Maidan 2019 in Hong Kong. Lessons and conclusions
One of the largest rallies in weeks took place in Hong Kong on Sunday in the pouring rain, The Wall Street Journal reports. Hundreds of thousands of protesters, dressed mostly in black, marched through one of Hong Kong's busiest shopping districts.
Unlike previous protests, this action was peaceful, and its participants spoke out against violence.
According to the Chinese newspaper China Daily, citing the organizers of the rally, 476 thousand people took part in the rally. Demonstrators carried the flags of China and Hong Kong and sang the Chinese anthem.
Just a week ago, it seemed that the unrest in Hong Kong had reached a dangerous point, followed by an uprising. Protesters seized the international airport, blocked access to those arriving in the city, and took a journalist hostage.
In general, the situation ceased to be languid and threatened to result in a Maidan massacre according to the Ukrainian scenario in its hottest phase.
Last weekend, the Chinese leadership was forced to move army troops closer to Hong Kong in trucks and armored vehicles, although “civilian activists”, supported by the Western press, began to inflate the arrival of the Chinese military into “Tiananmen 2.0” with hand-wringing and foam at the mouth.
Knowing full well the harsh reputation of the Chinese army in internal disputes, the general democratic public, accustomed to the correct reaction of the police to their outrages, murmured indignantly, muttered, and gushed: “This is not fair! We didn't agree like that! You can’t disrupt people’s protest so inhumanely!”
The arrival of the military in Hong Kong gave positive results: the extremists who seized the airport and hostages were partially arrested, partially dispersed by the police who received reinforcements, and the main air harbor was unblocked and began to receive and send passenger flights again.
The reason for mass protests was amendments to the extradition law. Hong Kong (Hong Kong) returned to China in 1997 after 150 years as a British overseas territory. By signing the act of acceptance and transfer of the city, the Chinese authorities guaranteed Hong Kong broad autonomy and self-government under the slogan “One country, two systems” for a period of 50 years.
Life, however, makes its own adjustments, so Beijing decided to make some amendments to the legal relations with the special territory by passing an extradition law that allows the transfer of convicted Hong Kong residents to Chinese correctional institutions.
City residents, frightened by rumors of executions, torture and human rights violations in Greater China prisons, took to the streets. Or rather, these rumors were just the seed for the start of mass protests in Hong Kong. For the further the rallies flared up, the louder and more clearly the demands for the return of the city to the jurisdiction of London began to be heard in the ranks of the protesters, the more often and thickly the flags of British Hong Kong, Great Britain and the United States began to be taken out.
Soon, the demonstrators moved from nonviolent measures to direct violence not only against the police (who, by the way, acted quite mildly), but also against civilians. In particular, a crowd of plasma activists, inflamed by the hot anti-government protests in July, seized the Hong Kong City Hall and forced local authorities to repeal amendments to the extradition law.
Like the Ukrainian maydauns, the Hong Kong maydauns did everything to discredit and distort their declared ideals, crossing the line of law and morality.
Their Western curators did not lag behind the Maydowns. And it’s not just the countless political statements and demands of Western elites in support of the protesters, including meetings of Western diplomats with protest leaders based on Ukrainian patterns. All that was missing was handing out cookies from Grandma Nuland's bag.
Against the backdrop of an aggravation of the political situation, two ships of the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet, the guided-missile cruiser Lake Erie and the landing ship Green Bay, tried to enter Hong Kong “just for a moment.” Much to the displeasure of the Americans and the Maidans, the ships were not allowed into the port of Hong Kong.
All together, this allowed Beijing to reasonably accuse the West of interfering in the internal affairs of the PRC.
The decline in protest hysteria, the use of symbols and the anthem of the People's Republic of China by demonstrators in Hong Kong suggests that a new manual has been issued to the leaders of the riots, since Western curators are seriously concerned about how quickly and effectively over the past week the Chinese police, with the support of the military, have swaddled the particularly violent ones.
And, as the bard aptly noted, “there are few truly violent ones, so there are no leaders.”
Observers believe that the storming and holding of the airport was the last sob of the power phase of the “Hong Kong - Great Britain” action, when the organizers of the riots went all-in and got to the warehouse with police ammunition. On Tuesday, after clearing the airport building of extremists, the entertainers had to urgently change their shoes and take out the visual propaganda “Hong Kong and China - Tse Edina Krajina!”; the organizers of the Sunday march, as if nothing had happened, declared their love for peace and shifted responsibility for possible violence to the police leadership.
In general, few people have any doubts that the protracted Maidan in Hong Kong is slowly subsiding. The fatigue and confusion of its participants from constantly changing agendas, changing clothes from pink to black, and lack of funding are noticeable. Still, breaking the bank for a small price for months in such an expensive city like Hong Kong can ruin and exhaust anyone.
It is interesting that the protesters of the Chinese “Porto Franco” made very influential enemies for themselves with their inappropriate actions. And these are not the ruling Chinese communists in Beijing, but 100% bourgeois rich family clans of Hong Kong. Storming and blocking of important facilities for the city by extremists, beating people, and taking hostages brought huge losses to Hong Kong business. Estimated – at least $20 billion for the entire protest period of summer 2019. Experts predict that continued unrest will force Hong Kong's richest fathers to support communist Beijing's position as the peace and stability it offers promotes profit and prosperity.
By the way, they report from Hong Kong that the maydauns, screaming at all corners about their love for the city, are furiously trashing and damaging city property, “because this causes damage to the Beijing regime,” which is eerily reminiscent of the actions of adherents of “European Ukraine” in Kyiv during the “Euromaidan” "
It is very likely that the Hong Kong Maidan of 2019 will cause certain political consequences associated with a revision of the current status of Hong Kong, expressed by the formula “One country, two systems.” It is clear that the 1997 document, which established Hong Kong’s broad autonomy, makes it a weak link that could one day break and destabilize China.
Supporters of drastic measures are perplexed: why don’t the Chinese comrades restore order in Hong Kong with tanks, like in Tiananmen Square 30 years ago. Why, they ask, all this rotten liberalism and patience for months in relation to the Maidanists rocking the country?
In fact, if similar unrest and separatist manifestations had broken out somewhere in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region or in Tibet, the CCP leadership, without much hesitation, would have ordered the deployment of tanks there, suppressing any protests within XNUMX hours. Hong Kong is not the same. Special status, the third financial capital of the world and all that jazz. In this city, Beijing politicians have to avoid brute force and straight-line decisions.
It should always be remembered that China has not yet regained control of the island of Taiwan. Looking at Hong Kong, which has been part of the People's Republic of China for 22 years, maintaining its identity, confusion and vacillation have arisen among the Taiwanese separatists, boiling down to the conviction that a return to the Celestial Empire is inevitable. The Hong Kong maydowns rolled out by tanks will make even the most staunch supporters of the unification of the Chinese nation recoil from China.
That is why the most powerful units sent to disperse and arrest extremists became an analogue of the Chinese SOBR, opposing “triads” and street gangs. Never before used against protests.
However, Mama’s oppositionists should blame themselves for this: protest, yell, wave flags, but don’t you dare throw petrol bombs at the police, seize administrative buildings, take hostages and beat people!
Now the Chinese authorities have the right to talk about the risk of the spread of terrorism in Hong Kong and even borrow something from the US experience associated with a set of measures introduced in the country after September 11, 2001. Such as tightening the internal security regime, expanding the rights of police authorities while simultaneously limiting civil rights and freedoms in a too free city. What did they fight for...
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