Putin and Xi Are Going Soft on Protest. Why?
The Russian and Chinese regimes are doing something new: Not escalating in the face of protest.
Not even Xi can ignore 2 million people.
Photographer: Carl Court/Getty Images
The apparent victory of Hong Kong protesters and a mini-thaw taking place in Russia are interesting departures from the usual practice of two regimes known to have no reverse gear. Could they have decided to learn a technique one student of authoritarianism has dubbed “contained escalation”?
The communist government of mainland China has been whittling away at Hong Kong’s British-style liberties for years, and protests were routinely ignored. The so-called Umbrella Revolution of 2014 – a series of protests against a plan to have candidates for the role of Hong Kong’s chief executive screened by the mainland – resulted in the preservation of an even more restrictive electoral system. And last April, nine of the movement’s leaders were convicted of “conspiring” and “inciting” to cause a public nuisance. Even in relatively liberal Hong Kong, the regime that crushed the Tiananmen Square protests didn’t step back in the face of popular indignation.