The Hong Kong Universal Suffrage Protests: The Revolution That Can?

Even though a June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square style crackdown failed to materialize, is the recent Hong Kong Universal Suffrage protests could soon be the termed as “the revolution that can”?

By:Ringo Bones 

Fortunately for the rest of humanity, a feared “June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square style crackdown” failed to rear its ugly head yet again on the recent Hong Kong Universal Suffrage Protests that started in September 26, 2014. Also known as the Umbrella Revolution for the hashtag Tweet named after the protesters’ use of their umbrellas to shield themselves from pepper sprays deployed by the Hong Kong riot police, the recent pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong that occupied the Mainland Chinese special administrative region – despite the reduced number of protesters this very moment – is still going strong until its demands are met on a genuine universal suffrage for Hong Kong where its citizens can genuinely choose their own candidates of chief executive to administer them as opposed to only being able to choose ones vetted by the Beijing communist party by 2017.

As the now reduced number of protesters are still able to reduce access to the main business district and the Beijing appointed chief executive’s headquarters, the protesters’ still pending formal talks slated for Friday, October 10 is still up in the air in terms of what will be accomplished. During the height of the Hong Kong Occupy Central protests, the Beijing government even resorted to using their “Cyber Army” to shut down any Instagram activity between Hong Kong and Mainland China in order to avoid any sympathetic rallies in the Mainland.

After reading the first few chapters of Mainland China’s General Secretary Xi Jinping’s latest book titled The Governance of China which Chairman Xi unabashedly states his fusing of Confucianism and Mao era socialism as the main “secret of his (political?) success” I think any June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square era crackdown on the Hong Kong Occupy Central protestors is out of the question. But on how Chairman Xi will “resolve” the Hong Kong “unrest” during the next few months might prove surprising to say the least to anyone closely watching the events in Hong Kong.