For China, Hong Kong is an examination

The events of Hong Kong put China in a difficult situation, for which finding a way out is an unusual political exercise, which can affect both domestic and foreign politics. If there were no international constraints, it is reasonable to think that Beijing would prefer to solve the problem quickly through the use of its own armed forces. Moreover, this eventuality is the constant threat to which the Hong Kong protest is subjected: the current law provides that, if the government (supported by Beijing) of the former British colony were to request the intervention of the Chinese People's Army, China will not could that respond positively to this request. It would certainly be a purely formal request, which would serve the Chinese government to have some sort of legal justification for violent repression. To make this move, however, it would mean to render the model "a country two systems" through which the Chinese government wants to present itself to the world, to give a patina of tolerance and democracy, which is useful to increase trade. Betraying this model could have a significant economic cost, capable of compressing the programmatic data of Chinese growth. Then there are also diplomatic costs, which would make the Chinese image so far laboriously built back. On the other hand, Beijing must however count in the ideal balance sheet of the management of the Hong Kong issue, the inability to manage a protégé that has become radicalized, precisely because of the rigidity of the government of the former British colony, which acted on the instructions of the central government of Beijing. One of the dangers that frighten the Chinese Communist Party bureaucrats is the widening of the protest in the most sensitive areas of the Chinese empire: first of all Taiwan, which shows ever greater signs of intolerance towards Chinese interference, in the Muslim region of the Chinese country , where the protest, although stifled in violence has never ceased to threaten the normalization process imposed by Beijing, up to internal dissent, certainly easier to control, but which always presents critical elements for the system. Officially, for now, China does not intend to put an end to the model with which Hong Kong rules, but pursues a line that combines trust in the police, which has tightened its methods against the demonstrators, to the introduction of forms of hidden repression such as the failure to condemn the actions of criminals, probably coming from organized crime circles in Hong Kong, which have acted against dissidents with violent actions not opposed by the security forces. The perception is that China is aware that the sending of the army could undermine the trust coming from Western countries, which has, however, earned itself with large investments. Beijing has also shown itself to be rather nervous towards the Western powers that have warned it not to intervene directly in Hong Kong: China does not tolerate internal interference, and it is understandable, but this susceptibility shows that it is not yet ready to play the role of great world power outside the economic field. The Beijing dialectic is based on a financial supremacy, thanks to which it gains easy access to international relations, but when contingent themes shift the reasons for diplomatic dialectics, China finds itself imprisoned within its own patterns by authoritarian state, which does not allow him to understand the normal dynamics of relations with democratic states. Hong Kong is a test for China in the face of the world, because the former British colony is not a remote region of China and not even an area of ​​Syria or Iraq, where, unfortunately, the rights are not usually guaranteed, but it is an economic power ideally framed in the western world and, therefore, a privileged observatory to see how China behaves and could behave in the future. The consequences can be very heavy for Chinese ambitions and above all for its economic objectives: a price that is too high even in the face of an increasingly contrary opposition.