It's always funny to see China whataboutists point the finger at US intervention and cry orientalism when active western solidarity is explicitly what many Hong Kong democrats are lobbying for on the international stage, alongside US/British/etc. citizens from the diaspora who fled Chinese tyranny and are expressly, democratically pressuring their own representatives at home. Ooh, scary US imperialism! Ooh, scary British colonial nostalgia! Come off it, you fools. Chinese control over the past twenty years has been far more interventionist and oppressive of the local culture than either of those have ever been.
Hong Kong is a beacon of civic nationalism where an affinity with the west over values, fairness, and governance trumps an affinity with the narrow Han ethno-nationalist vision of the PRC where they preen their sense of entitlement to the totality of the region's rich, diverse, and vibrant cultural heritage. China would very much like everyone to forget and deny that the British intellectual inheritance that built modern HK, inculcating a belief in due process and a free press, is an inextricable part of the city's history and identity. Bollocks to that. Hong Kong expresses western liberal ideals better than the west itself, and the west should stand with it. We should have the moral conviction to be causing trouble for the PRC. "Western influence = bad" might fly with hegemonic Chinese ethnic nationalists and gullible others with simplistic, one-size-fits-all ideas about colonialism, but Hong Kong democrats see right through that nonsense and know what's up. They know who's the real imperialist in the room.
I've actually been impressed with how little of that argument we've seen here up to this point given some of the fashionable anti-west anti-liberalism we often see around these parts. Instead, I've been heartened to see a more or less unequivocal unity, and not just here on this silly video game forum. Maybe because anybody with an informed look at this understands that the fight for liberty and democracy in HK is not a left/right issue in our narrow local terms, and is in fact a strong reminder of what we, in the west, like to imagine are the ideals we have in common with our political opponents.