The Limits of Mass Protest in a Dictatorship
Public opinion cannot remove a communist government by electing another one. But the PRC does aspire to a certain degree of respectability in the world. Sending tanks to crush protests in Hong Kong would make China look very bad – though this does not mean that the government would not do so, if it saw no other way.
https://prosyn.org/EybmgA3
LONDON – Hong Kong is not Beijing. And July 1, 2019, is not June 4, 1989. First of all, in 1989, the violence in China came almost entirely from the side of the government; the weeks of demonstrations in Beijing and other cities had remained remarkably peaceful throughout. This was mostly true in Hong Kong as well, until a small number of young protesters lost their cool and ransacked the Legislative Council chamber with crowbars and hammers.