I'm honestly a bit disheartened. I came here expecting the more open community I usually see here. I suppose on this topic it's not there.
As half the posts accuse me more or less of being a Chinese nationalist arguing in bad faith.
I'm not going to accuse you of this, and I'll take your word that you're coming into this with a genuine concern, but I hope I can give you a helpful, diplomatic explanation of why people might read you this way.
The fact is that the CCP, and CCP-aligned Chinese nationals worldwide, regularly take advantage of the semantic confusion in the west where we use the word "Chinese" to refer to both the ethnicity and the country.
The CCP's Han-ethno-nationalist ideology adores this confusion. They have a long history of believing that China and the Chinese ethnicity are one and the same, and that they have a rightful claim to the global ethnic-Chinese diaspora. It is right there in their citizenship policies. It is visible in the designation they have for "overseas Chinese" at their border entry points. And it is most visible in the One China ideology and their regional bullying of politically self-governing entities like Hong Kong and Taiwan, which is fundamentally driven by an ethno-nationalist notion that all ethnic Chinese properly belong to PRC-run China, and that everything else is a historical aberration. (This is also the excuse that China uses to accuse democrats, both in Hong Kong and around the world—and their excuse for flat-out ignoring the Joint Declaration that defined the terms of the British sovereignty transfer in 1997.) It is visible in their concerted effort, largely failed, to indoctrinate post-British Hong Kong with a newfound sense of pro-Chinese identity, displacing the local culture that is proud to speak Cantonese and write in Traditional Chinese characters, and to erase the British-derived intellectual tradition of free speech and due process that is so integral to the real history of modern HK.
In the west we're often rightly concerned about the blight that is white supremacy and the abuse directed at visible minorities. Fair. If that's the perspective you're coming from, I understand. But realize that pro-CCP Chinese elements
love to take advantage of this. They love to accuse anyone speaking out against China, the country, of being racist against Chinese, the ethnicity.
Realize that "aren't you being racist/xenophobic?"—while it might be innocently meant—immediately strikes people knowledgeable about the region's politics as the
classic Communist Chinese deflection to shut down opposition and make those sensitive to racism doubt their solidarity with anti-CCP movements.
If you look at the streets of Hong Kong, or at the global solidarity marches in London, Berlin, New York, everywhere—you'll see that people who are ethnically Chinese are on the front lines here, and that they are the ones enduring the most abuse and intimidation from pro-China elements, who act out of a misplaced sense of ethno-nationalist pride and a belief that insulting the country of China insults them as Chinese people (which is exactly what PRC ideology wants them to feel). Understand that ethnic Chinese who are pro-HK, or critical of the PRC's history of humanitarian atrocities and historical revisionism, are
themselves frequently accused of being self-hating racists by the pro-mainland opposition.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Hong Kong, specifically, is one of the most complex cities on earth when it comes to national identity. You have people who feel very Chinese and see Chinese culture and history going back to ancient times as their own, but who passionately oppose the PRC's Han/Mandarin imperialism. You have BNO passport holders from the colonial era who still identify as British. You have young localists who dissociate from China completely and who identify only as born-and-bred Hong Kongers.
All of these factions and more are bound up in the democratic movement, and the current Chinese government is desperate to make you forget that. They want Hong Kongers to forget; they want global observers to forget. They
want ethnic Chinese to feel threatened and offended every time somebody speaks out against the country, because it serves their ideological interests to conflate the two as much as possible.
Is there some racism going on in the west among people who don't know any better? Probably—and that's unfortunate. But it's also a distraction that serves PRC interests. So when people respond to anti-China sentiment by saying, "but aren't you just being racist"—understand that this sets off every alarm bell in the room.
The People's Republic of China does not stand for the global diaspora of people with ethnic Chinese heritage. About this, we must be loud and clear. Otherwise we risk capitulating to their argument that their campaign of regional hegemony is an internal matter of sovereignty, in which the west is not supposed to interfere.
I'm willing to read you in good faith here and I'm sorry that others are jumping on you in a way that feels hostile. But I hope you understand why some of the arguments you are making hit sore points with those who are standing up against the PRC menace—and familiar points where they have been hit many times before.
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