China’s rulers will pay a high price for repression in Hong Kong

THE WORLD has a right to be shocked by China’s rapid crushing of civic freedoms in Hong Kong. But outsiders should not be surprised. Western politicians spent years arguing that China, out of pure self-interest, should grant Hong Kong greater autonomy, or at least preserve liberties promised by the slogan “One Country, Two Systems”. That was always a doomed effort. In part, pleas to grant Hong Kong more freedoms reflected a misjudgment about the incentives that guide the swaggering-yet-paranoid hard men who lead China’s Communist Party today. In part, Western arguments were a bluff, based on half-veiled threats that multinational companies, foreign investors and banks might walk away from Hong Kong’s lucrative financial markets if the territory’s political freedoms were too brutally curbed. China is now calling that bluff.