From Jude Blanchette at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) at the AFR:
Some argue that Beijing will ultimately refrain from the use of violence due to a concern over its global reputation or domestic blowback. Kerry Brown of King’s College London predicted: “Anything too dramatic is going to be quite a high cost. It will be called Tiananmen 2.0, and they don’t want that kind of reputational hit.”
Yet this fundamentally misunderstands the party’s long-running political calculus and how it interprets past events, including Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968, and even June 4, 1989. The great arc of CCP history – indeed, of one-party political systems in general – shows that international opprobrium and domestic blowback are manageable, if costly. The uncontrolled deterioration of political authority is not. And that’s exactly what Beijing sees in Hong Kong right now.
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