China has entered into a no-win situation. If they give in to the Hongkongers' demands the Communist Party will look weak. The shame will weaken their regime and may lead to a cascading failure in the provinces, in Tibet and in Xinjiang where millions of Uyghurs are already being held in concentration camps to keep the province from erupting into violence and breaking away. On the other hand, if they send in the army and crush the protestors like they did at Tienanmen Square in 1989, this will severely damage the image of the Communist Party on the world stage and may lead to economic warfare that would cripple China's economy and cause the country to fragment. China has no good options.
And they have to act fast. The Chinese population is aging, and the youth are becoming fat and lazy, unfit for military service. China must strike fast, to conquer the South China Sea, and to invade Hong Kong and Taiwan while they still have an army left that can win these wars. In 50 years America will still have the same percentage of young people to old people, but in China there will only be one young person for every three or four old people, a situation that is unsustainable. The Communist Party needs to act now, while it still has the ability, before its population grows too old and its chance to become a super power evaporates.
This same thing happened in the 80s in Europe. One by one communist nations broke out into violence and the people overthrew their shackles. The Soviet Union, crippled by severe oil crisis and a bloody war in Afghanistan, didn't have the money or the will to stop them from breaking away. The Warsaw Pact evaporated, and then the individual republics within the Soviet Union itself declared independence, and the world's second super power disintegrated.
The CPC's grip on China is stronger than the Soviet Union, and since 1972 it has had the tacit approval of the US government. This position was strengthened in 2000 when Bill Clinton allowed China to join the World Trade Organization. The new President Donald Trump is the first leader since Kennedy who has had the balls to stand up to communism, and has taken the fight to the CPC with tariffs that have caused China to devalue its currency. The CPC's grip on power is secure for now, but with its rapidly aging population and the growth of other Asian nations like India taking a bite out of the cheap labor market, there is a very good chance that China will collapse within the next 50 years. An invasion of Hong Kong would only hasten that collapse.
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