Thoughts On Hong Kong (w/Update)

The months-long protests in the Chinese province of Hong Kong has moved to a more chaotic stage, with the protesters taking over the international airport and pretty much shutting it down.

Originally started in response to the Mainland China's efforts to accelerate its control of the regional government - something that the United Kingdom negotiated during the 1997 transition to not happen until 2047 - through an aggressive extradition deal, the protests have continued on since March of this year and escalated into marches and sit-ins across every street and business center.

Hong Kong residents are well aware of the kind of suppression and loss of civil liberties that await them if the Chinese central government takes over everything, and they're not waiting for that to take away the rights they're used to having.

Unfortunately, the Chinese government - still self-serving and corrupt - has faced this problem before... and the last time it happened it got real bloody real quick and the only thing left afterward was the international condemnation and little else. China kept chugging along after Tiananmen, because other nations needed to do business with that country for its resources and workforce.

Hong Kong is different, though. It still has the unofficial protection of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. The province itself is viewed as "special" as a global city. Any overt crackdown and the world could respond with more than angry words this time.

The problem of a violent reaction by the corrupt regime still troubles me. It's the only move - invading Tibet, crushing democracy reformers, shoving religious ethnics like the Uighurs into re-education/torture camps - the government knows.

But the residents of Hong Kong can't back down either. Their entire way of life, even tied to the rest of China as they are now, revolves around the ability to speak their minds, question any acts of corruption, stand for rights as people against any political force that would treat them poorly. They'll listen to offers of compromise but not demands for surrender.

This is not going to end well. I wish it would, I hope saner heads may prevail and some compromise reached... but we're talking about authoritarian bullies who had no problem sending in the tanks before and won't have any doubts about doing it again.

Stay safe, Hong Kong.

Update: Woke up to this Atlantic article that spells out in better detail just how bad the situation is. The Chinese government is shackled by a zero-sum, our-way-or-the-highway mentality that makes compromise next to impossible. To quote Michael Schuman's article:

All governments, of course, have a habit of insisting they are in the right. But China finds altering course especially difficult, mainly because of how its domestic political system functions. As an authoritarian regime—and one that is more and more centered on a personal cult surrounding Xi Jinping—admitting fault is perceived as a threat to credibility. Nor is it clear how much bad news filters up to top decision makers through a bureaucracy fearful that policy disagreements could be mistaken for disloyalty. Compounding matters is the historical narrative marketed domestically by Beijing, in which the party stars as the defender of the Chinese nation against foreign imperialists who have preyed upon the country for more than a century. “They haven’t been treated well; now they have a right to stand up and be a great power,” Glaser said of the thinking. “All of this leads the Chinese to believe that their interests are more important than others.”

It's a serious - and lethal - flaw in governance that is not going to end well either way.