The conflict in Hong Kong is not about the Extradition Bill — and now many other issues are piling up almost weekly. The issue is that Communist China is trying to swallow and digest Hong Kongers who know the taste of freedom.
Humans are far more likely to fight to keep something they have than to fight for something they do not have. Mainland Chinese as a group never in their lives have tasted freedom. The communist cowboys in Beijing ride their broken slave horses daily and the broken horses just stare at the ground and go where they are told.
The British helped Hong Kongers taste freedom, and rule of law, and Hong Kongers love their freedom and legitimate judicial system. They will fight. The real fight is beginning.
Hong Kong is a key battle ground in a much larger war. Taiwan and others are watching.
And the Gray Lady is there to tell the rest of the world to pay no attention: “A New Red Scare Is Reshaping Washington:”
In a ballroom across from the Capitol building, an unlikely group of military hawks, populist crusaders, Chinese Muslim freedom fighters and followers of the Falun Gong has been meeting to warn anyone who will listen that China poses an existential threat to the United States that will not end until the Communist Party is overthrown.
If the warnings sound straight out of the Cold War, they are. The Committee on the Present Danger, a long-defunct group that campaigned against the dangers of the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s, has recently been revived with the help of Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s former chief strategist, to warn against the dangers of China.
Once dismissed as xenophobes and fringe elements, the group’s members are finding their views increasingly embraced in President Trump’s Washington, where skepticism and mistrust of China have taken hold. Fear of China has spread across the government, from the White House to Congress to federal agencies, where Beijing’s rise is unquestioningly viewed as an economic and national security threat and the defining challenge of the 21st century.
“These are two systems that are incompatible,” Mr. Bannon said of the United States and China. “One side is going to win, and one side is going to lose.”
I’d take the New York Times more seriously, if they hadn’t been doing their damndest in recent years to rehabilitate the legacy of the Soviet Bloc. (The ghost of Walter Duranty smiles.)
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Related: While Everyone Is Distracted By Russia, Chinese Spying And Influence Runs Wild. But it’s not just China.