Seconded. It's exactly what I thought when I saw the photo.
They sort of think it's a healthy habit to have a short nap at noon -- I was like "what?!" when I was actually asked to take a nap. If I'm not mistaken the schools in China actually allocate "nap time" and encourage students to sleep.
The smartest people on the planet wonder about the origin of the universe, discovered many wondrous things, and yet they still have no clue why things happened as it did.
Your overconfident arrogance would be annoying if the tortured remains of your natural curiosity were not pitiful.
Disclaimer: I am not religious and I don't believe that "God" created the universe.
it should be noted that the Japanese had earned it many times over
No people of any country or nation would have "earned" a indiscriminate genocidal bombing like that. Sure you might debate whether it was a necessary evil to get the Japanese to surrender, but "earned" is way off.
I think the lack of diary products in Chinese/Japanese food is more of a culinary preference than biology. In recent years, there is a trend of more diary products being introduced into the Chinese market, probably due to Western culinary influences.
Of course, some people are more intolerant than others, but as a ethnic Chinese I never had much trouble with milk, at least never had problems with up to a few cups a day.
Are you saying that we shouldn't be able to talk about or research potential differences in groups of people because of "potential racism"?
Can't even state that, say, ethnic Japanese have dark / black hair?
You say the research is incomplete. Does it mean any such research must be done in secrecy for 10 years until it's complete, then published only together with a big fat disclaimer that the research should not be understood to promote Japanese supremacy?
I really can't see anybody sane would claim Japanese are superior because their intestines have some kind of bacteria. I mean, sure, the crazy racy people would use anything as a justification, but that's their problem, not a problem with the research itself.
Disclaimer: I'm not Japanese and I don't support any kind of racial discrimination.
So can an average, well-educated Japanese, but that doesn't make them Chinese. It's an accident of logographic writing systems that people can decipher writings in what really are unintelligible dialects or languages to them.
No, an average Japanese can't. There have been great Japanese scholars working on Chinese studies and they sometimes produce work that surpasses Chinese scholars, but the average well educated Japanese simply won't understand the Chinese writing.
It's not like modern Chinese is simply using the same characters in a different way, and it's definitely not a different language. We will never know how the ancient Chinese speak exactly, and the spoken language will probably be unintelligible to anybody alive, but if that's what you're arguing, then I don't understand Shanghainese at all -- does that mean it's not Chinese?
Honestly, I read Records_of_the_Grand_Historian in my leisure time, and it's completely intelligible and understandable, and it's not like I'm deciphering the "logographic" characters one by one. If "logographic" characters itself makes a language more intelligible, then why are these things so hard to understand?
10 years ago when I didn't know better, I thought PHP was an OK language. Ever since I got used to writing with "real" languages, PHP's inconsistent function calls, flat namespaces, OOP-as-afterthought and other poor design choices really bugged the hell out of me. These days I question the sanity of the people who designed PHP in the first place.
Sure PHP might be superficially useful in the "real world", but then you can learn it in a week once you've grasped basic programming. And if I'm hiring, I probably wouldn't hire one that uses PHP as his only primary language, even if I'm looking for a PHP developer. Why? Because if the only language you know is PHP, you can't be writing good code. More likely, you're one of those creating trivial SQL injections.
As for VB, I'll be less harsh, since particularly that the "new" VB.NET is essentially C# in another dialect, which isn't too bad. But then, it's Microsoft lock-in without much advantage to compensate for.
China likes to present and view itself that way but that's a fiction, starting with the notion that something like a continuous Chinese civilization has even existed over the past two millennia.
If you're talking about political entities, empires and kingdoms and states, it is common knowledge that China was splitted and divided and invaded for much of its history.
But as a civilization, China did indeed exist continuously for at least the past two millenia. I really can't fathom why you could claim otherwise. It's definitely not "one of the oldest civilizations" compared with the ancient greeks, egyptians and babylonians, etc. but age-wise it truly has a 2000+ year history. Educated Chinese can read the texts written 2000 years ago, the ethnic "Han" majority derives its name directly from the Han empire 2000 years ago, and the political system had little significant change until 100 years ago. And this is not only true today, but for the continuous period of 2000+ years.
I'm not saying this makes the Chinese "great". If anything it is evidence of stagnation.
the modern Chinese script dates back to maybe 200-700AD
An average well educated Chinese person can read and understand Chinese written in 200BC and beyond. The form of the characters were standardized by the Qin emperor in around 200BC, and there were few modifications throughout the millenia.
Not much different from what Europe experienced with Rome and afterwards.
The Roman Empire simply ceased to exist forever. China is still on the map, and has a traceable cultural and political heritage that goes back to at least the Qin empire and beyond. There were long periods of splits, but the empires that formed after were just like the ones before, culturally, politically and ideologically.
In fact the stagnation (relative to the rapid rise of the west in the last 500 years) is probably what led to the downfall of the "great" Chinese empire.
I agree that there is a lot of "my Chinese dick is longer than your western dicks" kind of meaningless boasting, but I do feel compelled to rectify some of your points that I see as invalid.
The way to handle memory for most tasks in these competitions is to statically declare the structures you need, and use them intelligently. There was almost never a need to malloc() or "new" objects.
The large inputs are usually there to force solutions use efficient algorithms, not to filter out the ones that leak memory...
In fact, in 99.99% of the problems encountered in these "informatics" competitions, you don't need any memory management. You need to allocate memory (usually declaring a large array or something like that), but you don't need to worry about free() or cleaning up anything.
The static type system doesn't get in the way either. The input is usually just numbers (frequently integers) and that's what you deal with.
I've participated in local and regional Informatics Olympiads, and went to the IOI once. I was involved in training local students a few years ago, so I know quite a bit of the ins and outs of these competitions.
All the languages have pros and cons, but PHP and VB obviously aren't suitable (if only for their encouragement of crappy coding practices). Java offers little advantage over C/C++, and it forces OOP onto you so it adds an unnecessary layer of complexity for the students.
The "industry standard" of competitive programming is C++, since it offers near-C speed with the power of various algorithms (eg. sort) and data structures ( maps, sets, priority queues ). Those who intend to take the competition seriously should be using C++ as their primary language. But then judging from your requirements the vast majority of your students won't fall into this category, so I wouldn't recommend C++, at least not at this stage.
Python generally is a good first language for its simplicity and power. There are a few problems with using python for competitive programming though. First, speed can become a problem for *some* contests, which have rather tight runtime constraints. The contests that cater for a wide range of languages are usually better in this respect, but a lot out there are primarily C/C++/Pascal/Java. Secondly, the fact that python supports a range of built in advanced data structures and algorithms means that you may lose the chance to teach them how to implement the basic stuff, eg. using a binary search tree to implement a map (typing `` mymap = {}; mymap[foo] = bar; '' is surely easier than implementing a BST yourself). You might ask why learn to reinvent the wheel when most modern languages provide these features, but these data structures and algorithms is the core of informatics olympiads, and one needs to learn from the basics. That being said, if the timeframe is just 2 months, I think teaching python might be most rewarding for the students.
C and Pascal are basically on the same league. C is a bit more "archaic" than Pascal in terms of the way it does things, but feature-wise they are roughly equivalent. The languages are simple, fast, and bare bones enough to force the user to implement the basic stuff. In the long term they are good languages for teaching data structures and algorithms, but require a bit of patience on the part of the student since you need to know quite a bit before you can do anything "flashy" with them.
My experience with most average students is that they usually struggle to form precise ideas on what to tell the program to do, and then when they do have rough ideas they then fail to write a syntactically correct program, and if they really do write a syntactically correct program the program usually fails on correctness for most inputs, or simply do the wrong thing. Running time shouldn't be a concern before the students actually get a correct program, and my experience is, unless you have really really bright students, most of them probably won't be able to come close to writing a correct program within competition constraints, so don't worry too much about running time.
In short, I recommend python, but in the long term you might want to think about using C/Pascal. And if you restrain yourself to a subset of C++, it might work too.
Linux does the same thing, as far as I know, and you don't see anybody calling Linux a memory hogging OS.
Just FYI, a while ago Andrew Morton was flamed by some people for having the kernel cache too much, and a debate similar to this one ensued. Eventually he had to add a "swappiness" option to the kernel to make the complainers happy.
So yeah, Linux indeed does the same thing, but people flamed anyway.
As others have already mentioned, did it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, that it's not because those people were somehow still considered themselves to owe allegiance to their former countries, but just that what they said was closer to the objective truth?
Maybe the US shouldn't act all righteous after being caught poking its nose into a foreign country? Maybe the US media really is biased in reporting the incidents about Tibet?
And why should they care how China was portrayed? Is it not enough that they desire at least some level of objectivity? Does demonizing China help anybody at all (except those who profit from fear)?
Instead of accusing them of sympathizing with the country that they should have severed ties with, why not use them as a glimpse into the window the truth of a country so often subject to distortion or outright lies by the US govt and media?
The Vietnamese and the Japanese are essentially descendants of the Chinese so they would share the same cultural value of favoring cooperation over competition. They have demonstrated this value over and over again with their resilience through wars, economic strife and growing pains.
Not any more than Americans are descendants of the English. There are many stories and legends of Chinese travelers and settlers being dispatched to various places in Asia, but there is no conclusive evidence of (East) Asians being direct descendants of the Chinese. What (I think) likely happened is that there was a lot of intermarriage between the Chinese settlers and the native peoples.
Besides, as a sibling poster already mentioned, you're likely to spark a flamewar if you take this attitude to a Japanese or a Vietnamese person.
Regarding the cultural heritage though, you're essentially correct.
When they were in college, the country was in ruins and urgently needed rebuilding. Which is why the brightest minds (or at least the most influential people) opted for Engineering.
Besides, until recent decades nobody really studied things like Law in China. There wasn't any, and wasn't any perceived need for it, not in the Chinese communist society.
> You claim that China is more capitalist that the US.
I said *Hong Kong* is more capitalist than the US. We do have worker unions here, and occasional strikes. I'm pretty sure the government is somewhat annoyed by that, but nobody's out to get them.
China's "social market economy" is capitalist until the government decides that the economy is going in the wrong direction and intervenes. Or that some markets contravene the state ideology and gets shut down. I'm aware of that.
> When the Chinese finally decided they had had enough of Taiwan
Chinese hostility of Taiwan had nothing to do with political ideology. Taiwan was a result of the Chinese civil war fought between the Communists and Nationalists (which back then of course was somewhat due to differences in ideology). The Nationalists fled to Taiwan and for a while their motto was to muster forces and retake China through military means. There was a lot of bad blood between them, and political ideology was only one of the reasons for the hostility.
In fact Taiwan was no better than China until recent decades. They were under marshal law until the 1980s. The only reason why they had a better image in the US was because Taiwan was valuable in keeping China's military in check, and a potential location for a proxy war with China.
As for your other points, most of us in Hong Kong are well aware of that.
Dude, Hong Kong is not the China that you speak of. If all you know about Hong Kong are the few paranoid people who thought that Hong Kong would become a Maoist state, your sources of information are really, really bad.
Stop drinking all that kool aid and open your eyes and see for yourself what the place is like.
Communist command economy? See for yourself where Hong Kong lies. http://www.heritage.org/Index/ It basically means we are more capitalist than the USA.
Dictatorship government facilitating public transport? Glad that you raised the issue, there were multiple protests in the last few weeks because of a proposal to build high speed rail connecting to Chinese cities. It wasn't a petty protest either. Participants were counted in thousands, and it was the talk of the city. I definitely know what that is like.
Slave? And I don't know it? It may well be true for a lot of people in mainland China, but here, there are no censorship laws, no GFW, you can say whatever you want and the government is not going to get you, even if you're saying something like "God Damn the Chinese Communist Party" (the Falungung people regularly poise banners along these lines and stage protests in the busy streets in the Central districts). The mass media (tv, etc) routinely replay the recordings of June 4th Tiananmen Square protests on the air. I've personally organized protests on unreasonable crackdowns of Internet activity and censorship attempts by the local police. The city is buzzing with proposals for democratic reform. A few years ago 500 thousand people went on the streets urging the government to push forward political reforms.
Sure we may not be a democracy, but alleging that Hong Kong people don't know what they're missing out of? You really have no idea. And careful in painting Hong Kong people and the PRC government with the same brush -- a lot of people here identify themselves as Hong Kong people, but nonetheless have nothing to do with the PRC government. Why? For precisely the same reasons you've mentioned.
Not everything that comes in touch with China becomes an evil "communist command economic". Even today in China the label "communist" is only in name, the economy is basically more capitalist than planned. Your information is like 30 years out of date. Get a clue.
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Seconded. It's exactly what I thought when I saw the photo.
They sort of think it's a healthy habit to have a short nap at noon -- I was like "what?!" when I was actually asked to take a nap. If I'm not mistaken the schools in China actually allocate "nap time" and encourage students to sleep.
Same to you.
The smartest people on the planet wonder about the origin of the universe, discovered many wondrous things, and yet they still have no clue why things happened as it did.
Your overconfident arrogance would be annoying if the tortured remains of your natural curiosity were not pitiful.
Disclaimer: I am not religious and I don't believe that "God" created the universe.
Japan ended up being our only real presence in that part of the world afterwards.
Translation: we will kill innocent people to attempt to establish a puppet government on the other side of the Earth.
That's exactly what the USA has been doing for decades. For justice! For freedom! For democracy!
There's a reason why some people hate your country enough to fly hundreds of thousands of miles just to take down your buildings.
it should be noted that the Japanese had earned it many times over
No people of any country or nation would have "earned" a indiscriminate genocidal bombing like that. Sure you might debate whether it was a necessary evil to get the Japanese to surrender, but "earned" is way off.
I think the lack of diary products in Chinese/Japanese food is more of a culinary preference than biology. In recent years, there is a trend of more diary products being introduced into the Chinese market, probably due to Western culinary influences.
Of course, some people are more intolerant than others, but as a ethnic Chinese I never had much trouble with milk, at least never had problems with up to a few cups a day.
Are you saying that we shouldn't be able to talk about or research potential differences in groups of people because of "potential racism"?
Can't even state that, say, ethnic Japanese have dark / black hair?
You say the research is incomplete. Does it mean any such research must be done in secrecy for 10 years until it's complete, then published only together with a big fat disclaimer that the research should not be understood to promote Japanese supremacy?
I really can't see anybody sane would claim Japanese are superior because their intestines have some kind of bacteria. I mean, sure, the crazy racy people would use anything as a justification, but that's their problem, not a problem with the research itself.
Disclaimer: I'm not Japanese and I don't support any kind of racial discrimination.
Yes, yes. A democratically elected government that goes around the world killing people and committing torture... that is so much better.
Hey, 99.99999999999999999999999% of the world (I presume humans) is like less than one cell.
So can an average, well-educated Japanese, but that doesn't make them Chinese. It's an accident of logographic writing systems that people can decipher writings in what really are unintelligible dialects or languages to them.
No, an average Japanese can't. There have been great Japanese scholars working on Chinese studies and they sometimes produce work that surpasses Chinese scholars, but the average well educated Japanese simply won't understand the Chinese writing.
It's not like modern Chinese is simply using the same characters in a different way, and it's definitely not a different language. We will never know how the ancient Chinese speak exactly, and the spoken language will probably be unintelligible to anybody alive, but if that's what you're arguing, then I don't understand Shanghainese at all -- does that mean it's not Chinese?
Honestly, I read Records_of_the_Grand_Historian in my leisure time, and it's completely intelligible and understandable, and it's not like I'm deciphering the "logographic" characters one by one. If "logographic" characters itself makes a language more intelligible, then why are these things so hard to understand?
10 years ago when I didn't know better, I thought PHP was an OK language. Ever since I got used to writing with "real" languages, PHP's inconsistent function calls, flat namespaces, OOP-as-afterthought and other poor design choices really bugged the hell out of me. These days I question the sanity of the people who designed PHP in the first place.
Sure PHP might be superficially useful in the "real world", but then you can learn it in a week once you've grasped basic programming. And if I'm hiring, I probably wouldn't hire one that uses PHP as his only primary language, even if I'm looking for a PHP developer. Why? Because if the only language you know is PHP, you can't be writing good code. More likely, you're one of those creating trivial SQL injections.
As for VB, I'll be less harsh, since particularly that the "new" VB.NET is essentially C# in another dialect, which isn't too bad. But then, it's Microsoft lock-in without much advantage to compensate for.
China likes to present and view itself that way but that's a fiction, starting with the notion that something like a continuous Chinese civilization has even existed over the past two millennia.
If you're talking about political entities, empires and kingdoms and states, it is common knowledge that China was splitted and divided and invaded for much of its history.
But as a civilization, China did indeed exist continuously for at least the past two millenia. I really can't fathom why you could claim otherwise. It's definitely not "one of the oldest civilizations" compared with the ancient greeks, egyptians and babylonians, etc. but age-wise it truly has a 2000+ year history. Educated Chinese can read the texts written 2000 years ago, the ethnic "Han" majority derives its name directly from the Han empire 2000 years ago, and the political system had little significant change until 100 years ago. And this is not only true today, but for the continuous period of 2000+ years.
I'm not saying this makes the Chinese "great". If anything it is evidence of stagnation.
the modern Chinese script dates back to maybe 200-700AD
An average well educated Chinese person can read and understand Chinese written in 200BC and beyond. The form of the characters were standardized by the Qin emperor in around 200BC, and there were few modifications throughout the millenia.
Not much different from what Europe experienced with Rome and afterwards.
The Roman Empire simply ceased to exist forever. China is still on the map, and has a traceable cultural and political heritage that goes back to at least the Qin empire and beyond. There were long periods of splits, but the empires that formed after were just like the ones before, culturally, politically and ideologically.
In fact the stagnation (relative to the rapid rise of the west in the last 500 years) is probably what led to the downfall of the "great" Chinese empire.
I agree that there is a lot of "my Chinese dick is longer than your western dicks" kind of meaningless boasting, but I do feel compelled to rectify some of your points that I see as invalid.
The competition is pretty hardcore at higher levels.
Then you're doing it wrong.
The way to handle memory for most tasks in these competitions is to statically declare the structures you need, and use them intelligently. There was almost never a need to malloc() or "new" objects.
The large inputs are usually there to force solutions use efficient algorithms, not to filter out the ones that leak memory...
In fact, in 99.99% of the problems encountered in these "informatics" competitions, you don't need any memory management. You need to allocate memory (usually declaring a large array or something like that), but you don't need to worry about free() or cleaning up anything.
The static type system doesn't get in the way either. The input is usually just numbers (frequently integers) and that's what you deal with.
I've participated in local and regional Informatics Olympiads, and went to the IOI once. I was involved in training local students a few years ago, so I know quite a bit of the ins and outs of these competitions.
All the languages have pros and cons, but PHP and VB obviously aren't suitable (if only for their encouragement of crappy coding practices). Java offers little advantage over C/C++, and it forces OOP onto you so it adds an unnecessary layer of complexity for the students.
The "industry standard" of competitive programming is C++, since it offers near-C speed with the power of various algorithms (eg. sort) and data structures ( maps, sets, priority queues ). Those who intend to take the competition seriously should be using C++ as their primary language. But then judging from your requirements the vast majority of your students won't fall into this category, so I wouldn't recommend C++, at least not at this stage.
Python generally is a good first language for its simplicity and power. There are a few problems with using python for competitive programming though. First, speed can become a problem for *some* contests, which have rather tight runtime constraints. The contests that cater for a wide range of languages are usually better in this respect, but a lot out there are primarily C/C++/Pascal/Java. Secondly, the fact that python supports a range of built in advanced data structures and algorithms means that you may lose the chance to teach them how to implement the basic stuff, eg. using a binary search tree to implement a map (typing `` mymap = {}; mymap[foo] = bar; '' is surely easier than implementing a BST yourself). You might ask why learn to reinvent the wheel when most modern languages provide these features, but these data structures and algorithms is the core of informatics olympiads, and one needs to learn from the basics. That being said, if the timeframe is just 2 months, I think teaching python might be most rewarding for the students.
C and Pascal are basically on the same league. C is a bit more "archaic" than Pascal in terms of the way it does things, but feature-wise they are roughly equivalent. The languages are simple, fast, and bare bones enough to force the user to implement the basic stuff. In the long term they are good languages for teaching data structures and algorithms, but require a bit of patience on the part of the student since you need to know quite a bit before you can do anything "flashy" with them.
My experience with most average students is that they usually struggle to form precise ideas on what to tell the program to do, and then when they do have rough ideas they then fail to write a syntactically correct program, and if they really do write a syntactically correct program the program usually fails on correctness for most inputs, or simply do the wrong thing. Running time shouldn't be a concern before the students actually get a correct program, and my experience is, unless you have really really bright students, most of them probably won't be able to come close to writing a correct program within competition constraints, so don't worry too much about running time.
In short, I recommend python, but in the long term you might want to think about using C/Pascal. And if you restrain yourself to a subset of C++, it might work too.
Linux does the same thing, as far as I know, and you don't see anybody calling Linux a memory hogging OS.
Just FYI, a while ago Andrew Morton was flamed by some people for having the kernel cache too much, and a debate similar to this one ensued. Eventually he had to add a "swappiness" option to the kernel to make the complainers happy.
So yeah, Linux indeed does the same thing, but people flamed anyway.
This is going to be the new racism.
As others have already mentioned, did it occur to you that maybe, just maybe, that it's not because those people were somehow still considered themselves to owe allegiance to their former countries, but just that what they said was closer to the objective truth?
Maybe the US shouldn't act all righteous after being caught poking its nose into a foreign country?
Maybe the US media really is biased in reporting the incidents about Tibet?
And why should they care how China was portrayed? Is it not enough that they desire at least some level of objectivity? Does demonizing China help anybody at all (except those who profit from fear)?
Instead of accusing them of sympathizing with the country that they should have severed ties with, why not use them as a glimpse into the window the truth of a country so often subject to distortion or outright lies by the US govt and media?
Javascript is really different from C++/C#/Java. Take some time to learn it.
In fact, from what I understand about D, it's just a "C++ done right", but still it's in the same class as the C++/C#/Java that you hate so much.
The Vietnamese and the Japanese are essentially descendants of the Chinese so they would share the same cultural value of favoring cooperation over competition. They have demonstrated this value over and over again with their resilience through wars, economic strife and growing pains.
Not any more than Americans are descendants of the English. There are many stories and legends of Chinese travelers and settlers being dispatched to various places in Asia, but there is no conclusive evidence of (East) Asians being direct descendants of the Chinese. What (I think) likely happened is that there was a lot of intermarriage between the Chinese settlers and the native peoples.
Besides, as a sibling poster already mentioned, you're likely to spark a flamewar if you take this attitude to a Japanese or a Vietnamese person.
Regarding the cultural heritage though, you're essentially correct.
When they were in college, the country was in ruins and urgently needed rebuilding. Which is why the brightest minds (or at least the most influential people) opted for Engineering.
Besides, until recent decades nobody really studied things like Law in China. There wasn't any, and wasn't any perceived need for it, not in the Chinese communist society.
> You claim that China is more capitalist that the US.
I said *Hong Kong* is more capitalist than the US. We do have worker unions here, and occasional strikes. I'm pretty sure the government is somewhat annoyed by that, but nobody's out to get them.
China's "social market economy" is capitalist until the government decides that the economy is going in the wrong direction and intervenes. Or that some markets contravene the state ideology and gets shut down. I'm aware of that.
> When the Chinese finally decided they had had enough of Taiwan
Chinese hostility of Taiwan had nothing to do with political ideology. Taiwan was a result of the Chinese civil war fought between the Communists and Nationalists (which back then of course was somewhat due to differences in ideology). The Nationalists fled to Taiwan and for a while their motto was to muster forces and retake China through military means. There was a lot of bad blood between them, and political ideology was only one of the reasons for the hostility.
In fact Taiwan was no better than China until recent decades. They were under marshal law until the 1980s. The only reason why they had a better image in the US was because Taiwan was valuable in keeping China's military in check, and a potential location for a proxy war with China.
As for your other points, most of us in Hong Kong are well aware of that.
Dude, Hong Kong is not the China that you speak of. If all you know about Hong Kong are the few paranoid people who thought that Hong Kong would become a Maoist state, your sources of information are really, really bad.
Stop drinking all that kool aid and open your eyes and see for yourself what the place is like.
Communist command economy? See for yourself where Hong Kong lies. http://www.heritage.org/Index/ It basically means we are more capitalist than the USA.
Dictatorship government facilitating public transport? Glad that you raised the issue, there were multiple protests in the last few weeks because of a proposal to build high speed rail connecting to Chinese cities. It wasn't a petty protest either. Participants were counted in thousands, and it was the talk of the city. I definitely know what that is like.
Slave? And I don't know it? It may well be true for a lot of people in mainland China, but here, there are no censorship laws, no GFW, you can say whatever you want and the government is not going to get you, even if you're saying something like "God Damn the Chinese Communist Party" (the Falungung people regularly poise banners along these lines and stage protests in the busy streets in the Central districts). The mass media (tv, etc) routinely replay the recordings of June 4th Tiananmen Square protests on the air. I've personally organized protests on unreasonable crackdowns of Internet activity and censorship attempts by the local police. The city is buzzing with proposals for democratic reform. A few years ago 500 thousand people went on the streets urging the government to push forward political reforms.
Sure we may not be a democracy, but alleging that Hong Kong people don't know what they're missing out of? You really have no idea. And careful in painting Hong Kong people and the PRC government with the same brush -- a lot of people here identify themselves as Hong Kong people, but nonetheless have nothing to do with the PRC government. Why? For precisely the same reasons you've mentioned.
Not everything that comes in touch with China becomes an evil "communist command economic". Even today in China the label "communist" is only in name, the economy is basically more capitalist than planned. Your information is like 30 years out of date. Get a clue.
Furthermore, once you start charging money, it is harder to disclaim liability if there is anything wrong in the software.