Chinese Government Decides It's Done Fucking Around, Forces Hong Kong To Engage In 'Patriot-Only' Elections
from the flag-humping-now-mandatory dept
Hong Kong is now just China. The last pretense of the region being anything but another Chinese province has been washed away.
It's been a steady erosion since China took possession of the region from the British government back in 1997. Despite an agreement to steer clear of direct control of Hong Kong's government until 2047, the Chinese government immediately began meddling, amping things up when Hong Kong residents engaged in sustained pro-democracy protests.
Over the past couple of years, the Chinese government has turned protesting into a crime with life sentences attached and restyled the Hong Kong government in its own image. It has also used the greatest excuse ever invented for governmental power grabs -- "national security" -- to make it easier to jail opponents, eject problematic government officials, and control the flow of information, along with the information itself.
Control of the internet has been handed over to Hong Kong police, an entity which is entirely subservient to its new masters. As if that wasn't enough, the Chinese government, with the assistance of the complicit remnants of Hong Kong's government, converted the burgeoning police state into a literal police state by making a police commissioner the region's Secretary of Security (the same police commissioner who presided over numerous acts of violence against pro-democracy activists) and elevating the former Secretary of Security to fully-compromised Chief Executive Carrie Lam's second-in-command.
The latest move -- enabled by a law passed earlier this year -- cuts Hong Kong residents out of the election loop. Only certain people are allowed to vote for their new representatives and officials, and they've been preapproved by the Chinese government.
Hong Kong's political elite began selecting a powerful committee on Sunday which will choose the city's next leader and nearly half the legislature under a new "patriots only" system imposed by Beijing.
[...]
The first poll under that new system -- carrying the slogan "Patriots rule Hong Kong" -- took place on Sunday as members of the city's ruling classes cast votes for a 1,500-seat Election Committee.
In December, that committee will appoint 40 of the city's 90 legislators -- 30 others will be chosen by special interest groups and just 20 will be directly elected. The following year, it will pick Hong Kong's next Beijing-approved leader.
China is at least being honest about why it's instituted a new election system that ensures China will be well-represented in Hong Kong's government.
Beijing insists the new political system is more representative and will ensure "anti-China" elements are not allowed into office.
Carrie Lam, the current head of Hong Kong, made it clear she agrees with the new system inflicted on her region with a statement that sounds like it was crafted by a North Korean government official/Donald Trump speechwriter:
Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam told reporters Sunday: "The Election Committee elections are very meaningful as it is the first elections held after we have improved the electoral system to ensure that only patriots can take office."
A caricature in a political satire couldn't have said it better. And that's all Lam is at this point. Unfortunately, she presides over a region that has to pay for this buffoonish kowtowing with their lives and liberties. To be sure, self-preservation is a powerful motivating force for most politicians, but Lam's abdication of her role as a servant of Hong Kong residents means people are going to end up dead at the hands of her new overseers.
And, to be sure, Lam herself wants to live an unencumbered life, but she's going to have to step over the bodies of the "non-patriots" she used to serve to do it. The same can be said for everyone in the Hong Kong government who has decided it's better to serve oppressors than fight to live free.
This bogus, jingoistic election is the end of Hong Kong as we know it. China will be more than happy to profit from the region's immense wealth, but it's never going to restore rights to the people who made Hong Kong what it is.
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Filed Under: china, civil rights, elections, hong kong, patriots
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Immense wealth for now
With the total takeover, I'm interested to see if they don't accidentally kill off the golden goose.
If Xi Jinping is happy to loot HK's current wealth with no desire to keep it producing, then he'll continue on his present course. If they're not careful, they'll supplant actual wealth generatioin for the Lysenkoism-equivalent
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Re: Immense wealth for now
Trofim Lysenko is one of the most reviled figures in biology. He went out and talked to the ignorant Siberian peasants, who told him that grain could "get used to" cold temperatures in a few generations. He published studies to this regard - universally denounced as pseudoscience. In capitalist countries, scientists wisely avoided any taint with Communist pseudoscience, speaking instead in favor of the nascent science of eugenics and the Indiana Plan to remove unwanted genes from the future population, even before it caught on in Germany.
The odd detail is that some people in the U.S. eventually dared to do the studies: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40003-015-0170-x But that is "epigenetics", a science invented for the first time in the 1990s, that has nothing to do with the work of Lysenko or the experience of his ignorant Siberian peasants.
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Re: Re: Immense wealth for now
Siberian farmers who noticed a thing have zero to do with anything. Nothing wrong with them.
Lysenko 1) thought genetic information was bullshit (so, so much for epigenetics) and, 2) had ideas similar to Lamarck's while claiming to be not-Lamarckian. Additionally, his own created ideas, based on nothing, involve somatic cells (and their experience in life) influencing the "genetic" (or however he would put it) inheritance of offspring.
His other ideas in agronomy literally led to famines.
So if that's your hill, so be it.
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Re: Re: Immense wealth for now
"But that is "epigenetics", a science invented for the first time in the 1990s, that has nothing to do with the work of Lysenko or the experience of his ignorant Siberian peasants."
Epigenetics is a real thing as demonstrated by empirical observation and a metric boatload of peer-reviewed studies. Which is why certain traits can be permanently invoked by changing environmental conditions.
I have no doubt the "ignorant" siberian peasants may have known what they were talking about given that they spent their lives as peasants where if you subscribe to insubstantial fairy tales around grain, you starve.
Lysenko and his pseudo-lamarckian skew on genetics, however, indeed merits his dark reputation in biology, same as his spiritual peer Ilia Ivanov in charge of Stalin's attempt to breed ape-man supersoldiers.
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Re: Re: Re: Immense wealth for now
It sounds like you lack appreciation for basic science. Tell me -- if Ivanov is such a bad source, who should we cite for this data instead? It's a less disturbing experiment than our modern day "organoid" studies, and think of the knowledge that could be gained by studying human-chimp hybrids and assessing the nature of their consciousness. The main terror is that of bureaucrats who don't know what to write on their forms.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Immense wealth for now
"It sounds like you lack appreciation for basic science."
No, not really. I hold, however, that trying to artificially inseminate women with ape sperm and trying to impregnate female chimpanzees with human sperm is no more "science" than Mengele trying to make people more "aryan" by injecting blue dye into their iris.
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Such a well-written and insightful article - like everything Cushing and Techdirt publish.
What a shame I can't share it with my students, my young child and a few of my more sensitive friends because of the title.
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You could republish on your own website, with a new title as Techdirt does not assert copyright over its articles.
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Re: Re:
Yeah, just copy it and pass it around however. Text files are a thing.
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Well you could share it with those people, and just warn them that the title contains a profanity that they have probably heard hundreds of times before (or in the case of your young child, a word that he should not use until he is much older and understands the meaning - although if his reading comprehension is such that he can actually understand this article, chances are he's either encountered that word already, or will at some point soon, and it would be better if you attempted to explain its meaning and why it's not appropriate to use in certain social situations than to let his first encounter be in a bathroom stall, wondering what that word means). If, despite being warned, anyone chooses to read it anyway, that's on them, and if they get offended with you for sharing it then they are probably people you don't really need in your life anyway.
Just recently I cut a friend out of my life that I had known for 50 years (since back in high school) because he lost it when I made an offhand comment about Donald Trump that was only mildly negative. If he gets offended that easily then I really don't need him in my life anymore. True friends are ones you can disagree with on various topics but they will still accept you. False friends are the ones who only like you as long as you agree with them and subscribe to their world view.
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'The arm's been 99% ripped off' 'But what about the paper-cut?!'
If you share an article about china deciding that only state-approved politicians are allowed to hold office and the thing that offends them the most is the word 'fucking' in the article's title then their priorities are completely shot.
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Re: what a shame
what a shame you couldn't just print it out and then use a black highlighter on the offending text.
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We knew this was coming when the Hong Kong protesters were attacking their opponents in the streets, chasing out Chinese and destroying their university. Were they radicals skilled in the art of destroying their own cause, or were they Chinese provocateurs sent in to create an excuse to crack down, or were they American provocateurs sent in to provoke the Chinese into destroying their own commercial city? That I have no idea.
We should often fear the excesses of our "friends" more than those of our enemies.
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"...chasing out Chinese..."
Ah. Um. Uh...
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So how many renminbi do you get for posting Chinese propaganda?
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"We knew this was coming when the Hong Kong protesters..."
No, we knew this was coming when the british sat down with china and signed the sino-chinese treaty giving Hong Kong back to China. The only real guesswork there was the timetable.
On the one hand dictatorial autocracy is bad, no two ways about that. On the other hand Hong Kong wasn't a conquered territory - it was under a contractual lease and the expectation was always that the place would return to China, and the dictatorial autocracy that comes with.
The residents of HK had few realistic choices once the treaty became reality. The most palatable of which was always "OK, so you've got about twenty years to flee the country. Start now and your children may grow up free". Staying was, very straightforwardly, making the choice of accepting the beijing oligarchy at some point in time.
I can somehow sympathize with the hong kong university students who now have to ask their parents "So let me get this straight, you KNEW this was going to happen and still had me grow up...here!?"
Screw the possible excesses of "friends". HK's main problem today is that every member of the younger generation there has parents who couldn't be arsed to care about the future of their children.
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Only "true" patriots deserve to be able to vote....
Hmm... where have I heard that before???
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Starship Troopers?
Singapore? (They didn't go that far, but the sentiment is there.)
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Part of me feels sad. But I’m also tired of uber-laissez-faire economics cultists propping Hong Kong up as an example of how having basically no trade regulations or controls whatsoever is a good thing and other countries should follow suit. The CCP is shit but I also hate that Hong Kong’s lightning-in-a-bottle existence is (maybe “was” soon enough) used to try and goad people and governments toward embracing delusional hyper-capitalist ideals that ignore the realities we face today.
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Meanwhile...
The Republican party will be screaming for the US to take action against China while at the same time doing everything they can to limit any voters that will vote against them.
Hypocrisy at its best
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Just to be clear, if Carrie Lam was not fully compromised, the only change in that line would be the name of the chief executive. China replace a number of "disloyal" or otherwise uncooperative legislators earlier. How much less reticent would they be to replace the chief executive?
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If there were a solution to China's totalitarianism, I would wonder why it has not been discovered at this late date, or why anyone could reasonably hope that it would be discovered just as Hong Kong needs such.
I myself am curious how far back into the past one might need to go before there might have been something like a positive outcome for HK. Certainly it's pre-1997... but what might the British have done differently that wouldn't have resulted in a shooting war between the UK and China?
If, for instance, had the Brits been pushing gun rights and having everyone have keep a machine gun in the kitchen, could that make a difference? Or would they just have used that as an excuse to steamroll the island and repopulate it with loyalists? And even that's wishful thinking, the CCP might have decided to start 30 years early if the Brits even privately mused the subject.
1989 and Tianamen is a better candidate, though that might be cheating. Had things gone differently there, things could have been more positive for China in general and not just HK.
Really, you need to almost go back a century and have the UK just annex the place.
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Re:
"If there were a solution to China's totalitarianism, I would wonder why it has not been discovered at this late date, or why anyone could reasonably hope that it would be discovered just as Hong Kong needs such."
There isn't. China found a method of governance which worked to maintain the world's largest nation at the time some 2500 years ago and ever since they've stuck to that recipe.
"I myself am curious how far back into the past one might need to go before there might have been something like a positive outcome for HK."
Somewhere in the 18th century when the british drug cartel forced China to lease them the land at gunpoint. Make them not do that. Every other option still results in China retaking HK with the only variable being the exact timetable.
"Or would they just have used that as an excuse to steamroll the island and repopulate it with loyalists?"
"Really, you need to almost go back a century and have the UK just annex the place."
Would solve nothing. Territory which China once accepted as part of the empire will be recovered. Even if the recovery would lead to world war 3 or result in a century-long campaign of HK fending off state-sponsored guerillas and terrorists. Eventually HK was always going to be chinese again.
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Re: Re:
Try reading Chinese history sometime, as 2500 years ago was the start of the warring states period, and it proceeds through various events like the rule of the Manchu, and then the Mongols. European interference and the opium wars, along with the Boxer rebellion did not aid stability. Then there is the tangled period of the warlords and the civil war with Mao, with Japanese invasion and the second world war mixed in with it. The cultural revolution was hardly a time of peace and prosperity.
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"Try reading Chinese history sometime..."
Why do you think I'm saying what I'm saying? I did, and this is the takeaway. See below for clarification.
"...as 2500 years ago was the start of the warring states period, and it proceeds through various events like the rule of the Manchu, and then the Mongols."
Yes indeed; six kingdoms were conquered in the end by Qin Shi Huangdi and Huaxia came to mean the empire of Qin - China. And over 2500 years since that nation has survived as a culture and a nation through revolutions, invasions, foreign takeovers (Genghis and Kublai). Famine, coups and revolution eventually ended with a new dynasty emerging to helm the same country - and all the mongol invasion accomplished was the birth of the Yuan dynasty.
Meanwhile every nation in the west falls apart like snot in heavy rainfall any time either of those upheavals happen. China is of an age with the roman republic yet still exists. The german city-states are ancient in nature yet have been broken apart and recombined so many times just in the last two centuries you aren't finding any hegemonic sense of belonging between, say, a hungarian or a bavarian. The british, french, dutch and spanish empires were all undisputed sovereigns across some 25% of the known world yet fell apart in less than three centuries from their respective inception.
"The cultural revolution was hardly a time of peace and prosperity."
No more so than any time of famine, invasion, revolution, etc...but the nation as a whole still exists as a culture and concept and if you ask a chinese citizen today about Huaxia you'll find a deep-rooted nationalism which albeit less obvious than the common western variety is by far more pervasive.
What China does and the way it maintains it's national integrity is ugly, often both inhumane and wasteful. Unlike every method employed by westerners, however, it's proven. And that makes democracy a hard sell not just to the chinese leadership but often to the citizens as well, who don't need state propaganda to read and understand timelines.
China was always going to redeem themselves from the century of humiliation by taking back every inch of land lost. No matter the cost. Hence Hong Kong had an expiry date as a free city at inception.
They will always suppress dissenters and secessionists - no matter the cost. So Tibet And Xinjiang will get trampled by every means until the residents there see themselves as chinese first and Tibetan or Uyghur second...or until they are no more.
And unless Taiwan drops its assertion of "being China" the PRC will walk in and take it the very minute the US turns its back or can't, at the moment, project force to the Taiwan strait.
None of those are up for discussion, debate, or subject to diplomacy. You'll need to sail another gunship up the Yangtze river and shell Beijing before the PRC backs down - temporarily - from either of those reclamation projects.
The diplomatic corps of the US, UK, France, Germany etc...they all know this which is why no one has even suggested sending aid to either Xinjiang or Hong Kong save through hot air, posturing and angry words. And why the US to this day officially recognizes the PRC as being the sole legal government of China - while still patrolling the straits of Formosa to render a chinese invasion of Taiwan impossible without running it right across a US battlegroup. Realpolitik at it's finest, complete with conjuring tricks.
With that long wall of words as argument here, then, is the TL;DR;
Nothing could save the freedoms of Hong Kong. Those were dead in the water the very second the brits 'acquired' it. It was only ever a matter of when.
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Nothing but nukes, and by that time, we would be all screwed.
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"Nothing but nukes, and by that time, we would be all screwed."
Correct.
In the west we're fairly casual about fait accompli - if land changed hands a few centuries ago it's usually considered more constructive by almost everyone around to just move forward from there rather than revisit old wounds.
Although I'm sure there are several native americans, basques, sámi, etc who'd beg to differ with that view it's a fact that throughout the west in modern times it's no longer fashionable to use "ancestral land" as the excuse for warfare.
This is - emphatically - not the case for China which will retrieve lost territories of huaxia at any cost, as soon as they are able.
What really bugs me here is that residents of HK must have known this better than any westerner. Once the timetable for the handover was clear, that was the time to leave. Since they didn't, a whole generation of university students today are in the unenviable position of their parents having decided to let them grow up in a territory they must have known would turn into part of the chinese autocracy around the time those children became adults.
I can certainly understand why those students are furious today. They were raised to western freedoms but now, almost overnight, that all changed.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
China waited 200+ years to repel the “southern” invasion. Ending shortly after the battle of Red Cliffs.
It’s like real life chess. It’s not if you loose, it’s how long they make you wait to die.
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Re: HK and good outcomes
As bad as the CCP is, lets not kid ourselves that the Chinese people are just itching for real democracy. China's history is basically warlords. kings, emperors, etc, with the CCP just the latest in a long line of totalitarians.
HK may be different in that it had a few generations of relatively benign British rule, but its gone and it ain't coming back.
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Re: Re: HK and good outcomes
"China's history is basically warlords. kings, emperors, etc, with the CCP just the latest in a long line of totalitarians."
And, arguably, for most of that time, the most generally enlightened nation in the world. The west keeps trying to view China as a USSR-style soviet wannabe communist oligarchy or a North Korea-style dictatorship driven by ideology.
China is neither. Their system of government is as pragmatic as a knife fight and more cynical than Machiavelli. It operates under a very few absolute demands;
90-95% of the citizenry must be happy, well-fed, prosperous and educated.
Huaxia must be maintained.
The government must be completely unopposed.
Everything else is optional.
This makes China both simple and hard to deal with. Simple because you know exactly how they'll react to any situation which impacts any of the absolutes. Hard because there is no compromise on those.
Thus if the residents of HK start questioning Beijing, a crackdown cometh and no diplomacy short of shelling Beijing will make China back down on that.
If The Uyghyrs claim they're Turks rather than Chinese then a crackdown cometh along with "re-education" camps and no diplomacy short of shelling Beijing will make China back down on that.
If the Tibetans claim their religion trumps the edicts of Beijing then a crackdown cometh and no diplomacy short of shelling Beijing will make China back down on that.
If Taiwan claims they are the "real" china then a crackdown cometh the very minute the US no longer has battleships in the strait of Formosa.
And China doesn't forget, unlike western countries. Their current prosperity stems from a plan they started working hard at in the bloody 50's, of becoming the world's manufacturing centre.
HK was always going to be a very short-lived aberration because unless you conquer the damn nation as a whole and establish a new dynasty no foreigner is going to own a piece of mainland China. No matter the cost.
Hence why the UK and the US do very little here. China has no limits on what they're willing to do to reabsorb HK. The UK and the US do.
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and good old gutless UK hasn't done a damn thing except mouth complaints!! terrible! people being jailed, whisked off like the Nazis did to Jews and basically, no one gives a fuck! has China gotten so powerful? gotten so advanced on the quiet? is the world afraid of what China might do if challenged? sounds like an old situation revived in modern times!
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Re:
The world's leaders are worried that China will cut off the seemingly endless supply of cheap tat that's used to keep the proles distracted.
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Re: UK abandons Hong Kongers
What tripe. The UK and Canada are taking in Hong Kong expats by the thousands. The Chinese government is doing all they can to keep anyone from leaving. Maybe read a little before you spout foolishness...
https://www.pri.org/stories/2021-08-11/tens-thousands-hong-kongers-have-applied-speci al-new-uk-visas
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Re:
"has China gotten so powerful?"
Yes. Did you miss this? They dominate large swathes of world trade because everyone wanted to take advantage of their cheap labor and now we're all thoroughly addicted to it.
"gotten so advanced on the quiet?"
It was hardly quiet, it's been building up quite openly for decades.
"is the world afraid of what China might do if challenged?"
Of course they are. While China has a lot to lose as well, nobody really wants to rush into a situation that seriously damages their own economy by being cut off from Chinese markets and labor. Any serious challenge against China would require a fantastical level of world cooperation.
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Re: Re:
"They dominate large swathes of world trade because everyone wanted to take advantage of their cheap labor and now we're all thoroughly addicted to it."
That's how it started, yes, but "cheap labor" stopped being the engine long ago. These days it's the fact that for a few generations now the chinese have run massive subsidies into vocational schools specialized in training precision tooling specialists and tooling engineers. One of the reasons as to why in these last generations half the country has been swung from poverty into the middle class.
Meanwhile the west have largely abandoned and de-emphasized vocational training and education, meaning that western countries no longer have a labor base capable of manufacturing at that scale at all. Today if you want to start a factory making precision goods and electronics, you go to China because you can walk out the door in any industrialized city, point at ten random people, and find half of a design and logistics team with the required skills that way.
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Re:
"and good old gutless UK hasn't done a damn thing except mouth complaints"
...and all the other things they've done like granting a majority HK residents automatic visas to move to the UK. I'm curious as to what else you suggest should happen, given that they are vastly overpowered in terms of military and economic power.
There's certainly an argument that they should have done more surrounding 1997, but right now there's far fewer options.
"has China gotten so powerful?"
Welcome to the year 2005. I have some bad news about the next couple of decades if you think things are going to improve in your favour.
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"...has China gotten so powerful? gotten so advanced on the quiet? is the world afraid of what China might do if challenged?"
The answer consists of two simple arguments;
1) The only way to "do anything about it" is to march troops into harms way and keep them in a shooting war with China, on chinese soil, forever or until either one side runs out of soldiers or the war escalates towards the use of nukes. China will not quit on recovering what they see as land stolen at gunpoint by western barbarian druglords during what they call the "century of humiliation".
So unless you are prepared for world war 3 or a few hundred afghanistans in a row then no, there's nothing you can do.
2) More than half of the western industry has their manufacturing base in China and any disruption of chinese trade will sink most western industries and economies as a result.
Therefore no western politician with knowledge of the situation will do anything more than posture and try to look dignified while giving Beijing a scolding from a safe distance.
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It is sad
I've loved visiting and living in China and Hong Kong. But, no more. I cannot stomach what the CCP has done to both places. The best thing that could happen is Western businesses completely abandon Hong Kong and China. Starve the beast! But, no, companies like Apple will always bend over and say, "Take me, Xi!" as long as they get to sell their wares there.
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Re: It is sad
"But, no, companies like Apple will always bend over and say, "Take me, Xi!" as long as they get to sell their wares there."
Oh, if that was all there was to it. Tim Cook, as CEO of Apple, once investigated what it would take to move all the industries and manufacturing back to the US. They came to the conclusion that until the US trained tens of thousands of skilled factory engineers and tool-and-die manufacturers a standard iPhone would start costing 30k USD per unit. There's an old Forbes article about it - go google "How Much Would An iPhone Cost If Apple Were Forced To Make It In America?".
The US, land of free enterprise, turned out to love outsourcing so much every education and training program which created the skillsets required to own an at-home industry base was abandoned. Meanwhile China spent fifty years lavishly spending money on free university classes for any citizen who wanted a high-paying job in the cities.
It's not so much that US industry doesn't want to retrieve their manufacturing base, given the lucrative offers the last three or four administrations have implied. It's that they literally can't, because China has been the supply line for everything for so long now the US no longer has the option to rebuild the one they had. Not without spending trillions into university grants and job projects for a decade or two.
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Re: Re: It is sad
[Addendum]
Tim Cook's full interview where he mentions the issues about moving manufacturing back to the US can also be found on youtube; "Tim Cook Discusses Apple's Future in China I Fortune"
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And here I'd just been saying that the russian government should drop the pretense, look like the chinese government beat them to it.
'Only politicians who agree with us are allowed to hold office' makes a complete mockery of elections and makes clear that politicians are not there to represent the public they are there to rule them.
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You must be new here.
Singapore has done this nonsense since 1965.
And every "opposition party" In Singapore agrees with the incumbents.
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More from history
There’s a few facts outsiders don’t understand about china.
China is over 22,000 years old. Forming in river carved caves as Xi Chi.
China has never once been first aggressor.
They expanded by being invaded. Winning. And adding the invading land to its own.
Sometimes it took days, sometimes years, and sometimes centuries. But China always won.
China has survived world-ending natural occurrences. Volcanos. Floods. Plagues. Fire. … the survivors always pick up. Start again.
China has never lost a war. They’ve gone cold at times plotting, calculating. Waiting for the right time to strike back.
Every person in China is a member of the army. Though not enacted in centuries, the old code is still law.
Look at WWII to understand this. In the midst of a brutal civil war the Chinese population came together, put their conflict aside, and battled the common enemy. When it was over? They went back to fighting themselves.
The idea of Chinese defectors is almost unheard of. Forgot actual defection.
China can not be defeated. Not then. Not now. Not in the future.
Despite protests, don’t think for a second that an invasion (even one in support of the protesters, eg US/UN/NATO) of Hong King wouldn’t result in the total destruction of the non-Chinese force.
The reality of history is China was sailing the globe before white people figured out metals.
There’s substantial reason to believe they found the Americas, via California, thousands of years before the kingdoms of Europe even considered heading west.
American first worlders show genetic traces of ancient Chinese descent.
Ancient pottery and tablets of Asian origin have been found in now submerged coast line from Canada to Chile.
It’s not just foolish, it’s down right insanity to think anyone could invade any part of China and win.
And before you point to western help of China in WWII don’t be foolish. They would have eventually repelled the axis. It would have taken longer but the results would be the same.
You don’t survive 22,000+ years without being good at winning.
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