Hong Kongers are leading the way in the first major ideological confrontation of the new cold war that the People’s Republic of China has launched against the West.
They are conducting their struggle astutely, recognizing two operating imperatives:
First, the ultimate source of the growing constriction on their “guaranteed” freedoms is not the Hong Kong administration, but the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Second, the audience for the protesters’ message is the Chinese population itself, and ultimately, the wider international community.
The Chinese government refrained from overt interference as long as the protests were confined to downtown government and police buildings, where they could derogate them as the work of local troublemakers and vandals.
At the same time, Beijing used its finely honed instruments of information suppression to keep news of the demonstrations away from Chinese, just as it does with the thousands of local protests throughout China.
Its greatest fear is the coalescing of myriad demonstrations into a national movement against the CCP government.
At first, the demonstrators had no way to reach the Chinese, but they soon recognized that they had a ready-made audience in the thousands of Chinese tourists who come to Hong Kong every day.
Once infected with the unofficial version, they would carry the message of the uprising back to the Chinese populace in ways the ultimate nemesis in Beijing could not control.
They shifted the locus of the protests from the city center to the high-speed train station connecting Hong Kong to China.
“We want to show tourists, including mainland Chinese tourists, what is happening in Hong Kong and we hope they can take this concept back to China,” one student said.
The Chinese authorities saw the danger and, to send a message to all train passengers, unleashed “triad” thugs, armed with sticks and metal rods, to attack the demonstrators in the Mass Transit Railway station in Yuen Long, seriously injuring many.
In a coordinated response that escalated the strategic communications campaign, the demonstrations on Friday last week leap-frogged from rail transit facilities to Hong Kong International Airport, where protesters could influence a broader audience of global visitors.
Flight attendants and airport staff launched an 11-hour protest against the Hong Kong government for tolerating, if not instigating, the violent transit attacks at the subway station.
They were joined by the original downtown protesters who staged a sit-down in the airport terminal greeting travelers from around the world with their chants of “free Hong Kong.”
Some students held signs in English, Japanese and Korean appealing to “international friends for help standing up to the Hong Kong government.”
Others held signs reading: “Tourist warning: Do not trust the police or the government.”
The protesters have accomplished their initial purpose of bringing Hong Kong’s plight to the world’s attention. They hope to gain international support for restoring and maintaining their political freedoms.
They are also relying on global public opinion to dissuade Beijing from using military force in Hong Kong and replicating its 1989 massacre of students and workers in Tiananmen Square and other cities.
There are disquieting signs that Chinese leaders are considering precisely those extreme measures.
The Chinese Ministry of National Defense warned that the protests were challenging China’s sovereignty over Hong Kong and said: “That absolutely cannot be tolerated.”
That hint of military intervention was reinforced by reports of troop mobilization in Shenzhen, a potential launching point for an assault on Hong Kong.
A ministry spokesman said that US officials and a “black hand” were stoking violence and chaos in Hong Kong.
“We can see that US officials are even behind such incidents,” he said.
The US Department of State had already expressed the US’ “grave concern” over the proposed extradition legislation at the root of the protests, and as the confrontations escalated, US President Donald Trump and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo issued veiled warnings to Beijing.
“The president, I think, captured it right when he said that we need China to do the right thing. We hope that they’ll do that, we hope that the protests will remain peaceful,” Pompeo said in an interview.
Hong Kong’s protesters have adroitly pulled off a minor strategic communications coup and exposed the CCP’s vulnerability to truthful messages directed at Chinese and the international community.
The US and other Western governments, with far more sophisticated communications instruments at their disposal, should follow the protesters’ lead and prepare an unapologetic name-and-shame campaign against Chinese leaders.
Beijing should be under no illusion that if it uses force, the administration would be able to return to “business as usual” as its predecessors did after Tiananmen.
In addition, former statesmen and other pro-engagement figures should refrain from giving China cover for any outrage it might commit against Hong Kong.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense. He is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member of the advisory committee of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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