Its funny how we are told how Taiwan has all the culture and China doesn't. Yet as soon as the guys from the mainland who move to Taiwan die off, there is no more culture out of Taiwan. Funny isn't it?
Its not hard to understand. When China was a backwater both HK and Taiwan, the former with its movies and the latter with its Mandopop, claimed to be the inheritors of Chinese culture. When China pulled ahead, both rejected the Chinese label and decided to align their cultural identity more with the West and Japan.
When HK's protest first broke out, there were many criticisms that the Mainland, among many basic PR tactics it neglected, one of which was to respect the territory's Cantonese roots. For sure, there was alot that could've been done differently with that situation. But if we're going by history, where most Empires went for the autonomy in exchange for taxes and military protection route, China was always unique in pursuing the assimilation route. Today, nothing has changed. It took time, some fumbles were made, but today it is the HK traitors eeking out a meager living as second class citizens in the West. While far from the days when Apple Daily mocked the Mainland as a toxic wasteland not even Mainlanders wanted to touch, today it is HK'ers streaming into Shenzhen to admire the city's modernity and progress compared to their own.
The West and its vassals are obsessed with the past glories and justifying their conduct based on what was. That's what scares them about the CPC and China, ever they exist to remind them that "was" is the operative word here and they would be wise to adjust their way of seeing the world to the realities of "today," lest they want to be left further and further behind.