Hong Kong Faces The Dragon

China is resuming its normal history of repression and dissolution with a North and South ebb and flow as it has had for 3,000 years. Within the last 160 years the Manchu were crippled and discredited by the Southern coastal syncretic Christian Taiping Rebellion. That was crushed but the Manchu fell and in the 1920s Chiang Kai-shek's KMT marched North to unify China and 20 years later Mao's CCP marched South. For 70 years the CCP has held power and gotten the Chinese people to endure their brutal regime by reminding them of the suffering from Warlords, the Civil War (even though that was caused by the CCP), and foreign invasion by Japan.

Will the CCP order the invasion of Hong Kong with massive loss of life and the crippling of banking and commerce? Probably yes. The final trigger I predict will be when the local police refuse to attack their own people. Xi knows that is when the Resistance becomes a Rebellion that is either crushed or it sweeps away the regime. Trotsky in a brilliant passage described how the Russian Revolution began when the Cossacks allowed the protesters to crawl to safety under the bellies of their horses.

The demonstrators today rallied in front of the main police station on HK's Nathan Street. If the CCP orders the police to respond and they refuse then I expect the troops from a distant region that have likely been assembling outside HK for the last weeks to enter. Just as with Tiananmen Square where troops from Inner Mongolia were used after the students fraternized with the local garrison I think that the Chinese will use poor country boys who hate the coastal city dwellers.

What can the people of HK do to resist? We may imagine technical wizardry in laboratories allowing them to hack into computers and communications, wreaking havoc, but ultimately boots and low tech savagery will win.

Is the fascist CCP regime doomed? Ultimately yes. That however will be of small comfort to the dead and those who suffer, both in China and outside, from likely years of repression rebellion poverty and quite possibly war.