This is ominous (tip to Instapundit):
Hong Kong police shot and critically wounded a protester and a man was set on fire on Monday in violence that prompted leader Carrie Lam to denounce "enemies of the people" and drew a chilling warning from a senior Chinese newspaper editor.
Protesters threw petrol bombs at police after a weekend of clashes across the Chinese-ruled territory, marking a dramatic escalation in more than five months of often violent pro-democracy unrest.
"The violence has far exceeded the call for democracy and the demonstrators are now the people's enemy," Hong Kong chief executive Lam said in a defiant televised address. [emphasis added]
For enemies of the people, there are the People's Liberation Army and the People's Armed Police.
People helping people, it ain't.
UPDATE: I've heard people say that China won't dare unleash mass violence on the people of Hong Kong. The economic cost would be too high, it is said.
Perhaps the Chinese will decide that it will be more effective to conduct a more subtle crackdown. Perhaps these last months Chinese intelligence has been mapping the protest movement and will infiltrate, arrest, abuse, and disappear key protest personnel and collapse it more quietly.
But there is a risk to even a quiet victory. If people in the rest of China don't see the protests being put down in a high profile manner, what might the rest of the Chinese people think?
Will it look like Hong Kong got away with its long defiance of the Chinese Communist Party? Will it seem like that level of resistance is possible elsewhere as a solution to grievances? Is that the real price of not crushing visibly the protests in Hong Kong?
My view is that nothing--nothing--is a higher priority for the Chinese Communist Party than continued survival of the Chinese Communist Party.
So if to maintain their monopoly on power, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has to abandon territory (whether owned or claimed), go to war, or wreck their economy by sending in the PLA and PAP to shoot and beat the Hong Kong protesters while unleashing the undercover spooks to kill and kidnap protest leaders, the CCP will do so.
UPDATE: Thoughts on Hong Kong. Is the PLA already in Hong Kong in police uniforms?
UPDATE: If China is quietly funneling in security forces, it is more likely to be the PAP. And more on the issue. The people of Hong Kong seem to be sustaining their support for the protests/proto-insurgents. And dealing with this confronts China with an issue of bad timing given the US decision to stop ignoring Chinese economic warfare and industrial espionage.
And I'll note that the 2008 financial crisis hurt China, too, and their responses to that--more debt and spending--are causing problems now.
