The running protests in Hong Kong are a great example this year of the difficulty of thinking critically about current events.
Online you can find "riot porn" leftists getting excited by the disciplined tactics of the protesters—using wok dishes to extinguish tear gas canisters, for example. You can find stentorian Parenti-fanboy tankies shouting that the whole of the protest movement is a CIA attempt to recolonise Hong Kong for the USA. Chinese state media is working overtime remixing footage of the protests as propaganda, and so on.
Almost all the commentary talks in terms of states and state agencies and not in terms of trade, capital flows, profit or vested interests. This means a huge amount is out of the picture in popular analysis. Dangerous pseudo-left shills like Oz Katerji are out there equating "liberation movements" in Syria, Sudan, Hong Kong and Venezuela as if they're all the same.
It's actually really hard to make out what is going on, and how it relates to the balance of economic and political forces in China. The naive accounts we have of the Chinese regime and its social bases are very unhelpful as well. I'm confused and about all I know is that there are very few voices I trust to both understand the situation and faithfully communicate insights.
