Hong Kong Protests 2014

There is a fundamental gap between how Americans perceive China and how China’s leaders perceive China. That gap is as wide as the Pacific Ocean and it is crucial for understanding what’s happening in Hong Kong today and how China’s leaders will respond to it.

Americans see China for its strengths: its massive size, powerhouse economy, exploding growth, miraculously expanding cities, booming industries, and growing influence on the world. Even the fact that many Americans see China as a threat is ultimately a compliment to the country, treating is as a near- or soon-to-be-equal.

Mass protests have been ongoing now for several days in Hong Kong, presenting the Chinese government with one of the greatest and most difficult challenges that it has faced in years. Chinese information authorities, naturally, are working aggressively to censor all news of the protests on China’s mainland, and state media is complying.

But the statiest Chinese state media outlet of them all, People’s Daily, may have gone a little overboard in diverting attention from the Hong Kong news. On Tuesday evening local time, the official Twitter account of the People’s Daily newspaper and media group tweeted this out:

A huge and oft-stated fear among Hong Kong’s protesters right now is of a Chinese military crackdown like the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in which troops killed 2,600 protesters who were asking for a lot less democracy than Hong Kongers are asking for now. Some protesters are already anticipating it, lacing downtown with yellow ribbons marked “they can’t kill us all.” A WhiteHouse.gov petition circulating in Hong Kong has already drawn 190,000 signatures asking President Obama to “Support Hong Kong Democracy and Prevent A Second Tiananmen Massacre in Hong Kong.”

It sounds both outlandish and not outlandish. Hong Kong, a largely-autonomous part of China since it left the British Empire in 1997, has far more freedom than the rest of China, including free speech and the frequently-exercised right to protest peacefully. It’s an international city with a free press; any mass violence would disgrace image-conscious Beijing. But Hong Kongers see China gradually asserting more control over their city, and they remember clearly the 1989 massacre, and they worry that Beijing’s willingness to use violence against mainland protesters could one day apply to them as well.

Patrick Chovanec, a long-time resident and thoughtful observer of China (now in New York at an asset management company), tweeted out this series of thoughtful observations about the growing crisis in Hong Kong. He makes some excellent and insightful points about the demonstrations in Hong Kong, which began on September 24 as protest against China reneging on its promise to grant the city fully democracy in 2017.

Pay particular to what Chovanec says about what the protests do and do not mean for the rest of China, which is crucial for how this all ends, given that Beijing has final say. And also pay attention to his points about issues of identity in Hong Kong, a central and often overlooked party of the Hong Kong story.

This video, taken on Sunday in Hong Kong’s Central business district where protesters have been clustered, shows what it was like in the center of the peaceful demonstrations the moment that tear gas hit. There is such chaos and panic in the crowd, which numbered at that point in the tens of thousands, that it’s a miracle no one was killed.

This sort of violence is unheard of in peaceful and prosperous Hong Kong. The citizens of Hong Kong pride themselves on their freedom to protest peacefully, which they do often. The unprecedented severity of the police crackdown on Sunday shocked much of Hong Kong, and appears to have rallied residents to the protester’s cause, hitting on underlying anxieties that Hong Kong could become more like authoritarian mainland China.