Troop buildup seen as credible threat
How effective is military posturing and how patient is iron-fisted Xi?
The Shenzhen Bay Sports Centre rises along the shore with the green hills of Hong Kong visible across the water. It normally bustles with a variety of youth sports programs and dance, art and language academies, including one that advertises a “Hong Kong Style Education.”
In recent days, however, it has become a staging ground for olive-green military transports and armoured personnel carriers that arrived Aug. 11 and disgorged hundreds of security officers from the People’s Armed Police, a Chinese paramilitary force, who are loudly running through daily exercises and drills.
By massing the troops within view of Hong Kong, the semiautonomous territory convulsed by protests, China’s Communist Party is delivering a strong warning that the use of force remains an option for Beijing.
It is also a stark reminder that military power remains the bedrock of the party’s legitimacy.
“It’s a credible threat,” Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in California, said. “The Chinese government does not want to leave any doubt that, if necessary, it will act.”
China’s leader, Xi Jinping, has governed with an increasingly iron fist, including over the military.
The deployment does not appear to be the prelude to a military intervention in Hong Kong, but few analysts expressed doubt that China would act if Xi believed the country’s sovereignty over the territory was jeopardized.
“How can he regard the Hong Kong movement as a pure democratic movement?” said Tian Feilong, executive director of a research institute on Hong Kong policy in Beijing. Xi will probably perceive the protests not just as a call for democracy in Hong Kong, but also as an effort to topple the Communist Party itself, he said. “He is very politically alert.”
Xi’s government, he said, has most likely completed preparations for an intervention, but is holding off as long as the local authorities manage to keep the protests contained.
That calculus could change, he and other analysts said, if the protests succeed in crippling the government or other institutions, like the courts, which will soon begin hearing the first cases of those arrested in the demonstrations. In what some observers see as a worrying sign, officials in Beijing have called the protesters’ actions “close to terrorism.”
“The military solution would have many urgent and disruptive effects,” said Wu Qiang, a political analyst in Beijing. “It would be political suicide for the Communist Party of China and the ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement of Hong Kong.”
More nationalistic voices have brushed aside such fretting, noting that China is a much stronger and diplomatically confident country than the one that endured international opprobrium after the Tiananmen crackdown.
“The Hong Kong matter will not be a repeat of the political disturbance of 1989,” Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, wrote Friday in an editorial, referring to the year that military troops in Beijing crushed the Tiananmen protests.
It said Beijing had not decided to use force to intervene in Hong Kong, but had the legal right to do so if needed.
The deployment in Shenzhen was clearly meant to focus attention in Hong Kong and beyond. A white bridge that connects Shenzhen to Hong Kong is only three kilometres down the road.
It remains to be seen how effective Beijing’s posturing will be. The authorities have from the start misjudged the depth of the anger driving people into the streets. While the deployment and increasingly blunt warnings from officials have rattled nerves, they seem to have had little effect on those who view the struggle as one crucial for preserving Hong Kong’s freedoms.
For now, analysts said, officials in Beijing appear willing to watch and wait, continuing to offer support for Hong Kong’s beleaguered leaders, to dangle carrots and sticks at business and cultural leaders, and to try to undermine public support for the protests. Giving in to the protesters’ demands would be an unacceptable sign of weakness for them.