Opinion | Joshua Wong and Alex Chow: The People of Hong Kong Will Not Be Cowed by China

Hong Kong’s youth are maturing quickly from breathing in the toxic air that is being shot at them. Many teenagers buy safety masks with their pocket money — and their convictions strengthened. While the elderly implore police officers to put down their pistols and batons, professionals are making donations to the movement.

Righting the wrong that is being done in Hong Kong is also the business of the outside world and rests on its will to confront a C.C.P.-controlled China. World leaders cannot keep mistaking their wish for the peaceful rise of China (and one that perhaps will eventually become democratic) with the reality of the Chinese Communist dictatorship today. Any act or policy that sustains the lifeblood of the Communist dictatorship in Beijing is an offense to the peoples whom that dictatorship persecutes and oppresses — in Tibet, Xinjiang, Hong Kong and mainland China.

When Britain handed control of Hong Kong to China in 1997, some people thought that what was then a colony — a wartime trophy of European imperial empires — was about to come unshackled. But handing Hong Kong to a reviving empire only spelled its re-colonialization. If China had been a democracy in 1997, the handover would have meant no dispute. In reality, it turned the millions of Hong Kong’s residents into refugees in their own city, subservient to the authoritarian Communist regime in Beijing.

Many Hong Kongers are people, or descendants of people, who fled the mainland to escape a regime that starved tens of millions of its citizens decades ago, then murdered students in 1989 and has since persecuted political dissents incessantly. Today, that regime fuels Chinese nationalism on the mainland by delivering fragmented information and fabricated propaganda, or “fake news,” to its people.

We understand that some critics of American interventionism may be inclined to have sympathy for China as a still-developing country bullied by an over-dominant West. But please listen to us here in Hong Kong: Communist China is no alternative to the interventionism you hate or contest — that is an inconvenient truth that the world must reckon with.

The massive resistance movement in Hong Kong is a crisis of legitimacy for the Chinese government. The uprising is also a call for the rest of the world to support our crusade for human dignity, equality and freedom. The protesters at the front lines of these marches, who go out there in the city’s streets, are doing no less than taking on that enormously powerful communist-cum-fascist regime.

In September, the struggle will only take on more life. We know that the Chinese government wants grand celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the birth of the People’s Republic of China on Oct. 1; it wants to put history on its side by rewriting the memory of the people. But Hong Kongers won’t let it commemorate that day without a fight.