Protests started in Hong Kong in late September. What had happened is that the Chinese government
had come out and said 'hey we know we promised your first fully-democratic election in 2017,
but we're going to approve any of the candidates who can run.' People started protesting and
then few days later, the thing that really escalated it was when Hong Kong police came
out with an unprecedented level of force to crack down on the protesters, which only further
outraged a lot of people in Hong Kong, drove more people into the streets where they're
now shutting down the financial district. To understand what's really happening here,
the larger forces at work, you have to go back to 1997. That's the year of what people
in Hong Kong call the handover, when it went from one of the last vestiges of the British
Empire to part of China. As part of the handover, China promised that Hong Kong would be able
to keep this really unusual level of freedom, and it would get to have these first fully-democratic
elections in 2017. It's called the One Country, Two Systems policy. So when China reneged
a little bit on its plan for the 2017 elections, it looked to a lot of people in Hong Kong
like it was the beginning of the end of One Country, Two Systems. And the thing that you
have to understand is that it's about more than just democracy, although that's important.
There's a kind of sense of Hong Kong exceptionalism. People there are much more affluent, much
more worldly. They really see themselves as very distinct from the rest of China. And
any move like this that feels like it's pulling them into the dictatorial rule of the communist
party in China is very scary to them. And part of what really makes that so scary is
the memory of Tiananmen Square, right, which happened in 1989 in Beijing. That memory is
much, much stronger in Hong Kong, where they hold an annual vigil every year. They're keeping
the flame alive for their fellow Chinese who can't, so that when police started coming
out in force late in these protests, they thought 'hey this doesn't look like Hong Kong,
this looks like Beijing.' So what you're seeing is not just a fight for, can we keep the election
rules that we have for 2017, it's a fight for, can they stay Hong Kong or are they going
to become just like the rest of China?