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If you hadn’t heard, there are massive protests in Hong Kong ongoing regarding the mainland Chinese government rejection of democratic voting for Governor of Hong Kong. When the British reached the agreement to return Hong Kong to China, that was one of the stipulations. China has simply disregarded it. And Britain is, of course, powerless to do anything about it.  The communist Chinese government is more than willing to have an election. They just want to pick the slate of available candidates.

The Chinese government may not be as stable as it appears. It is notoriously opaque. And we’ve heard speculation that the military is not nearly as much under civil (that is, Party) control as the government would have us think. Some have speculated that the ongoing incursions into Indian territory have been ordered by the military, and not by the Party.

Further, the danger to a government’s internal stability is rarely from the poor. Nor from the rich. Revolutions are spawned by the middle class. And the rising middle class in China, in spite being a small percentage of the nation, is still a huge number of actual people. And they chafe under the yoke of the government that enjoys the fruits of their productivity, and yet withholds any real political power from them. Some parts, though by no means all, of the middle class see the government as corrupt and the bureaucracies as an overburden on the potential for even greater economic growth.

In 1989, we saw that the Chinese government and military were more than willing to use massive force to tamp down even the most modest demands for reform. Will they do so in Hong Kong now? And if they don’t use force in Hong Kong, will that cause further unrest to spread to the mainland?

The protests in Hong Kong may yet fizzle out.

Or they may be the first rubles in a seismic shift in the politic scene in Asia.