China and Hong Kong
I think the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong were wise to pause the campaign for now because they have made real progress in the fight to free themselves from a one party state in which a political elite of 80 million members of the Communist Party (CCP) control the rest of China's population of 1.3 billion citizens.
Now when I was first getting interested in politics in Scotland I remember going to see a play from the 7:84 Theatre Company which took its name and sense of outrage from the fact that only 7% of Scotland's population controlled 84% of the country's wealth.
Yet in China the figures are even more outrageous, politically speaking, with just 6% of the China's citizens (i.e. members of the CCP) telling the other 94% what to do with their lives including the interpretation of 'rules' about who can stand for election as the Hong Kong's first citizen or chief executive.
So the next big challenge for the pro-democracy campaign is to identify and then unite around a credible candidate who is not anti-China, but whose political platform is based on a successful, growing economy going hand-in-hand with further democratic reforms.
China holds the hard line
The Hong Kong protests descended into violence this weekend, with many blaming thugs in the pay of government. So what next for the activists, asks Michael Sheridan in Hong Kong. Can they really hope to prevail?
By Michael Sheridan Hong Kong - The Sunday Times
ON THE streets of Hong Kong yesterday, it turned into a fight between generations. A group of middle-aged men yelled “You are scum!” and tore down a barricade of wooden crates and railings as the young, anti-government protesters who had built it rushed to stop them.
The men from the mob had come out on a second day of clashes in Mongkok, a tough, crowded district where the underworld has a tight grip on revenues from shops, bars and streets of small brothels. It was not a pretty sight.
“They’re not here — look, no police, none!” said Agnes Lee, a student, as the burly, tattooed men threw wood blocks and metal piping across the street to shouts of rage from the democracy campaigners.
Police arrested eight men with ties to triads, or Chinese crime syndicates, who were among a total of 18 held after scuffles, according to Lai Tung-kwok, the secretary forsecurity. He strongly denied accusations by the democracy movement that the police were colluding with the triads, who have a history of being used by the Chinese Communist party as hired enforcers. But Amnesty International said the police had failed in their duty to protect peaceful protesters.
The violence that began to mar Hong Kong’s well-mannered mass demonstrations raised disturbing questions over the next turn the protests would take. Activists and students called off talks with the government and accused it of orchestrating the trouble at the behest of Beijing.
Some of the attackers were not from Hong Kong but from mainland China, said local journalists who chased one bald, stocky assailant down a side street.
“Where are you from? Where are you from?” they asked. The man turned round and spat. “Go f*** your mothers,” he said.
IT HAD been all smiles when the billionaire tycoons from Hong Kong trooped across the red carpet in Beijing on September 22 to pay homage to the strongest leader of China since the era of Deng Xiaoping a quarter of a century ago.
President Xi Jinping greeted them with the regal air of one who rules 1.3bn subjects as head of the state, the Communist party and the army. Like an emperor of old, he sat enthroned in an armchair. “I see most of my old friends,” he said, without a trace of irony.
The Chinese leader had a message. There would be no compromise on democracy. Hong Kong’s 7.2m people must be led by “a patriot” approved by Beijing. The message delivered, he strolled across the grand salon as the 70 men in dark suits scurried at his heels. Amid all the fawning, it is doubtful that any of them wanted to give him bad news.
Down in Hong Kong, the former British colony on the south China coast 1,200 miles from Beijing, a group of students had other ideas. For more than a year, they had argued, written, planned and agitated. Now they had taken their campaign to the streets. Thousands of school pupils and university students marched, sang, paraded and sat in orderly rows. For anyone in China old enough to remember 1989, it brought back images of the idealistic student protests which ended that year in the massacre at Tiananmen Square.
Few of the demonstrators were born then. Many were just infants when Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997 under a agreement between Deng and Margaret Thatcher, stating that Hong Kong’s rights and freedoms would be guaranteed for 50 years by a formula called “one country, two systems”.
Most of them felt China had gone back on its promises. “The handover was a gamble on China liberalising,” admits a British official involved in the talks. It was a losing bet.
Among Chinese leaders, Xi, 61, has turned out to be a Maoist relic whose vision of tomorrow is yesterday — a China run by the state security ministry, where thought is policed by censors, dissent strangled and obedience enforced in the name of a xenophobic nationalism that plays on foreign countries as useful scapegoats.
Xi has promised economic change and is using a campaign against corruption to purge elite rivals, even though his own extended family is worth more than £200m. Liberalisation is not on his agenda: by any measure, China is going backwards on political reform.
This is all alien to young Hong Kong people, who are connected to the online world and live in a freewheeling global business city. They treasure freedoms denied on the mainland: the rights to free speech and assembly, to trade, to worship freely and to have a small or a large family according to personal choice, not the whim of the state.
They found their spokesman in a skinny 17-year-old named Joshua Wong, an articulate orator in his native Cantonese, who grabbed centre stage at the protests. At 14, he founded a group called Scholarism, which defeated government plans to impose a curriculum dominated by propaganda. The son of committed Christians, Wong takes an evangelical tone.
“I don’t want to see primary school students sitting out here protesting for democracy in 10 years’ time,” he says. “If not now, when?”
Fired by youthful zeal, the protesters filled the streets around the government headquarters. For days there was a standoff. Their numbers began to wane. Then on the night of Friday, September 26, Wong grabbed the microphone.
“Let’s go!” he yelled. His friends, Alex Chow and Lester Shum, led a wild charge. They rushed a fence, vaulting over it and into the government courtyard. The police wrestled Wong to the ground and arrested him. He would vanish for 40 hours.
That was the spark that ignited Hong Kong. Over the next two days, the police fired tear gas and used pepper spray. Riding a wave of indignation, older activists launched a long-planned campaign called Occupy Central with Love and Peace. Tens of thousands joined them. To defend themselves, they unfurled gaily coloured umbrellas. And the watching world had its latest hashtag: the umbrella revolution.
IT IS not, of course, a revolution. The simple story is that the protests are all about one man, one vote.
The men who have led Hong Kong since 1997 were all picked by Beijing. The present chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, 60, a British-educated businessman, was chosen by a committee of 1,200 worthies. He won 689 votes, a figure that is now a derisive tag among the protesters who call him “689”.
China has promised that in 2017, the people of Hong Kong can elect their own leader. “We all knew that the Chinese didn’t mind elections so long as they knew the results in advance,” said the late Sir Percy Cradock, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office mandarin who negotiated the handover, speaking in jest. It does not seem so witty now.
On August 31, China’s rubber-stamp parliament ordained that there could be only three candidates in 2017. Each would have to be endorsed by more than half the 1,200 committee members. In effect, the process would exclude anyone who did not fit Xi’s definition of “a patriot”. It would be an election by universal suffrage. But one in which there was no free choice.
In most such election procedures a compromise could be negotiated. But Xi has committed his prestige to the hard line. He has entrusted Hong Kong affairs to the man perhaps least likely to understand them, Zhang Dejiang, the party’s No 3, a colourless economist — trained in North Korea.
“China feels threatened,” said Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing member of the Hong Kong legislature.“It’s a challenge to their authority.”
THAT challenge crystallised late last Sunday night in the unlikely setting of Hong Kong’s high court. Visibly annoyed with the police, Mr Justice Patrick Li Hon-leung ordered the immediate release of Wong and his fellow protesters, granting a writ of habeas corpus. Their continued detention was unlawful, the judge said. They were freed without charge. For those who cling to the rule of law that Hong Kong inherited from Britain, it was a magnificent moment.
At sunrise on Wednesday, the young people gathered on the waterfront. It was China’s National Day. Helicopters and planes of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which has a 1,200-strong garrison, staged a flypast over Victoria harbour. Flanked by PLA officers and the city’s establishment, the embattled chief executive stood to attention as the red flag was raised. Nearby, Wong and his little group turned their backs and raised their arms in silent scorn. A few radicals jeered. The grandees had to leave by boat.
Both events underlined the difference between Hong Kong and mainland China, where Wong and his friends would have vanished into the penal system for their impudence.
By apparent coincidence, the PLA daily newspaper reported that young recruits at the Hong Kong barracks began the first day of a 24-day political education course “to make sure that the voice of the party is the strongest voice in the camp”.
To thousands of holiday visitors from mainland China, the scenes were a revelation. “It’s not the way that our government told us,” said Kelvin Liang, 27, an export manager. “They are not violent at all.” Others, however, called the protesters “illegal,” “selfish” and “ungrateful”.
In Beijing, there were signs that Xi’s impassive mask was slipping. For weeks, the state media had not mentioned a thing. But on Wednesday, a front-page editorial in the People’s Daily warned of “unimaginable consequences” if the protests went on. A day later, a second editorial denounced them as “chaos”.
For an older generation this warning was an exact echo of a notorious People’s Daily editorial on April 26, 1989, which abused the Tiananmen protests as “a planned conspiracy . . . to plunge the whole country into chaos” and set the stage for the violence that ended them six weeks later.
It was lost on the world’s politest demonstrators as they thronged the car-free carriageways, staging impromptu debates, writing slogans and holding teach-ins as volunteers handed out water and cleared up the rubbish while small children frolicked with their parents.
Cola Ho, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, stood with a bullhorn in front of a “democracy wall” adorned by thousands of Post-it notes with personal messages.
“It was my idea,, she said proudly, “and my parents support me just as long as it’s safe.” She said she had learnt about the famous “democracy wall” set up in Beijing in 1978 by dissidents who wrote “big character posters” calling for change .
“People really like it,” said her friend and helper, Philip Yeung, 17. “They still like writing things down.”
At the same time, both sides exploited technology. The protesters used an app called FireChat, which links mobile phone users over short range using wi-fi and Bluetooth connections. They also set up a tech website, Code4HK, to help organisers.
China’s army of hackers soon hit back: a security company, Lacoon Mobile Security, detected a virus targeting iPhones and other devices in the demonstrations.
“This is a precious opportunity,” said Albert Ho, 65, a veteran democracy campaigner, as he sat in the shade watching the younger generation. “Look at them. They are so reasonable and restrained. If the other side can show sincerity, there can be a retreat with dignity.”
Late on Thursday, 15 minutes before a futile deadline set by protesters for his resignation, the chief executive announced a step back. Leung designated Carrie Lam, the chief secretary, who heads the civil service, as a negotiator. She would discuss “constitutional development” with the students. “Somebody in Beijing has picked up the phone,” commented a former Hong Kong government official.
FOR the Chinese government, this has been a bad week for its vaunted “soft power”. Images of smart young Hong Kong people buzzed around the world, creating sympathy almost everywhere. Messages of support from Tunisia, Ukraine and Ecuador were among dozens adorning a wall outside a branch of McDonald’s that did a thriving trade.
In London, 3,000 people gathered in a vigil outside the Chinese embassy. There were demonstrations in Manchester, Edinburgh and cities around the globe. The foreign minister, Wang Yi, on a visit to Washington, could respond to concern from President Barack Obama only with the statement that Hong Kong was a Chinese internal affair.
The nightmare for China is, indeed, an internal affair. Despite its imposing strength, the Communist party is haunted by the fear that it inhabits “an empty fortress”, a classical Chinese expression for weakness. The elite power struggles of 2012, which ended in victory for Xi, exposed fault lines not visible in the past.
His economic plans, if fulfilled, will vex vested interests. The economy is slowing down and may not hit its 7.5% growth target this year, although none should doubt the government’s power to control it.
While never disclosing its internal arguments, the party does send deliberate signals to the people. Last week it released photographs of Xi at a National Day event standing alongside his predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, along with almost every member of the politburo standing committee, the supreme ruling body. One notable absentee: the purged security chief Zhou Yongkang, who once held sway over the police state.
The intended message was one of unity and resolve. To many people in Hong Kong, however, the pictures will have evoked the phrase used by the Prince of Wales in his journal to describe the Chinese leaders he met at the 1997 handover as a “group of appalling old waxworks”. Whatever the outcome, in the image war between generations, the kids have already won.
Additional reporting: Clare Pennington
Six reasons China won’t risk another Tiananmen Square
For more than a week, as thousands of protesters rallied in Hong Kong, people have asked: could it end like Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) crushed peaceful protests with great loss of life?
The answer is no, according to most Chinese commentators. The key differences between then and now are:
1. The 1989 movement was at the heart of government in Beijing and was a direct threat to communist rule, while Hong Kong’s protests are in a far-off territory on the coast.
2. In 1989, units of the PLA’s 27th Army deployed tanks, armoured vehicles and troops. Hong Kong has only a civil police force with sidearms — and its officers would probably disobey orders to use them.
3. China does not have the military resources in place to impose martial law on Hong Kong and its 7.2m population: there is only a small PLA garrison and a unit of some 1,500 paramilitary police just across the border.
4. Hong Kong is a special autonomous region, its status enshrined in a treaty registered at the UN: military action would destroy China’s diplomatic reputation and sanctions could hurt its economy.
5. There is no political will to repeat 1989. Although the regime still claims it was the right thing to do, President Xi Jinping knows he would never recover from it.
6. It is more likely the party will revert to its classic formula: using propaganda, commercial threats, subversion and violent proxies such as triad gangsters to weaken its opponents.
ON THE streets of Hong Kong yesterday, it turned into a fight between generations. A group of middle-aged men yelled “You are scum!” and tore down a barricade of wooden crates and railings as the young, anti-government protesters who had built it rushed to stop them.
The men from the mob had come out on a second day of clashes in Mongkok, a tough, crowded district where the underworld has a tight grip on revenues from shops, bars and streets of small brothels. It was not a pretty sight.
“They’re not here — look, no police, none!” said Agnes Lee, a student, as the burly, tattooed men threw wood blocks and metal piping across the street to shouts of rage from the democracy campaigners.
Police arrested eight men with ties to triads, or Chinese crime syndicates, who were among a total of 18 held after scuffles, according to Lai Tung-kwok, the secretary forsecurity. He strongly denied accusations by the democracy movement that the police were colluding with the triads, who have a history of being used by the Chinese Communist party as hired enforcers. But Amnesty International said the police had failed in their duty to protect peaceful protesters.
The violence that began to mar Hong Kong’s well-mannered mass demonstrations raised disturbing questions over the next turn the protests would take. Activists and students called off talks with the government and accused it of orchestrating the trouble at the behest of Beijing.
Some of the attackers were not from Hong Kong but from mainland China, said local journalists who chased one bald, stocky assailant down a side street.
“Where are you from? Where are you from?” they asked. The man turned round and spat. “Go f*** your mothers,” he said.
IT HAD been all smiles when the billionaire tycoons from Hong Kong trooped across the red carpet in Beijing on September 22 to pay homage to the strongest leader of China since the era of Deng Xiaoping a quarter of a century ago.
President Xi Jinping greeted them with the regal air of one who rules 1.3bn subjects as head of the state, the Communist party and the army. Like an emperor of old, he sat enthroned in an armchair. “I see most of my old friends,” he said, without a trace of irony.
The Chinese leader had a message. There would be no compromise on democracy. Hong Kong’s 7.2m people must be led by “a patriot” approved by Beijing. The message delivered, he strolled across the grand salon as the 70 men in dark suits scurried at his heels. Amid all the fawning, it is doubtful that any of them wanted to give him bad news.
Down in Hong Kong, the former British colony on the south China coast 1,200 miles from Beijing, a group of students had other ideas. For more than a year, they had argued, written, planned and agitated. Now they had taken their campaign to the streets. Thousands of school pupils and university students marched, sang, paraded and sat in orderly rows. For anyone in China old enough to remember 1989, it brought back images of the idealistic student protests which ended that year in the massacre at Tiananmen Square.
Few of the demonstrators were born then. Many were just infants when Britain handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997 under a agreement between Deng and Margaret Thatcher, stating that Hong Kong’s rights and freedoms would be guaranteed for 50 years by a formula called “one country, two systems”.
Most of them felt China had gone back on its promises. “The handover was a gamble on China liberalising,” admits a British official involved in the talks. It was a losing bet.
Among Chinese leaders, Xi, 61, has turned out to be a Maoist relic whose vision of tomorrow is yesterday — a China run by the state security ministry, where thought is policed by censors, dissent strangled and obedience enforced in the name of a xenophobic nationalism that plays on foreign countries as useful scapegoats.
Xi has promised economic change and is using a campaign against corruption to purge elite rivals, even though his own extended family is worth more than £200m. Liberalisation is not on his agenda: by any measure, China is going backwards on political reform.
This is all alien to young Hong Kong people, who are connected to the online world and live in a freewheeling global business city. They treasure freedoms denied on the mainland: the rights to free speech and assembly, to trade, to worship freely and to have a small or a large family according to personal choice, not the whim of the state.
They found their spokesman in a skinny 17-year-old named Joshua Wong, an articulate orator in his native Cantonese, who grabbed centre stage at the protests. At 14, he founded a group called Scholarism, which defeated government plans to impose a curriculum dominated by propaganda. The son of committed Christians, Wong takes an evangelical tone.
“I don’t want to see primary school students sitting out here protesting for democracy in 10 years’ time,” he says. “If not now, when?”
Fired by youthful zeal, the protesters filled the streets around the government headquarters. For days there was a standoff. Their numbers began to wane. Then on the night of Friday, September 26, Wong grabbed the microphone.
“Let’s go!” he yelled. His friends, Alex Chow and Lester Shum, led a wild charge. They rushed a fence, vaulting over it and into the government courtyard. The police wrestled Wong to the ground and arrested him. He would vanish for 40 hours.
That was the spark that ignited Hong Kong. Over the next two days, the police fired tear gas and used pepper spray. Riding a wave of indignation, older activists launched a long-planned campaign called Occupy Central with Love and Peace. Tens of thousands joined them. To defend themselves, they unfurled gaily coloured umbrellas. And the watching world had its latest hashtag: the umbrella revolution.
IT IS not, of course, a revolution. The simple story is that the protests are all about one man, one vote.
The men who have led Hong Kong since 1997 were all picked by Beijing. The present chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, 60, a British-educated businessman, was chosen by a committee of 1,200 worthies. He won 689 votes, a figure that is now a derisive tag among the protesters who call him “689”.
China has promised that in 2017, the people of Hong Kong can elect their own leader. “We all knew that the Chinese didn’t mind elections so long as they knew the results in advance,” said the late Sir Percy Cradock, the Foreign & Commonwealth Office mandarin who negotiated the handover, speaking in jest. It does not seem so witty now.
On August 31, China’s rubber-stamp parliament ordained that there could be only three candidates in 2017. Each would have to be endorsed by more than half the 1,200 committee members. In effect, the process would exclude anyone who did not fit Xi’s definition of “a patriot”. It would be an election by universal suffrage. But one in which there was no free choice.
In most such election procedures a compromise could be negotiated. But Xi has committed his prestige to the hard line. He has entrusted Hong Kong affairs to the man perhaps least likely to understand them, Zhang Dejiang, the party’s No 3, a colourless economist — trained in North Korea.
“China feels threatened,” said Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing member of the Hong Kong legislature.“It’s a challenge to their authority.”
THAT challenge crystallised late last Sunday night in the unlikely setting of Hong Kong’s high court. Visibly annoyed with the police, Mr Justice Patrick Li Hon-leung ordered the immediate release of Wong and his fellow protesters, granting a writ of habeas corpus. Their continued detention was unlawful, the judge said. They were freed without charge. For those who cling to the rule of law that Hong Kong inherited from Britain, it was a magnificent moment.
At sunrise on Wednesday, the young people gathered on the waterfront. It was China’s National Day. Helicopters and planes of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which has a 1,200-strong garrison, staged a flypast over Victoria harbour. Flanked by PLA officers and the city’s establishment, the embattled chief executive stood to attention as the red flag was raised. Nearby, Wong and his little group turned their backs and raised their arms in silent scorn. A few radicals jeered. The grandees had to leave by boat.
Both events underlined the difference between Hong Kong and mainland China, where Wong and his friends would have vanished into the penal system for their impudence.
By apparent coincidence, the PLA daily newspaper reported that young recruits at the Hong Kong barracks began the first day of a 24-day political education course “to make sure that the voice of the party is the strongest voice in the camp”.
To thousands of holiday visitors from mainland China, the scenes were a revelation. “It’s not the way that our government told us,” said Kelvin Liang, 27, an export manager. “They are not violent at all.” Others, however, called the protesters “illegal,” “selfish” and “ungrateful”.
In Beijing, there were signs that Xi’s impassive mask was slipping. For weeks, the state media had not mentioned a thing. But on Wednesday, a front-page editorial in the People’s Daily warned of “unimaginable consequences” if the protests went on. A day later, a second editorial denounced them as “chaos”.
For an older generation this warning was an exact echo of a notorious People’s Daily editorial on April 26, 1989, which abused the Tiananmen protests as “a planned conspiracy . . . to plunge the whole country into chaos” and set the stage for the violence that ended them six weeks later.
It was lost on the world’s politest demonstrators as they thronged the car-free carriageways, staging impromptu debates, writing slogans and holding teach-ins as volunteers handed out water and cleared up the rubbish while small children frolicked with their parents.
Cola Ho, a 16-year-old schoolgirl, stood with a bullhorn in front of a “democracy wall” adorned by thousands of Post-it notes with personal messages.
“It was my idea,, she said proudly, “and my parents support me just as long as it’s safe.” She said she had learnt about the famous “democracy wall” set up in Beijing in 1978 by dissidents who wrote “big character posters” calling for change .
“People really like it,” said her friend and helper, Philip Yeung, 17. “They still like writing things down.”
At the same time, both sides exploited technology. The protesters used an app called FireChat, which links mobile phone users over short range using wi-fi and Bluetooth connections. They also set up a tech website, Code4HK, to help organisers.
China’s army of hackers soon hit back: a security company, Lacoon Mobile Security, detected a virus targeting iPhones and other devices in the demonstrations.
“This is a precious opportunity,” said Albert Ho, 65, a veteran democracy campaigner, as he sat in the shade watching the younger generation. “Look at them. They are so reasonable and restrained. If the other side can show sincerity, there can be a retreat with dignity.”
Late on Thursday, 15 minutes before a futile deadline set by protesters for his resignation, the chief executive announced a step back. Leung designated Carrie Lam, the chief secretary, who heads the civil service, as a negotiator. She would discuss “constitutional development” with the students. “Somebody in Beijing has picked up the phone,” commented a former Hong Kong government official.
FOR the Chinese government, this has been a bad week for its vaunted “soft power”. Images of smart young Hong Kong people buzzed around the world, creating sympathy almost everywhere. Messages of support from Tunisia, Ukraine and Ecuador were among dozens adorning a wall outside a branch of McDonald’s that did a thriving trade.
In London, 3,000 people gathered in a vigil outside the Chinese embassy. There were demonstrations in Manchester, Edinburgh and cities around the globe. The foreign minister, Wang Yi, on a visit to Washington, could respond to concern from President Barack Obama only with the statement that Hong Kong was a Chinese internal affair.
The nightmare for China is, indeed, an internal affair. Despite its imposing strength, the Communist party is haunted by the fear that it inhabits “an empty fortress”, a classical Chinese expression for weakness. The elite power struggles of 2012, which ended in victory for Xi, exposed fault lines not visible in the past.
His economic plans, if fulfilled, will vex vested interests. The economy is slowing down and may not hit its 7.5% growth target this year, although none should doubt the government’s power to control it.
While never disclosing its internal arguments, the party does send deliberate signals to the people. Last week it released photographs of Xi at a National Day event standing alongside his predecessors, Hu Jintao and Jiang Zemin, along with almost every member of the politburo standing committee, the supreme ruling body. One notable absentee: the purged security chief Zhou Yongkang, who once held sway over the police state.
The intended message was one of unity and resolve. To many people in Hong Kong, however, the pictures will have evoked the phrase used by the Prince of Wales in his journal to describe the Chinese leaders he met at the 1997 handover as a “group of appalling old waxworks”. Whatever the outcome, in the image war between generations, the kids have already won.
Additional reporting: Clare Pennington
Six reasons China won’t risk another Tiananmen Square
For more than a week, as thousands of protesters rallied in Hong Kong, people have asked: could it end like Tiananmen Square in 1989, when the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) crushed peaceful protests with great loss of life?
The answer is no, according to most Chinese commentators. The key differences between then and now are:
1. The 1989 movement was at the heart of government in Beijing and was a direct threat to communist rule, while Hong Kong’s protests are in a far-off territory on the coast.
2. In 1989, units of the PLA’s 27th Army deployed tanks, armoured vehicles and troops. Hong Kong has only a civil police force with sidearms — and its officers would probably disobey orders to use them.
3. China does not have the military resources in place to impose martial law on Hong Kong and its 7.2m population: there is only a small PLA garrison and a unit of some 1,500 paramilitary police just across the border.
4. Hong Kong is a special autonomous region, its status enshrined in a treaty registered at the UN: military action would destroy China’s diplomatic reputation and sanctions could hurt its economy.
5. There is no political will to repeat 1989. Although the regime still claims it was the right thing to do, President Xi Jinping knows he would never recover from it.
6. It is more likely the party will revert to its classic formula: using propaganda, commercial threats, subversion and violent proxies such as triad gangsters to weaken its opponents.
