With Hong Kong protests exploding to new levels, President Xi Jinping of China is likely to deploy Peoples Liberation Army forces onto the former British colony’s streets. And that means a slaughter of some degree.
Xi’s problem is simple. Hong Kong police and their Chinese Ministry of State Security intelligence service masters are proving unable to stem the mass disorder. In so, painting a picture of political incompetence and security impotence, Hong Kong’s street battles are an existential threat to Xi’s regime. The protests degrade the Chinese Communist Party’s claim to a divine right of power and weaken Xi’s global narrative of a China that is destined to lead.
To be sure, Xi and his comrades on the powerful Standing Committee do not want to send the army into Hong Kong.
They know that doing so would spark immediate international furor and pressure otherwise China-sympathetic Western interests such as President Emmanuel Macron and the NBA to degrade their relationships with Beijing. Yet, neither can Xi allow this chaos to continue. Every day it does, the Communist Party appears weaker and thus more vulnerable to that which it most fears: resistance to its rule on the mainland and new international resistance to its global agenda.
And Beijing’s current strategy for ending the protests is an obvious and manifest failure. Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s recent trip to Beijing — a trip likely designed to avoid Western intelligence monitoring of communications — was about Beijing offering new guidance to end the violence. But Beijing’s diktats to Lam have achieved nothing but chaos, agitating the protesters into new resistance.
Nor has Beijing’s backtracking on the extradition law, which sparked the protests cooled protester fury. Propaganda efforts to persuade protesters to fall in love with the Communist Party have been similarly catastrophic. A recent face mask ban has also served the opposite effect and was ruled illegal by the Hong Kong court system on Monday. That decision by a relatively independent judiciary emphasizes the stakes in this great struggle between authoritarian aggression and the democratic rule of law.
At the same time, however, those who believe Xi’s Communist Party is stuck are deluding themselves.
Unlike us in the West, the Standing Committee views its mission to usurp the American-led liberal international order through the prism of generations, not years. Nor does Xi see Hong Kong struggle through a simple microcosm of individual rights versus central power. He sees it as a great test for his Chinese dream. Forced to choose between a military crackdown, which sparks a year or two of international fury, and Hong Kong’s collapse into anarchy, Xi will choose the former.
In short, slaughter is likely coming to Hong Kong.
