Pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong feel eerily familiar.

I was 18 in the spring of 1989, and was just finishing up my senior year of high school.  My east Bay Area school had a pretty large population of recent Chinese immigrants or the children of Chinese immigrants, and the pro-democracy demonstrations in Beijing were the subject of almost all conversation. (Yep, give a high school student in the Bay Area something cultural or political to talk about, and they’ll chew it to bits).  Interestingly, a few of my friends were getting updates directly from China.  It seems that some of their relatives had access to fax machines that were allowed to dial out to the rest of the world, and we would hear about them as they came in.  It wasn’t unusual for us to be discussing some new occurrence hours before the news got it.

To say that the crackdown in Tiananmen Square came as a shock would be an understatement.  The story we got, day after day, was that the students were peaceful and that the police were only monitoring the situation or nibbling around the edges of the crowd.  The violent suppression of the demonstrators, followed by trials, prison, and executions, hit our rather naive belief in peaceful change right in the gut.  I’ll never forget watching some of my schoolmates quietly crying in class for days afterward.

The students in Hong Kong are following a very similar playbook to their predecessors.  Relatively orderly and peaceful demonstrations in a public place where the government cannot ignore them are coupled with press coverage.  Police attempts to break up the demonstrations with tear gas seem to have only added fuel to the fire.  Attempts to cut the demonstrators from the outside world by blocking communications channels such as Instagram or Twitter are being thwarted by a nimble, technically minded generation of demonstrators.

Right now, if I still could, I would be checking to see what military or paramilitary units are stationed in or near Hong Kong. The next few days or weeks may get complicated very quickly.  The Chinese government can either negotiate with the protesters (not gonna happen), ignore them until they give up and go away (unlikely), or it can crack down.  The next few days are going to be interesting, and I fear that they may be bloody.