Showdown

It may not, yet, reach the level of Tiananmen Square. But the DEMONSTRATIONS IN HONG KONG are rattling the world, China’s leadership and financial markets

- Bill Powell

AUDREY WU, A VIDEO EDITOR AT a Hong Kong TV station, was not even born in June of 1989, but her father has told her about what happened back then in Beijing.

He told her of the demonstrations that began to honor the late Chinese leader, Hu Yaobang, a liberal reformer who had just died. More and more students gathered at Tiananmen Square in the center of China’s capital city, soon to be joined by workers and other ordinary Chinese citizens. The protests morphed, the demonstrators railed about inflation, and government corruption. Finally, the students erected a statue of Lady Liberty.

The uprising, from that point, became a call for democracy.

Wu knows what happened then, too. She knows the Chinese leadership had finally had enough. So they sent in tanks and soldiers, and the killing began. Wu, 27, knows all about the Tiananmen Square massacre.

Still, that hasn’t stopped her from joining hundreds of thousands of fellow Hong Kong residents in the increasingly fraught demonstrations that have paralyzed the city for almost three months. Those demonstrations ratcheted up considerably on August 12 and 13 when protesters occupied and shut down Hong Kong’s international airport, one of the largest transit hubs in east Asia. In response, a large unit of the People’s Armed Police, based just over the border in the Chinese city of Shenzhen, began high profile drills clearly aimed at intimidation.

And a spokesman for Xi Jinping’s government in Beijing issued a warning whose meaning could not be mistaken: the demonstrations had shown “sprouts of terrorism,” which would be punished “without leniency [and] without mercy.”