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Opinion | Escalating violence is not the answer. It’s time for protesters to withdraw with dignity, to make way for dialogue and reform
- Protesters should think long and hard about how their commitment to ‘free Hong Kong’ has actually curtailed citizens’ liberties and freedoms. It’s time to focus energy on wide-ranging dialogue, including on badly needed electoral reform
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Mass social upheavals since the guillotine-crazed Jacobin terror of the French Revolution have had a habit of getting out of hand. Along with violently jettisoning the status quo, they have demonstrated a perverse habit of devouring their own.
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A long list, from Robespierre and Danton to Trotsky will attest to this. To be sure, liberté, égalité, fraternité is etched on our minds, an inspiration for generations. Yet, in the end, too many revolutions are better known for their gore, not glory.
Small wonder, then, that governments have an inherent aversion to mobs, no matter how exquisitely phrased their angst. And so Hong Kong’s demonstrators should also beware of becoming victims of their own excess. Popular support can be both fickle and fleeting.
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Communist China is no stranger to student movements and violent protest. It was, in many senses, born out of such a movement on May 4, 1919, when students congregated in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square to decry what they saw as a huge betrayal by Western powers and then Chinese leaders in the appeasement of Japan after World War I.
The Communist Party diligently commemorates the May Fourth Movement as a heroic struggle. In 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution chaos, the party played an active role in the Hong Kong riots. But, since the 1989 Tiananmen episode, its appetite for such unmanaged revolutionary outpourings has diminished considerably.
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