Protesters on a suicide mission

This is pretty much my take on the situation. Pretty much our take, as Jing would agree. The simple take is: no matter how well-intentioned, the protests, the violence, can only lead to a worse Hong Kong. A Hong Kong with less Freedom and Democracy, not more. That’s a reality, sad and inconvenient. 

Forgive me if I don’t want to see the destruction of our city by a bunch of deluded millenarians....

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It has been more than four months since Hong Kong plunged into its current wave of violent protests against Chinese rule. It started with large-scale demonstrations against proposed amendments to an extradition bill sought by the government, which then snowballed into an all-encompassing struggle for the protection of human rights and democracy in Hong Kong, as embodied by the Basic Law in the eyes of most Hong Kong citizens.
Meanwhile, the hard core of the protest movement pursues a strategy of urban guerilla warfare to engage Hong Kong’s security forces in almost ritualised – and increasingly violent – showdowns, mostly at weekends. These are the actions of several thousand protesters.
Gone are the days, it seems, of millions of people peacefully taking to the streets to speak out against the bill and Chinese infringement of Hong Kong’s guaranteed autonomy. Many are wary of the clashes between protesters and police, which are following a predictable logic of escalation on both sides.
People have been wounded by gunfire and fatalities are likely to follow soon if the stand-off continues. Where is Hong Kong’s protest movement heading? What is at stake for the city’s future?
When Joshua Wong Chi-fung came to Germany in September, he called Hong Kong the “new Berlin”, drawing a comparison with the West German enclave within the socialist (and authoritarian) German Democratic Republic during the cold war. He demanded that the German government, as well as the entire European Union, stand firmly behind the people of Hong Kong in their struggle against Chinese oppression.

In the end, no European government stood up and took a firm stance against Beijing. Wong’s attempt to internationalise the “Hong Kong problem” by taking it to the level of a fight between democracy and authoritarianism, between good and bad, has failed. It was predictable.

Although Western governments are sympathetic towards the protest movement, they do not question that Hong Kong is an integral part of China. Nor do they publicly reject the Chinese understanding that the Basic Law is a gift Beijing bestowed on the Hong Kong people in 1997, rather than a source of legal authority that now stands above the Chinese party-state.

Read the rest:
Hong Kong’s protesters will find that violent action to achieve abstract ideas is a suicide mission