Notice how there is next to no discussion about material conditions before and after China's tightened grip on HK other than a few people saying that basically nothing has changed and that the city is still perfectly fine for most people other than covid annoyances that exist basically everywhere now.
Also Americans have a weird amount of fixation on national flags, anthems, etc. I can guarantee you other than weird nationalist freaks next to no one else cares about political symbols this fucking much
I think partial culpability for the modern flag-worshipping in the US can be traced back to the Surge, when the US was planning on massively increasing troop size in Afghanistan and Iraq; as part of it, the military went waaay out of their way to force patriotism (particularly things like the anthem) into every place they could in an effort to drive recruitment and positive image, such as having the national anthem performed at sporting events, driving media coverage, massive increase in advertisements for military itself, and so on
It was definitely a thing before, but it really went insane after that