The United States can’t wait for the next crisis.

The Diplomat
Date: September 24, 2019
By: Michael Sobolik

Less than a month before the 70th anniversary of Mao Zedong’s establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, millions of men and women in Hong Kong are demanding liberty: Not from a Western imperialist, but from the Chinese Communist Party. The breakdown of Hong Kong’s autonomy is a failure for China, as its current President Xi Jinping has no good options from which to choose.

The United States is right to stand with Hong Kong, and actually has significantly more leverage than most people think in deterring China from cracking down there. Since the 1997 handover by the United Kingdom, as part of the autonomy arrangement hammered out with Beijing, Hong Kong has enjoyed special economic treatment that has made the island-city a haven for capital from the Mainland. That privileged status, as much as anything else, is what has prevented the PRC from clamping down on the protesters to date. It also provides America with an important opening by which to pressure China.

But why does Beijing feel so threatened by Hong Kong’s democracy? The answer can be found in Chinese history. From the Iron Age to the Industrial Revolution, China’s abiding strategic weakness was disunity. In Confucian parlance, the Chinese emperor commanded “all things under heaven,” but in practice dynasties in China ebbed and flowed as territory expanded and contracted along its periphery. Yale historian Kenneth Scott Latourette observed this phenomenon in 1964 when he noted the existence of two Chinas: China proper, spanning from Hebei and Gansu down to Sichuan and Guangdong, and outlying sections of Manchuria and Mongolia to the north and Tibet and modern-day Xinjiang to the west. “The very size of the country,” Latourette observed, “militates against unity.”
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