Reports are still fragmentary, but it appears that pro-Beijing thugs have started harassing and in some cases attacking peaceful pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong. They apparently are being abetted by members of the business community who are more invested in the rewards of Hong Kong’s economic system than in retaining their political freedoms. Street fights are breaking out, and the Hong Kong police are apparently doing little so far to protect the student protesters. After a week of impressively orderly occupation of Central Hong Kong, in which tens of thousands of protesters even cleaned up and recycled their trash, Hong Kong’s overlords in Beijing have decided that they cannot risk a direct confrontation with the demonstrators. Instead, they are channeling their inner Vladimir Putin to destroy the stability of the protests and manufacture an excuse for intervention.
Hence, reports of middle-aged male thugs now attacking the students and other protesters. They are not officially Chinese, of course, just as the famous “little green men” in Ukraine were not initially Russian. Yet both serve the same purpose: to provide an excuse for the government to use force to achieve its objectives. After all, intervention, whether in Central Hong Kong or in Crimea, is all about preserving the public peace, protecting innocent lives and property, etc., etc. It is the new face of hybrid warfare, which catches the other side off guard and paralyzes them from acting for just long enough to allow the real incursion to begin.
Anyone who may have thought that Hong Kong’s government retained some level of independence or legitimacy will find it hard to hold such credulous beliefs if the situation gets even more out of hand. The Hong Kong Police, once revered for their independence, could regain the trust of the people by isolating and shutting down the pro-China thugs. But this is a new Hong Kong, and its leaders, fully under the sway of Beijing, have made it clear there is no going back to a more liberal environment. If the student and Occupy Central leaders also decide not to back down, then what was a stirring expression of a people’s desire for freedom will likely become very bloody very quickly. That will be the pretext for sending out the Hong Kong–based People’s Liberation Army units to restore order, end the protests, and snuff out Hong Kong’s freedoms. It will be the same as Tiananmen Square, perhaps without the massacre. And in the future, historians will write that China’s amazing quarter-century of modernization from 1989 to 2014 lacked any political evolution to accompany it.