The strategy in use today is to largely let the dogs run for quite
some time to allow timely concerns driving the early going to become
well aged. Then use modest force to assert control.
Otherwise the two nations policy has worked well and it would be better to let this be. If they choose not to it is a bad omen for internal China as well.
The real danger here is that they kick over the confidence applecart
in Hong Kong triggering a real run in China. I think that it is here
that they are seriously vulnerable to credit problems.
Friday - October 3,
2014
Americans are caught
up with the Ebola crisis and the Secret Service lapses in protecting
the White House and the president's family. But what is transpiring
in Hong Kong may be of far greater consequence.
Last weekend, Hong
Kong authorities used pepper spray and tear gas to scatter the
remnants of a student protest of the decision to give Beijing veto
power over candidates in future elections.
The gassing was a
blunder. Citizens poured into the streets in solidarity with the
protesters. Hong Kong police lacked the nerve or numbers to remove
them. The People's Liberation Army stayed in its barracks. Crowds
clamoring for democracy controlled the city.
Now, on Beijing's
orders, authorities have adopted a "wait-them-out"
strategy, assuming the silent majority in Hong Kong will get fed up
with the Occupy Central protesters, as the Americans did with the
Occupy Wall Street protesters.
Beijing, however, is
understandably nervous.
To allow students to
block the city center and impede traffic shows weakness. Hong Kong's
reputation as a financial center and tourist attraction will suffer.
And Beijing cannot permit this to go on too long without risking
supportive protests erupting on the mainland.
Nor can the students
be allowed to force Hong Kong to give up Beijing's veto of
candidates. To capitulate would expose President Xi Jinping as a
leader who can be broken by street action. To permit that perception
would imperil Xi's standing with Beijing's hard-liners, and
potentially the regime itself.
Thus if the protesters
do not vacate Hong Kong's streets soon, they may have to be removed.
And Beijing is not a regime to recoil from force if it has run out of
other options.
The last democracy
protests, 25 years ago in Tiananmen Square, were crushed by tanks,
with hundreds dead. The Falun Gong religious movement was crushed.
Protests by Tibetans and Uighurs demanding autonomy have been met
with force and massive neo-Stalinist population transfers of Han
Chinese into Tibet and Xinjiang.
Xi Jinping is no
Mikhail Gorbachev. The people do not decide in his China. The party
does. He does. He is more in the mold of the Leonid Brezhnev of 1968,
who ordered Warsaw Pact tank armies in to put an end to the Prague
Spring.
Hong Kong is also a
microcosm of the world's ideological conflicts -- between democracy
and authoritarianism, pluralism and nationalism.
American elites may
sing psalms to multiculturalism.
But in China, on the
65th anniversary of the revolution where Mao declared, "China
has stood up!" nationalism is surging.
China's claim to all
the islands, shoals and rocks in the South China and East China seas,
her warnings to Vietnam, Japan and the United States to stay clear,
are cheered. Xi Jinping is seen as a nationalist and unyielding
defender of China's historic rights.
Vladimir Putin, a
Russian nationalist, is the most popular foreign leader in China for
taking back Crimea after a U.S.-backed coup in Kiev.
Putin's campaign
against NGOs in Moscow, which he sees as U.S.-financed centers of
subversion, is being watched in Beijing, and similar charges are
being made against U.S.-backed NGOs in Hong Kong.
Prime Minister Shinzo
Abe has appealed to Japanese nationalism with his defense of the
Senkakus against China and his call for the return of the southern
Kuriles seized by Stalin at the end of World War II.
While Abe has
suspended his visits to the Yasukuni Shrine to the spirits of
Japanese warriors, including Hideki Tojo, his party members still
make the visitations.
This week,
President Obama hosted the new president of India, the hugely
popular Hindu Nationalist Narendra Modi, who for a decade was denied
admission to the U.S. for failing to halt a Muslim massacre in his
home province of Gujarat.
The Arab Spring
of 2011 has produced sectarian and civil wars, with Egypt, the
largest Arab country, succumbing again to the rule of a soldier and
authoritarian nationalist.
For the eighth
year, Freedom House has reported a decline in freedom with "modern
authoritarianism" a global growth stock.
Hong Kong may
tell us which way the wind is blowing in the 21st century. Either
the city is going to move toward a democratic future as the
protesters demand, or it is going to be clasped more tightly to the
bosom of the Motherland and absorbed into China.
And it is hard to
be an optimist about the outcome of this struggle.
Consider this:
For the Chinese Communists to adopt a U.S.-style Constitution would
be suicidal. The people would use free speech to criticize and
castigate the regime. They would use a free press to expose its
incompetence, injustice and corruption. And they would use free
elections to be rid of the regime and party.
Either democracy,
or the Communist Party, has no future in China.
For they are
irreconcilable, mutually exclusive. Democracy will either kill
Communism, or the Chinese Communists will kill democracy.
Whatever happens
in the short run in Hong Kong, that climactic battle is coming.
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