As an ABC who currently lives in HK but has no ties to Asia (born and raised in the US) and has no personal interest in what's happening in HK, what I observe is a global increase in pace of change affecting this generation across the entire world, with drastically different results per region / body of people based on their current economic, cultural, and political positions.<p>I think earthquakes are a good illustration of what's happening. Energy that builds up, friction developed between tectonic plates that gets released, either violently or smoothly, with varying levels of impact depending on the geological conditions surrounding it.<p>In the US, I mostly agree with the high level view that Andrew Yang ascribes (which is actually just the technocrat doom and gloom point of view) - economic changes that created waves of discontent, with an unconscious realization that problems have become too big for individuals alone to deal with, demanding escalation to the government level to solve, bringing in a feeling that we need something radically different (Trump) to handle the observed radical differences that the 21st century world is bringing in.<p>In Asia, the socio-economic changes that are happening are the same as the US, except instead of having the strongest economy in the world with a wealth of resources, education, a progressive history and lots of national-level experience in dealing with shocking changes, you have... exactly what you see in HK. Asian culture, stemming from confucian values, encourage and promote people to power who like to keep things the same way and discourage adaptation (harmony in society is defined as minimizing conflict which usually means not rocking the boat).<p>While the US (at least compared to other countries) has a system in place that can handle mistakes, has a rich history of how to handle change and how to properly push for progressive value shifts, the whole of Asia lacks all of that experience as a culture. What you have is a bunch of the older generation who are used to the old way of doing things, and see the world more similar to the godfather era rather than modern society. The rest of society has a value to not rock the boat and to care for outward harmony over bring up legitimate issues. This yields an environment where people are just not "trained for change". The actions that the current Asian political powers are taking look primitive to anyone who has lived in modern society and has observed how progressive shifts actually take place (and many have taken place over the last 5-10 years).<p>It will be very interesting to see how Asia adapts because modern society isn't going anywhere, it's actually speeding up and clashing more and more with how the older generation wants things to be.