How Will China Respond to Hong Kong’s Protests?

When the Chinese government decided to backtrack on an earlier promise to the voters of Hong Kong that they would be able to elect any leader they chose in the territory’s next elections in 2017, they had to have been aware that this would have provoked widespread anger in Hong Kong.  After all, there was already a great deal of resentment towards the fact that any candidate running to become the leader of Hong Kong had to be vetted by Beijing and that the Chinese government will only allow two or three carefully-selected candidates to run for this position.  However, the scale of the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong appears to have caught Beijing completely off guard.

This is not the first time that major protests have taken place in Hong Kong against what is perceived by many of the residents of that territory to be Beijing’s heavy handedness in dealing with Hong Kong.  In fact, many large protests have occurred in recent years, culminating in the recent protests that have brought tens of thousands of people to the streets of one of the world’s great business centers.  However, these protests differ in the fact that they have been sustained for so long by increasing numbers of protestors, and that they are lead by an increasingly well-organized political opposition group known as Occupy Central that has brought many different elements of Hong Kong’s society to these demonstrations.

For Beijing, these protests in Hong Kong (population 7.2 million) are not only a threat to its control of that territory, but to its dominant position in China itself (population 1.3 billion).  First and foremost, Beijing wants to slowly, but surely, exert a greater degree of political control over Hong Kong and this has been clear since the territory was handed back to China by Britain in 1997.  More importantly, the Chinese government does not want these pro-democracy protests to spread north to China and has taken major steps towards restricting the flow of news from Hong Kong into China.  Finally, Beijing is increasingly concerned about the ever-increasing number of students joining the protests in Hong Kong, fearing that they will add a more radical element to the protests that could lead to violent clashes.

For the moment, China is likely to continue with its policy of attempting to quarantine Hong Kong so that support for the protests does not grow inside China itself.  Certainly, the Chinese government does not want to have to launch a violent crackdown on the protestors due to the implications that this would have for Hong Kong’s (and China’s) economy and social harmony.  Moreover, any violent crackdown would be seen in Taiwan as another reason not to push for the reunification of China, while other Asian countries would view this as the latest sign of China’s growing assertiveness in the region.  Nevertheless, history has shown that, if its back is to the wall, China’s Communist government will take whatever steps necessary to hold on to power.