> Because there’s no chance they are just people with an opinion, right?
Not when your Education system is literal State propaganda and they deny access to the Internet due to the specific fear of subversive acts, also known as: personal research.
It's one thing to hold an opinion and argue from that POV in honest discourse, its quite another to be operating and rewarded for your loyalty to the State and be monitored and possibly dissapeared if you deviate from this path. This is the same type of Human Conditioning seen during the Soviet Union, which I think can be universally understood to be a negative thing.
Many people in Hong Kong feel as though they've been forgotten by the International Community, the Umbrella Revolution/Yellow Movement was trying to oppose this since 2014, and it mainly went unnoticed other than some sound bites about violent protests, and not much else was understood beyond that.
When what should have been the real focus was the ever increasing Hegemony that was being built by the CCP that could essentially become so seemingly 'indispensable' to those addicted to its cheap labour/manufacturing that it could commit literal Crimes Against Humanity out in the open, lie and cover up International Pandemics that have cost untold Lives and Suffering several times (SARS as well as COVID), and still make People question if it's 'worth' decoupling from China.
That was my biggest fear all along, as I knew Hong Kong (the city) would eventually be returned to China. We stand at a critcal point as a Species on how we Live on Earth and I really want to maintain faith that Humanity can come to the most reasonable albeit difficult conclusion that this cannot continue, but its statements and sentiment like that that make me wonder just how detached people have become to this cancerous threat model. And if they can even muster the ability to be inconvenienced enough to actually see it for what it is instead of detaching into some perpetual self0induced distraction, often viewed from their Chinese made device.
If they are just people with an opinion, they can state that opinion, no problem. If they want to harass, threaten, and beat up those with a different opinion, well, you can't do that here. The next question is why they do such things. Because they're so enraged because someone criticizes China? Because they don't know the rules here, and don't bother to learn? Or because they actually are agents? The last seems the most likely. (You don't see, say, French students in the US brawling with French expats who criticizes France.)
