Hong Kong: The Storm Before the Crackdown?

After achieving concessions through mostly peaceful means, Hong Kong's protests have turned violent, which only plays into Beijing's hands.

    The images from Hong Kong last Friday night made an indisputable statement. Tens of thousands of civil servants — generally not a societal subset known for rabble rousing — filled the streets in peaceful protest. "Hong Kong has always been well behaved and enjoys a high degree of freedom,” the government workers said in an open letter to beleaguered Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam. “It is a pity that we have seen extreme oppression.”

     Within hours, the firmament of smartphone lights that had lit up Hong Kong’s business district in an exquisite display of nonviolent resistance were replaced in social media feeds worldwide with more inflammatory images of a police station in Kowloon besieged by demonstrators who hurled bricks through the windows and set a fire on its steps, and of police firing tear gas in response.

     Meanwhile, Donald Trump was proven eerily prescient 48 hours after using Beijing’s preferred description of Hong Kong’s resistance movement as “riots”. Trump had also volunteered China’s ironic daily talking point that such matters are "internal" and not to be “interfered” with. “That’s between Hong Kong and that’s between China, because Hong Kong is a part of China,” the American president told reporters, inadvertently nutshelling the problem.

     If Hong Kong were now truly “part of China”, the People’s Liberation Army would have removed every member of its pro-democracy movement to re-education camps, put the rest of its residents on cyberlockdown and shut down the internet instead of just unleashing its troll army on Facebook. The reason that hasn’t happened is the “one country, two systems” arrangement China agreed to when Britain handed over its former colony in 1997, ostensibly to maintain Hong Kong’s socioeconomically crucial democratic freedoms for 50 years. Beijing has begun reneging on the status quo three decades early by, among other measures, attempting to impose its human rights standards with the extradition bill that unleashed the current backlash.

   In the month since largely peaceful protests produced the bill’s suspension, the narrative on the streets of Hong Kong has evolved from one of freedom vs. tyranny into one of order vs. chaos. The difference between a freedom vs. tyranny narrative and an order vs. chaos narrative is the recalibration of public fear from long-term (the entirely legitimate but abstract fear of living in an Orwellian security state) to short-term (the fear of immediate violence). While public support for the protesters has been extraordinary, tyrannical regimes know that the law of diminishing disruption returns dictates that everybody loves freedom until they come to associate it daily with hooligans burning buildings and blocking their commute (see Spring, Arab). Which may be why the question of who’s instigating the recent escalation of violence has become a little murky.

    In the two decades since the dawn of the fourth industrial revolution presented the possibility of grassroots democratic contagion, China has consistently demonstrated the inextricability of the link it sees between suppressing democracy and maintaining stability; that it considers the notion of 1.4 billion people having a say in and about who governs them an existential threat, if not to the People’s Republic itself, then at least to the Communist Party. It has ambitiously attempted to disarm that threat through, among other means, the requisition of natural resources and acquisition of ports worldwide to preclude the truism that “when the people go hungry, governments topple” and the establishment of a forensically invasive, behaviour-modifying surveillance state.

   Lately, President Xi Jinping has been conducting a global charm offensive dubbed Xiplomacy, which, on a hopeful note, betrays an abiding interest in the value of international approval. Perhaps that instinct will guide his actions in Hong Kong, where the world is still watching.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine and a columnist for The Hill Times. She was Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, a writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP in New York and UPI in Washington.