LONDON - China has raised the rhetorical stakes in its dispute with pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong, saying they are creating “chaos.” That is a significant term in Chinese Communist Party ideology, suggesting that the situation could threaten the Party’s hold on power, and therefore that decisive action is required.
The word was used in a front-page commentary in the Party newspaper, – a platform used to express the views of top leaders and to implicitly warn of consequences unless the situation is rectified.
It is the same word Party officials used 25 years ago to describe the Tiananmen Square protests, in which thousands of students occupied Beijing’s central square for weeks.
Shortly afterwards, the Chinese military cleared the square by force and cracked down on democracy activists nationwide. Western experts say hundreds, if not thousands, were killed. China denies that anyone died on Tiananmen Square.
China’s latest rhetoric about the Hong Kong protesters is stronger than previous statements. Until now, Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Hua Chunying had only said the protests were “illegal” and “undermine the rule of law and sabotage social stability.
At the same time, there are reports of the detention and questioning of dozens of people on the mainland who have indicated their support for the protests. Some have spread foreign news reports that have been suppressed in China. Others have participated in a social media support campaign in which they shave their heads and then post photos of themselves.
The latest developments appear to indicate that the patience of top leaders is running out for the Occupy Central protesters, who are blocking roads around the Hong Kong government offices to demand free elections.
The new rhetoric from Beijing runs counter to what many China experts had expected – an effort to find a face-saving way out of the Hong Kong protests.
“What happens in Hong Kong, at the moment, is not going to threaten the very existence of the Chinese state in the way that Tiananmen did,” said former British diplomat Roderic Wye, who was posted at the British embassy in Beijing in the 1980s and 90s and is now at London’s Chatham House.
Still, even speaking before the latest commentary, Wye said public support in China for the Hong Kong protesters would change the Chinese leaders’ calculation.
“They clearly don’t want something similar to happen in China,” Wye said in a VOA interview, “because if it did start happening then, I think, yes, we could be back in a situation sort of parallel to Tiananmen. And that is something that the Chinese government will do their utmost to avoid.”
But Wye said although the Tiananmen crackdown successfully suppressed dissent in China for the last 25 years, Chinese leaders don’t want to use the same tactics in Hong Kong.
“If they did have the involvement from the People’s Armed Police or the Chinese military, that would effectively be the end of ‘One Country, Two Systems.’ And I don’t think that’s what they want at the moment.”
Hong Kong owes its special status as a Special Administrative Region to China’s desire in the 1980s to allow the territory to continue as an engine of trade and economic growth while coming back under Chinese sovereignty. That was the breakthrough concept of “One Country, Two Systems,” articulated by then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.
The concept also included a separate political system for Hong Kong, with levels of freedom and civil liberties that other Chinese citizens did not have, and still don’t.
But since then, China has developed many more engines of economic growth, potentially making Hong Kong’s special status less important to Chinese leaders.
At the same time, they may be more concerned about foreign reaction to how they handle these protests than they were about reaction to the Tiananmen crackdown. China is much more integrated into the global economy than it was 25 years ago, making it potentially more vulnerable to any sanctions that might follow a violent crackdown.
“I think it’s a very big challenge and quite an uncomfortable situation,” said China Studies Professor Francoise Lauwaert at the Free University of Brussels. “All China is watching Hong Kong now, and [China’s leaders] could be afraid of a kind of contagious disease for the system.”
But while the leadership is indicating it is not willing to take any such risk, experts differ on whether people elsewhere in China will see the Hong Kong protests as a model or as an overreach by people who already have more rights than they do.