Hong Kong Could Never Be Tiananmen 2.0: Comment
This opinion piece featured on Reuters online on the ongoing Hong Kong protests echoes strongly the thrust of a previous post made by this author.
As was emphasized, the Beijing of 1989 is not the Hong Kong of 2014. Back then, Beijing’s leadership was divided and disgraced CPC General Secretary Zhao Ziyang essentially used the students in his power struggle to gain the upper hand. The students had garnered widespread support from a broad spectrum of society.
Hong Kong is about a small minority, the most impassioned of who are mainly hormone-overdriven students, illegally blocking the streets of Central to the dismay and inconvenience of virtually everyone else, old and young, businessmen or worker, and tourists.
Aside from the profound differences in character, let’s not make a mountain out of a mole hill – electoral reform in Hong Kong, a city of 7 million, under ‘One Country, Two Systems’ can hardly become the template for reform on the mainland where 1.35 billion people reside. And it’s not going to spread there, either, at least for decades.
So, enough of linking Hong Kong to Tiananmen already! But, as other previous posts have revealed, there are those in the Occupy Central camp that wished for blood to be shed.
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