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So in March of 2019 I was hopeful. Han Kuo-Yu was ahead in the polls, and it looked like that if he won, that Mainland and Taiwan were going to continue the Ma-Xi talks, at which point you'd have trade deals, investment opportunities, and tons of money to be made. But knowing what I know about history, I was thinking "so what could happen to screw this up." And then the riots broke out in June. When things first started the protests were mostly peaceful, Beijing was absolutely desperate to give the protesters what they wanted, and in June and July, Han was dropping in the polls, but it looked like he was still ahead. At the time, I was hoping that this could be a blessing in disguise. If the moderates got control of the protests, agreed to a deal with the government then this might end up *helping* the KMT.
Then August came and the bottom dropped out. I'll leave it to historians to see how accidental or intentional it was. But it looks interesting that when things started to stabilize, someone wanted to push things off a cliff, and the fact that the major newspaper in Hong Kong (the Apple Daily) is headquartered in Taiwan and all of them are connected with the Trump organization means that you don't have to be into tinfoil hats to see a connection.
But this had pretty devastating effects for me. I've been under the cloud of the Chinese Civil War all my life, and I was hoping for a political deal that would create the same sort of relief that happened when the Cold War ended. No, it's not going to be a situation where you sign an agreement and everything is good, but I was hoping for something like an armistice and I could spend the rest of my life building on that.
But that's gone for now, and I estimate that it will take at least a decade to get back to where we were in March 2019, and I'm getting old. It took over two decades of work to get to where we were in early 2019. It's a shame that things fell apart, but the nice thing about thinking in terms of decades or centuries, is that this sort of thing is a "minor setback." The thing about the people that wrecked the deal, is that I don't think they have the patience to fight for another decade, or another century. At some point, they will give up, and then we win.
The big task for me is to make sure that my personal stuff is fine, then do what I can to do fix what's wrong with Hong Kong. Old dreams die, but you can dream new dreams. One of the things I've been reading a lot of is the fall of Saigon, since I have relatives that lived through that and escaped via boat through Hong Kong to the United States, and so I was thinking that what happens next in Hong Kong is not going to be nearly as bad as what they had to go through, and things ended up okay. Saigon is a nice city today.
And one reason I'm writing now is that we are at the end of a major pause. COVID has put the world in deep freeze for about a year. Once it unfreezes, everything is going to be different.