Hong Kong – collected thoughts

I’ve been invited to an online event this evening with the foreign Secretary @DominicRaab. I am tempted to pay my £10 but I am fairly sure I will hear nothing but a load of platitudinous sphericals, since his performance on Hong Kong so far has been woeful.

Hong Kong is the most significant issue facing the world now. A major power, which is also a totalitarian anti-state, has openly abrogated, not only an international treaty, but also its own internal law (Thanks Dom for pointing that out in Parliament the other day. Maybe you could have pointed that out publicly and loudly a few weeks ago and prevented the new Security Law being introduced ??)

The battle over Hong Kong is a microcosm of the battle humanity faces in the 21^st century. We simply cannot allow totalitarianism to win.

Given the descent of western society, under #WuFlu lockdown, into Orwellian dystopia, it seems apt to quote him :

“Sometimes the first duty of intelligent men is the restatement of the obvious.”

Communism is deceitful, coercive and destructive to any healthy society. The Chinese Communist Party, since taking power in 1949 has destroyed China. The Chinese like to think of themselves as one of the longest surviving civilizations. However the China that existed before Mao no longer exists.

I quote from this excellent article here https://www.libertynation.com/the-peoples-republic-china-hasnt-been-real-since-1949/

“When Mao took power, he changed the official name of the state to the People’s Republic of China. In so doing, he declared that the old government’s debt to American lenders was defunct. By the stroke of a pen, he wiped out what in today’s money amounts to $1.4 trillion in debt, by declaring that the old China that signed the obligations no longer existed.

Strangely, when the Hong Kong lease agreement between Queen Victoria’s British Empire and the old China expired in 1997, past contracts were suddenly valid again.

Mao didn’t just change the name of the country. He destroyed its culture too. Chinese people are often proud of the fact that the continuity of Chinese symbols for thousands of years allows modern Chinese to read documents from the archaic era.

Except that they can’t, because Mao insisted on introducing simplified Chinese symbols, which ruined the only salient feature of the language: its continuity with the past. Now, the Chinese still have to learn thousands of symbols just to read a newspaper, but they have lost the ability to read documents from the past. [Of course Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macao, the parts of China untouched by Mao’s philistinism, still use traditional characters]

This severing of history was a feature, not a bug. Mao urged his devoted followers to destroy any remnants of the past, and they set about doing what communists are doing in America right now: destroying all statues, temples, and cultural artefacts.

Taiwan, the last stronghold of Chiang, is the only remaining genuinely Chinese place that is untouched by the cultural revolution”.

So Mao secured Party control over all aspects of Chinese life and in so doing, turned the country into the rootless, cultureless, moral wasteland it is today. There is no private property ownership because if any business is sufficiently successful to pop up on the radar, the nearest Party member will steal it take it over “for the people”.

The world is now connected and computerised. And since the Chinese don’t recognise individual property, all Chinese technology is a threat. Consider this brilliant post on Reddit (which is now partially owned by Tencent so say goodbye to free speech there)…

Not new news, but tbh if you have tiktiok, just get rid of it from videos

Some tech hacker dude checked out TikTok the Chinese video app aimed at children and young people.

“So I can personally weigh in on this. I reverse-engineered the app, and feel confident in stating that I have a very strong understanding for how the app operates (or at least operated as of a few months ago).

TikTok is a data collection service that is thinly-veiled as a social network. If there is an API to get information on you, your contacts, or your device… well, they’re using it.

Phone hardware (cpu type, number of course, hardware ids, screen dimensions, dpi, memory usage, disk space, etc)
Other apps you have installed (I’ve even seen some I’ve deleted show up in their analytics payload – maybe using as cached value?)
Everything network-related (ip, local ip, router mac, your mac, wifi access point name)
Whether or not you’re rooted/jailbroken
Some variants of the app had GPS pinging enabled at the time, roughly once every 30 seconds – this is enabled by default if you ever location-tag a post IIRC
They set up a local proxy server on your device for “transcoding media”, but that can be abused very easily as it has zero authentication

The scariest part of all of this is that much of the logging they’re doing is remotely configurable, and unless you reverse every single one of their native libraries (have fun reading all of that assembly, assuming you can get past their customized fork of OLLVM!!!) and manually inspect every single obfuscated function. They have several different protections in place to prevent you from reversing or debugging the app as well. App behavior changes slightly if they know you’re trying to figure out what they’re doing. There’s also a few snippets of code on the Android version that allows for the downloading of a remote zip file, unzipping it, and executing said binary. There is zero reason a mobile app would need this functionality legitimately”.

OK that’s a bit techy but they’re scanning every detail of you, your device and its usage and sending them back to base. To coin a phrase, “All of your base are belong to us”.

The Chinese people do not recognise property rights because they are actively not enforced or upheld by the government or considered valid within the political systemic thinking.

So of course if you’re a Chinese tech firm building an app you’re not going to even recognise that limits exist on what you can and can’t extract from a user’s device. The concept is entirely alien.

So when Boris gave his speech at the UN last year addressing the impending onset of technological totality and wondered (and I paraphrase since I’m sure he mentioned Prometheus or some other greek bloke a couple of times) whether it would free us or enslave us, I can tell you for sure, unless we actively resist and object and oppose any and all trespasses on individual liberty via technological means we’ll end up as slaves. I’m not sure that the leadership have grasped this and am thus pretty gloomy about humanity’s general prospects if we let Hong Kong fall.

So that’s where we are. The decision to offer British citizenship to the BNOs is faintly laudable but also reeks of surrender. We’re not going to take the measures required to prevent China from breaching its Treaty obligations and destroying freedom in Hong Kong, which should include extensive and immediate economic and financial sanctions against all of China through the establishment of a coalition of regional powers plus CANZUK and the US. Accepting 3m is all well and good. But what about the other 4 million. Screw them ?? It’s incoherent and short sighted. China is a threat and needs to be tackled.

The decision facing humanity now is how we organise ourselves as a species. The choice is between a system based on coercion versus standing against all coercion and promoting free association and cooperation founded in individual liberty. The CCP does not have a role to play in any future of the world I want my children to inherit.

The grim reality is that I don’t think we have leadership of the calibre capable of preventing it.

Dom needs to man up. Urgently.

I saw a recent post in CapX which I found utterly laughable.

It suggested that we should create a new Hong Kong in the UK and relocate hundreds of thousands of people here. No disrespect to the Hong Kong BNOs, but idea that we can institute a 15% tax rate in a specific area of the UK because it would be good for economic growth (which is true) and not then institute a 15% tax rate throughout the UK as a whole is intellectually dishonest. It simply won’t happen.

I have detected amongst much of the social media comment, a kind of adoption of the narrative that ‘there is nothing we can do because it’s China’. There’s a sense of resignation permeating our politics.

I spoke to a Singaporean friend today and his comment was that ‘HK is a shithole now. There’s no way China is going to back down’.

This need not be true.

First of all, China is in breach of an international Treaty, the Sino British Joint Declaration of 1984. This was to resolve the issue of the 150 year lease of New Territories, which was due to expire in 1997. At the time, Deng Xiaoping assured Maggie Thatcher that he was steering China towards a more democratic system of government and under these influences, the UK also agreed to hand over Hong Kong Island and Kowloon, which had been ceded in perpetuity to the UK, on condition that Hong Kong independence would be maintained for 50 years until 2047.

The 2019 institution of an arrest warrant applicable in Hong Kong which would not be subject to Hong Kong judicial review, even where the alleged crime for which extradition was sought was not a crime in Hong Kong was the first trespass on Hong Kong law. The UK remained silent.

Ever since then the situation has deteriorated.

Trumps speech earlier however was electrifying.

These guys get it totally. Boris and Raab should be ashamed of themselves.

But anyway here’s the thing. We can still retrieve the situation.

China under the CCP is viewed with suspicion and hostility by powers in the region.

Therefore, the obvious approach is for the Anglosphere 5 to form a political coalition with other regional powers, India, Japan, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines and even Vietnam, and it would probably also include Thailand and Singapore to form an economic blockade against China.

The world’s economies are currently all disrupted, so fear of economic damage is no longer an impediment to instituting economic sanctions against China. All those countries should jointly issue notification to China of their immediate rescinding of recognition of China’s membership of the WTO and institute an immediate customs halt on all imports from China.

The central banks of all those countries should immediately prohibit all the banks licensed within their regulatory orbit from accepting or making any payment to any Chinese or Hong Kong bank.

At the same time they should issue a demand that China immediately vacates the illegally occupied Spratley islands.

They should demand that Carrie Lam immediately stands down as leader of the Hong Kong government.

They should demand that Hong Kong holds free and fair elections to replace the CCP placemen in the Hong Kong legislature.

Given the failure by the British to consult Hong Kong people before handing over Hong Kong and Kowloon, when 70% of Hong Kong people were in favour of British rule, and given the fact that China has now explicitly abrogated the Treaty, they should also demand that the Hong Kong people be given a referendum on whether they want independence from China, to stand as a free and independent nation in perpetuity.

This will bring about the collapse of Xi’s regime. This should certainly now be the world’s objective. He is a nasty thug whose government has imprisoned Uyghurs and Falun Gong and murdered them for their organs.

Do not be under any illusion about the barbarity of the Chinese Communist Party. As president Trump alluded to in his speech tonight, as discussion around the handover occurred, and following the conclusion of the 1984 agreement, the world had hoped that the spirit of liberty in Hong Kong would come to infect the whole of China.

Five years later, this nascent yearning for freedom by PRC Chinese was brutally put down in Tiananmen Square. Chinese army soldiers shot unarmed protesters. Armoured vehicles crushed their bodies and minced them into a pie of human flesh and bone which was then incinerated and the ashes flushed into the sewage system. Utter inhumanity.

The virus has shown that all humanity is connected. What happens anywhere happens everywhere. I don’t know if this is true, but supposedly President Kennedy had a placque somewhere with the inscription, “Where We Go One, We Go All”. This is certainly now true. The Chinese Communist Party is a threat to all of mankind, which makes the attempt by Cameron and Osborne to cosy up to the murderous mafia don Xi, all the more sickening.

Hong Kong is a microcosm of the issues facing the world and the parallels with Brexit are screaming at us. We have to act now. The people of Hong Kong absolutely have the right to their freedom, just as do we all.

I am deadly serious. This is as important as facing down Nazism and the Soviet Union in the 20th century and as technology more than ever before in our history has the power to enslave or free us, our choice now in favour of freedom is required to determine what kind of future humanity will have.