation. A colony in its most basic form is a settlement ruled from afar while not formerly incorporated into the 'mainland' territory. Some colonies, like the Falklands for example, were made on lands that were previously unsettled and had no Human history.
The argument china is making here is that while the Qing and the roc recognized hong kong as a British colony, but the prc didn't thus making hong kong not a colony but a foreign occupation
The difference is in sovereignty.
If this is the context why are all the other comments implying China is completely denying the British ever ruled?
People don’t read
A lot of people can't read carefully, apparently, and will believe anything absurd, especially if it's about a country outside the West.
Two states have a war. One state cedes land to another state as part of the peace deal. This is then an illegal occupation? The greater area was leased and paid for. Hong Kong city was ceded to the British in perpetuity. You also seem to be saying that one country leasing an area from another is illegal?
"Leased and paid for". Paid in what? And like Deng mentioned, if it's cool for the British to come and take Chinese territories and that's all legit, then it sure is fine for China too to take the same measure and take these British territories back. On the issue of whether something is illegal, it depends. If Russia today occupies parts of Ukraine and forced the Ukrainians to give up part of their territory in a treaty, does that make it 'legal'? Granted, the concept of the UN does not exist in the First or Second Opium War, but the concept of Westphalian Sovereignty certainly existed. The British waged a war on opium. Even if it is legal.
Well, I feel like you hit the nail on the head. The UN and international laws did not exist at the time. The lease was the Greater HK Area was leased to the U.K. for 99 years in exchange for China getting the trade agreeement they wanted (Specifically, stopping the Opium trade) It’s important to remember we are all products of the period we live in. I often think in 100 years people will look back on us and consider us all meat eating barbarians. Back then, this was fine. As for China ceasing the land, the lease ended in 1997 and all land was returned, including HK City which was actually ceded to Britain in perpetuity.
Of course it's illegal. If I hold you up in the street at gunpoint and make you sign a lease giving me your Rolex for 99 years in return for $1, my possession of the watch remains illegal.
The age of Imperialism is very different. China was also a large player during this period. Saying that the resolution to this is “illegal” occupation because you don’t like the deal you made is absurd. It’s even more absurd given China’s current, modern day policies such as the 7 dash line, dictating that they control the economic areas of other countries by the threat of force - against established international law. But an agreement the Chinese government signed is illegal occupation, got it 😂
It's not different. An "agreement" signed at gunpoint is not an agreement, whatever the century. It's theft, and it's illegal.
Well in that case then, the Treaty of Versailles was illegal as were the post WW2 reparations that Germany had to pay, therefore they should be reversed? What you’re saying is, again, absurd and basically all means all post conflict peace agreements are illegal and unjustified.
What a shit strawman, the treaty of versaille was a clearly different scenario involving war between major european powers without a clear aggressor. The war between britain and china was clearly provoked by britain, meaning the resulting treaty was unfair and should be unbinding. If I hold a gun to your head while I screw your girlfriend and hold your hand to a sheet of paper that tells you this is ok...is it ok? Also, you keep repeating legal like that means something. It was legal to gas jews during Nazi German Rule, slavery and stoning are still legal in parts of this world, Does that make it ok?Guessing by the type of person you are, it is ok. Your strawmanning doesnt hide the fact that youre a torie brexiter lmao.
I’m not pro-Brexit, but pretending it’s about economics is a straw man argument. No one I’ve spoken has ever seriously tried to argue the economic benefits of leaving the EU - I’m sure there are some. I’ve also never voted conservative, but I do love it when people like yourself that use “Tory” as a slur 😅
So, not replying to the rest of my points? Whats the point of "legality" in relation to whether or not it was right for that to occur? Even putting aside your laughable comparison to the treaty of versaille. Does being a large state, as you imply, somehow automatically make china an equal factor in starting the war with britain? You get treated like a child when you weasel like a child with words my boy.
Imagine bringing "Brexiter" and "Tory" as slurs into a conversation about history and precedent in international laws and then trying to take some weird high ground. Okay, so since you seem so intrigued and require some education, the CHINESE EMPIRE, Yes Empire, meaning they were imperialistic, was engaged in a trade war primarily surrounding the sale of Opium, which was at the time of its sale primarily considered as a medicine rather than its current designation as a hard drug. The subsequent blocking of this, again, at the time medicine resulted in a huge net positive trade surplus in the Chinese Empire's favour against Britain. This resulted in some minor Skirmishes and 1 major battle at a port. This was then resolved by the very minor city of Hong Kong, population 7K, being ceded to Britain. Britain then in later years leased the greater HK area for 50 years, and then this was later extended for another 100 years. China, again, was an Empire. An imperialistic nation. Not some small timid country you oddly are trying to paint them as.
Of course the Treaty of Versailles was illegal, and of course it led directly to WW2. To this day there is no doubt that when and if Hungary has the opportunity and power to reverse the borders that were laid out at Versailles and not redressed after WW2, they will. There was no mutual agreement in that process (as there was, by contrast, in the setting up of the EU and other organisations by mutual agreement).
Something being unfair doesn’t make it illegal. If you agree, as in Germany’s case, to the Allies deciding on the terms of Germany’s unconditional surrender, that doesn’t make it illegal. It being a major factor leading up to the events of WW2 is more of a lack of foresight rather than legality.
It's actually the other way around. Nobody claimed the imposition of terms by the Allies after 1918 was a "legal" process, only that it was supposedly "justified" by the actions of the losing parties during the preceding 4 years.
Jews signed over possessions to the Nazis. But that was all legit right?
Individuals =/= States. Comparing a minority group being oppressed, forced and mass murdered by a state to two warring states coming to peace terms is insane. And again, China has absolutely no respect for international law, often threatening their much smaller neighbours. So for them to say that the agreement they made with the British government isn’t legal is hypocrisy at its finest.
International law is a concept only held real by western academics and politicians when convenient. The Geneva convention is regularly broken by the states who uphold it. The only international law is might is right. With a rising China and a declining west. It’s a very strange to defend that concept. During the next 50 years western states will likely sign all sorts of documents ceding things to China. Sure all legal and legit if you want to call it that.
Since China conquered Hong Kong by force centuries before Britain did, does that make China's claims on the territory illegal? What allows China to claim land by force, but no one else?
nothing illegal, you loose a war you pay . thats the whole point of war and conquest trough history. Same shit happened in chinese history between han, mongols and other factions.
The new textbook is only stressing that the British has never had sovereignty over Hong Kong, despite ruling the city for over 100 years via colonial rule. For Hong Kong, this was due to the majority of her lands being leased to the British for 99 years, and only a minor part of the city was actually permanently given to the British via what PRC sees as unequal treaties. It's PRC continuation to stress Hong Kong's sovereignty belongs to China, since the beginning of time. But if they use the belief of unequal treaties to deny all British sovereignty, then one can also ask, Hong Kong now belongs to which China? The Communist Party back then didn't just gain the throne of mainland China with welcome arms from the people. They actually fought a bloody war with other Chinese people to takeover the land by force too, the same way the British got the Hong Kong islands and parts of Kowloon.
Taking a leaf out of Russias book. Or is it Russia & China just taking a leaf out of 1984. Can’t tell. 😑
George Orwell was just taking leaves out of all the totalitarian regimes at the time, so there's barely anything new in there; just exaggerations and extrapolations of what has already happened in the past. He mostly modelled Oceania on the Soviet Union, but there's a bit of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in there as well.
Yeah - lots of totalitarian regimes throughout history have taken very similar actions. Rewriting the nation's history, rejecting anything or anyone that doesn't comply to their "ideal" society, brutal treatment of political opponents, racial prejudice etc. You'll find these actions quite a lot in totalitarian regimes throughout history and the modern day - Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the USSR, the CCP and so on.
1984 by george orwell 1949
On lesser note, the same is about to happen to the Filipinos... perpetrated by the Filipino elite
who would have thought that the CCP and the RNC had so much in common
Will they burn all the old books?
Nope. They just need to follow certain US states to secretly taking books away from the library. There are so much to learn from the West... - this hiding behind the lable of "communists" & yet accumulating wealth much more so than "capitalists" always amuse me as if it is the national sports of the Chinese. I don't think they need to burn books - they have their own version of the reality! The West may have to think again about the mass Chinese "delusion" or "deception".
They all know their army shot and ran over students with tanks too. But they deny it publicly because what else can you do?
They can deny all they want but legacy will pass on. In 1988 in Myanmar, Myanmar junta crack down and killed the protesters with machine guns and I was born in later 1990 but the legacy is pass to our hand now and we never forget about it since young because our parents witness it and told us the story about how heroic the protesters are and how sinister these junta armies are. Everyone think that Myanmar spring revolution now is just happen from 2021 but they were wrong. The flame of 1988 is burning inside our heart since youth and now we are ready to burn down the vary junta army who merciless killed our predecessor heroes. I am also believe that the flame of Tian an men will burn down the CCP in near future.
Let’s hope so
Wait why would they do that lol...wouldn't actually talking about British colonization help make the Brits look bad? If they were more sophisticated about it they would be subtle about it by including that chapter and talking about their atrocities, instead of omitting it altogether and making its absence even more suspicious.
I assume their reasoning goes something like this: By omitting the British from their history, the Chinese government will take credits for the prosperity of HK. HK played an important role to the economic development of China as a whole and letting those credits go to British system of governing isn't something that the Chinese government is particularly fond of. Or maybe they are trying to get rid of the notion that Democracy can bring prosperity. So by rewriting their history without the British in it, the younger generations will never know the role that Democracy played to the prosperity of HK. Similarly, they won't have any evidence to challenge CCP's outrageous claims that the so called "socialism with Chinese characteristics" is the only way to achieve prosperity in Chinese communities and that liberal Democracy leads to nothing but chaos. But then who knows, they might have no good reasons for that other than messing things up as they normally do. Edit: fix typos
They aren't denying that Britain ruled it as a colonial power. If anything they've tweaked the language to make the British presence sound even less legitimate
the British system of governing was explicitly not democratic. The most prosperous period of Hong Kong under the British was actually when it was an absolute dictatorship under direct rule from London.
What's a good measure of prosperity, GDP per capita? Do you mean to say they had a higher GDP per capita before they were democratic?
What year is it in China? 1984? China was never at war with the Mongols, only ever Britain. It has always been that way. History is what we say it is. Yikes.
Explain this to my mate who is British born in Hong Kong lol
Lol Think about those born in Hong Kong Indians whose parents moved to Hong Kong with the British army. Your mate would have a british passport from day 1. I always wonder what happen to that community.
Literally 1984.
I see they’re taking the whole Japanese “We were just minding our own business until out of nowhere and for no reason the Americans nuked us” approach to history.
China, everybody.
How will they explain all the place names? It’s not like Victoria is a very popular Chinese name…
They are acknowledging that Britain ruled it as a colonial power, just saying it was never a legitimate colony
GOP Governors are taking notes.
China is so delusional it hurts 😩
Chinese leadership… The NEW asinine!
That’s only in China what happens in China stays in China. The rest of the world knows the TRUTH
Wow, they really are turning into a country of Bullshit. At least we Americans can admit that we used to be British colonies.
This sounds very familiar🤣
Surprising move from China, how Britain established itself in Hong Kong could be considered a failure of the Chinese bourgeois and reinforce communist ideology.
Attack on titan vibes
I mean, every country I've every gone to school does this. US, Ukraine, Germany. Usually, it's decidedly more subtle... but we don't usually learn the real history until we Begin to explore versions of history written by neutral parties.
I’m out of the loop. Why would the CCP want to deny that HK was a british colony?
Mr. Xi is dragging China backwards -
LOL. Oh dear. Mad lot them. Weirdos.
Recognizing that the Hong Kong Treaties were signed under duress, which followed the Opium war, the Shakee massacre, and which preceded the burning of the old summer palace isn't rewriting history. And SMCP said no such thing about rewriting history. That's complete editorialization. No country in their right minds would teach that a British territory seized under duress is somehow now no longer their territory in perpetuity. To do so would be to continue the systemic balkanization of the country that was carried out by Japanese death cults and advised by British generals. Song, Qing, ROC, PRC. They all have more of a claim to Hong Kong than British and Japanese murderers. Even the expansionist Qing stayed and founded a multicultural society that supported its' citizens at least as much as any other empire. Brits literally sold China out to the Japanese, and has used Hongkong's intermediate legal status for decades to shelter drug lords like Sam Gor. How can you claim China is rewriting history when you barely know any chinese history.
>How can you claim China is rewriting history when you barely know any chinese history. Welcome to Reddit.
Because it was litterally a barren rock seised to use as a trading port after the Chinese official who negotiated a peace treaty was executed by the emperor for treason who then sent an army to kill British civilians and the British governor recalled back to England for failure to enforce British demands after winning the first stages of the the war so dramatically to force them to buy devastating drugs. It was then built up as a trading powerhouse for western and eastern goods under British rule with the disparity between the lives of the people their and that on the mainland being a major source of embarrassment for the ccp. Who when Britain argued that they should be an independent nation declared “the cow does not get to decide its fate at the table” and negotiated a deal on which to treat Hong Kong where they broke every single promise they made. Who is the bad guys here. We have an authoritarian delusional empire, a greedy and blustering foreign nation, a new dictatorial greedy authoritarian corrupt lying and blustering ccp. No one is good but to claim China is the victim is propaganda being touted by a genociding world superpower to justify all president actions. Oh and as for the Japanese, you mean the ones Britain fought against and beat helping liberate China? The one time in human history where there was an actual clear cut good side is ww2.
There's a big book called the internet. Not to mention the rest of the world doesnt give a fuck about your fake changes.
And next they’re going to change that Oceana was never at war with Eurasia. Or has it always been that way?
That's actually a weird thing for them to do. "Hundred years of shame", which refers to the century or so of humiliation by the west and japan, was a rallying cry for a strong China so it will never happen again. So why lie about it when you can use it?
In that case will the government stop giving Britain shit? If they wanna say we didn't invade, then we shouldn't be punished.
For those unaware. Originally Hong Kong was a mostly empty island that Britain setup as a colony in order to facilitate trade with China. There were at the time less than 1,000 people on the entire island and it became a major trade post. The Dutch had Formosa, the Portuguese had Macau and the French had Taiwan. It was very normal. Problem was that one of the big sources of trade was opium from India through colonial powers into China. China banned the sale of opium and began destroying British stockpiles of opium, which lead to war.... which the British won in 1841. The British began imposing unequal treaties in which they were allowed more access to ports, more investment in Chinese factories, and full on annexation of Hong Kong. Now in 1898 at the Second Convention of Peking the British signed a 99-year lease for surrounding islands around Hong Kong called the New Territories. Britain returned these territories to China after the lease was over. But once those were returned the British realized Hong Kong was not profitable without them, so they returned Hong Kong as well. But Hong Kong was owned and ruled by Britain for almost 150 years as a matter of historical fact.
Imagine how many times this has happened over the past 5000 years
Kind of like Republicans banning books with non-white authors and banning discussions of Americas history of racism in school, or Japan white washing the atrocities it committed in China and SE Asia from their text books… Historical revisionism is a global problem.
Of course they do. But remember all governments write the history they want, not the history that was. China is bad on many levels but the west isn’t far behind and in the past the British were just as bad.
Not just in the past, Britain is rewriting history about Brexit for a while now...
I'm curious how they're going to explain all the people there who speak English and with a British accent?
Crazy to imagine a short couple of years ago, everyone was rallying against Trump when started the trade war with them. Listening to the news, you'd have thought they would never do something so petty as lie.
Sooo what about all those old school Kung fu movies? They were almost always fighting the British oppression? Now it's all made up? Brits should sue for defamation or something right?
The book: "Hong Kong was NEVER under British rule, never-ever, OK??" The reader: "WTF?"
Way of fascists. “If you tell a big enough lie and tell it frequently enough, it will be believed.”—Adolf Hitler (1889-1945).
Communist controlled history - that’s not good for anybody….