Quote:
Originally Posted by SeijiSensei
I watched a supposed student leader be interviewed by the BBC. He was frustratingly unwilling to accept any responsibility for the violence and kept blaming the police. He could have at least said, yes, a small contingent of demonstrators acted unwisely, but the vast majority of us have been peaceful. By refusing to admit even that, he makes it harder for sympathetic observers to feel reassured.
In the end I expect the protesters to be crushed by the Chinese military. The outside world will express dismay, but do nothing.
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I just feel that similar to the protests in 1989 the Hong Kong protests this year suffer from two major issues:
1) Lack of leadership, which makes it hard for the administration - even if they were willing - to negotiate. They don't have a contact person and if there were one they can't negotiate with people of whom they don't know if they represent even a majority of the people on the streets out there.
2) Lack of pragmatism. With each passing day a PLA intervention is edging closer. And once the PLA intervenes they can not only forget about any of their demands, no matter whether it's things already (practically) achieved such as the scrapping of the extradition bill or democratization, they can also say goodbye to the freedoms they (still) possess under the one-country-two-systems principle, no matter how much the edges have been frayed in the past decades. Furthermore, the instabilities brought about by a PLA intervention will pull the rug from Hong Kong's economy, which will worsen some of the conditions that are part of the reason why so many are going to the streets now.
The people on the streets need to realize that Beijing does not want to send the PLA in.