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China won’t turn Hong Kong’s protests into another
Tiananmen Square. At least, not yet.
(Vincent
Yu/AP)
“The incidents marked a
brazen escalation by protesters in confronting those they perceive as
infiltrators from mainland China and capped a second consecutive day of
chaos at Hong Kong’s airport, among the busiest in the world,” my colleagues reported.
The situation in Hong
Kong is nearing a precipice. Neither the protesters nor the Hong Kong
government, which is largely controlled by a domineering Beijing, seem
willing to cede any ground. On Monday, a senior Chinese official branded
the actions of Hong Kong’s dissidents as “signs of terrorism,” while
Chinese state media sought to whip up nationalist
sentiment on the mainland, casting the protests as the product of
foreign or U.S.-backed plots. The actions of the protesters on Tuesday in
the airport — they impeded travelers with makeshift barricades of luggage
carts, kept a semiconscious plainclothes officer hostage, and brawled with
riot police — would probably bolster both the Hong Kong government and Beijing’s
insistence that the disturbances are the work of “rioters.”
The specter of a more
dangerous clash looms. On Tuesday, President Trump retweeted a video on social
media of Chinese troops apparently mobilizing in the megacity of
Shenzhen, which is across the border from semiautonomous Hong Kong. In a
separate tweet, he limply urged all to “be calm and safe.” Thirty years
after the Communist regime snuffed out a student-led
democratic uprising in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, Chinese President Xi
Jinping and the rest of the Communist Party leadership must wonder how long
they’ll let Hong Kong’s young people continue to stand so defiantly against
them.
“We are at a
crossroads,” Martin Lee, a venerable Hong Kong advocate for democracy, told the New York Times.
“The future of Hong Kong — the future of democracy — depends on what’s
going to happen in the next few months.”
Earlier this summer, hundreds of thousands took to
the streets to protest an extradition bill under consideration by Hong
Kong’s government. Their outcry stalled the legislation but did not secure
its full withdrawal. The protests continued and broadened, with a new
generation of activists renewing calls for democratic reforms, the defense
of the former British colony’s civil liberties and police accountability.
Virtually every day, pro-democracy demonstrators have blocked roads, staged
sit-ins in public plazas and marched down busy thoroughfares. A general
strike last week paralyzed Asia’s financial hub and led to hundreds of
flight cancellations.
The protesters have
gained energy from the tone-deafness and
apparent heavy-handedness of the Hong Kong government’s response to
their demands. There’s widespread anger at the brutality displayed by Hong
Kong police in their crackdowns on demonstrations; polling shows a majority
of Hong Kongers want to see an independent investigation into police
conduct. This week, many protesters sported eye patches in solidarity with
a protester who lost her eye when shot at close range by what appeared to
be a beanbag round fired by the police. The U.N. human rights office
on Tuesday said it had “reviewed credible evidence” that Hong Kong law
enforcement employed tear gas and other weapons in ways that are
“prohibited by international norms and standards.”
In
the past, Hong Kong’s authorities have assuaged protest movements with
direct political concessions or let them fizzle out on their own.
That was the case with 2014′s “Umbrella Revolution,” when the
public started to lose sympathy with protesters who had camped for weeks
along a major thoroughfare and “occupied” areas close to Hong Kong’s
legislature. The protesters, too, grew fatigued and simply lost stamina.
This time, though,
there’s little sign of waning momentum. “It could be that the behavior of
the police makes people very conscious of what a Hong Kong that is no
longer autonomous looks like,” Michael C. Davis, a global fellow at the
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a D.C. think tank, told
Today’s WorldView. He added that he believes “there’s a debate going on
within the elites in Beijing, and you could guess that Xi could feel the
need to show a hard line on this and take action, but the costs would be
high.”
For China’s leadership,
the doggedness of Hong Kong’s protesters presents a real challenge. “On the
one hand, Xi can’t let this drag on too long — he is pursuing the so-called
China Dream to make China great again,” Warren Sun, an expert on Chinese
politics at Monash University in Australia, told my colleague Gerry Shih last week.
“On the other hand, he needs to be very careful because the international
world, including Trump and Taiwan, are watching to see if he mishandles
things.”
In an essay this week,
Minxin Pei, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College, spelled out how poorly a military crackdown
would go for China’s leadership: “Hong Kong’s residents would almost
certainly treat Chinese government forces as invaders, and mount the
fiercest possible resistance. The resulting clashes — which would likely
produce high numbers of civilian casualties — would mark the official end
of the ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement, with China’s government forced
to assert direct and full control over Hong Kong’s administration.”
Pei added that “with
the Hong Kong government’s legitimacy destroyed, the city would instantly
become ungovernable. Civil servants would quit their jobs in droves, and
the public would continue to resist.” This, in turn, would have devastating
consequences for the city’s economy, and — given its place as a global
logistics and financial hub — that of the world, to boot.
So
the prospect of a Chinese “invasion” is, for now, still distant.
“I believe they have learned the lesson that the price of using the
military is very high,” Wu’er Kaixi, one of the leaders of the 1989
Tiananmen protests, told Agence France-Presse over the weekend.
But that doesn’t mean
it’s off the table. “I don’t think there are people in the Chinese
leadership who believe that Tiananmen was a mistake,” Bonnie Glaser of the
Center for Strategic and International Studies told Today’s WorldView. She
added that Trump, who has essentially waved away interest in Hong Kong’s
unrest, may have signaled “to the Chinese that they can intervene with
impunity.”
For now, though, authorities
in Beijing and Hong Kong may hope other tactics work. “The Chinese and the
government in Hong Kong are trying to come up with creative ways short of
use of real force,” Glaser said. They may keep infiltrating the protests
with their own personnel, while hoping the deepening radicalism of hardcore
activists gradually turns the wider Hong Kong public against them. They are
also stepping up a propaganda campaign in a
bid to cool enthusiasm for the Hong Kongers’ demands abroad. The
protesters, meanwhile, would probably treat the resignation of Carrie Lam,
Hong Kong’s leader, as a huge victory, but that doesn’t yet seem to be in
the cards.
And so the struggle
continues. In Hong Kong’s airport, some caught in the middle look on with
sympathy. “I can’t blame anyone,” Krishna Hariharan, a 27-year-old Indian
engineer marooned on holiday, told my colleagues. “They are seeking
justice, and it just happens that our fates are intertwined like this. If
the government comes down hard on them — then what are they governing for?”
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