The history of the opium wars need to be as well know as the history of slavery in the US, until then, leaving this important context out of the discussion makes people think that the UK is the victim.

What I was trying to say is that media in the West pay far less attentions to the wrong doings of their allies. For example, the anniversary of the Tiananmen square incident made it to the front page of HN, but I have never seen anything on HN when it's the anniversary of the Nanjing massacre. These two are comparable because the Japanese leaders are still visiting the Yasukuni Shrine. Also, I have personally almost never see news about bad things that happened in Taiwan on Western media, does this mean that Taiwan is heaven on earth?

You may have freedom of speech, but I don't think your people are well-informed when they are flooded by cherry-picked facts, and this leads to bias against your non-allies.

About what HKers think, here is an image of the flyers they distributed during the protest: https://twitter.com/liuyun2018/status/1133227121713659904

Translation for the main bullet points:

> You don't get to have a lawyer: they will be unavailable or disappear before court.

> Imprison without trail: you will spend one or two years in prison at minimum.

> "Disappear": no one will hear from you when you are in prison, not even your families.

> Judges follow CCP's instructions: the CCP decides what happens on court.

> Super-high conviction rate: 99.94% nation wide conviction rate.

> Lighting-fast trails: No lawyers no family members, 5 minutes and it's done.

> Secret trails: When your family knows you are already in prison.

> Collective punishment： your family members are equally guilty.

Even in mainland China the situation is no where near this bad. These false accusations makes me question their motives. If you don't believe me and think we have North Korea levels of speech control, then I would ask you to please update your views or better, visit China if you get a chance.

Listing several individuals arrested for their political actions doesn't justify this baseless conjecture about the future of HK.

> Give an inch, give a mile.

Yes I know you don't trust the CCP, the CCP doesn't trust the West either. Today we implement democracy (as you defined) in HK, tomorrow you want HK to declare independence. Who's next? Shenzhen? Shanghai? We are aware of how the West has been "liberating" people in the Middle East and we are afraid of it.

Which brings me to my final point: we share completely different views of the world, and some words

You have been using the word democracy like it's some kind of panacea and refusing it is unacceptable. I (and the CCP) don't agree. Democracy is guaranteed to never be the worst, but it doesn't necessarily be the best, in all situations. Besides, based on the actions of the US after WWII, we have every reason to believe that the US doesn't want other parts of the world to stay in peace, or at least, does not have the ability to resolve the problem it created. Despite what the Western media has been saying, the CCP is actually bad at media manipulation, not nearly as good as the West. CCP thinks that if we implement democracy defined by the West, then the people will fall to Western values extremely fast and the whole country will become a huge mess. Yes, we are thinking about the Brexit drama and the likes, only more bloody.