1) Years ago for work, I went deep investigating these; some of the team actually flew to China to see it all first-hand and verify the data. This is not a bunk narrative.

2) I've never made this accusation on HN before and apologize if I'm wrong, but this is a new account with 3 comments, all on this post (one of the largest posts about Hong Kong I've seen in a while here), and it looks a lot like a paid actor for China. This makes me thankful for the green-name feature on HN, if the random string of numbers wasn't enough of a tell.