When hundreds of thousands of people in Hong Kong peacefully took to the streets last month, they had a few specific demands, including the withdrawal of an unpopular bill and an investigation into police abuse. In recent days, they added another call: the right to direct elections.
This latest demand brought into focus the issue that has been quietly seething at the heart of the protests: Hong Kong’s increasingly fraught relationship with mainland China and the authoritarian ruling Communist Party. That longstanding anxiety flared last week when a small group of demonstrators stormed the city’s legislature, blacked out the name for mainland China from Hong Kong’s official emblem and spray-painted slogans calling for universal suffrage.
