The events of June 1989 were horrific, but were they actually a miscalculation? China wasn’t quite the world’s factory yet and the fall of communism was just starting around the world. If there was a time that the rest of the world would have imposed consequences on the Communist Chinese regime for murdering their own people, it would have been 1989. Instead everything was forgiven and after five years the US granted China “most favored nation” trade status.

These days China produces an absolute majority of the world’s steel, many individual products like port cranes are solely manufactured in China, Shenzhen is an indispensable center of economic activity to a probably higher degree than even Silicon Valley, and the Belt-and-Road initiative is establishing Chinese soft power throughout the most rapidly growing parts of the world.

At the same time, this is a regime that deals with ethnic and religious tensions by throwing people into concentration camps and brainwashing them into the majority culture, as they are doing with the Uyghurs today. Has that resulted in any consequences for them?

Let’s face it, the “free world” these days is feckless and divided, China has turned into a superpower even since 1989, and the developing world can tell which direction the wind is blowing. Nobody can tell the CPC what to do anymore. And Hong Kong is a “disharmonious” part of China, much like Xinkiang. The CPC has a history of “solving” these “problems” by any means necessary.