China’s overreaction to legitimate demands for democracy in Hong Kong, where police are teargasing peaceful protesters asking for universal suffrage, leaves no doubt how the Communist Party sees its future. Regrettably, the Obama administration is saying it will “not take sides.”
Beijing’s Communists are making their position clear — they are not interested in sharing power in a multi-party democracy, in the mainland or in Hong Kong. Market-opening moves over the past decades notwithstanding, the leadership still agrees with Mao Zedong that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.”
Reports from the city today say that thousands of protesters are defying a government ban on protests. To many, this is starting to look like the buildup to the 1989 protests in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, which resulted in the death of some three thousand residents of the Chinese capital after the Communist Party brought in troops from the provinces.
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