Despite all the warnings, the number of demonstrators in Hong Kong is growing. Now the government fears in Beijing that the spark of anger skips to the whole country. The KP threatens a dramatic fall.

Such images enable China’s leadership in panic: water cannons, tear gas, smoke columns – and swashbuckling young people behind the barricades equipped with umbrellas, scarves and ski goggles. As these pictures three and a half years ago from Tunisia and Egypt went around the world, Beijing tightened Internet censorship. The spark of the Arab revolt, then still called “Jasmine Revolution”, should not skip to China.

Now come the same images from China itself, from the Hong Kong SAR and Beijing braces itself with all means against the flood of images. On the night of Monday, the leadership had apparently shut off Instagram. Bad enough that Hong Kong is raging. China should stay calm, people in Beijing and Shanghai are noticed as little as possible. The unrest in Zhongnanhai, the government district, next to the Forbidden City must be significant.

The protests of the students in Hong Kong are the most difficult open challenges for China’s autocrats since the uprising on Tiananmen Square 25 years ago. As dramatic as the situation in the Middle East and in the Ukraine is – if Beijing does not get the peaceful situation in Hong Kong in the handle, then the crisis could follow summer 2014, a still more serious fall. Because unlike in 1989 China is now no longer an economic dwarf, but the second largest economy in the world. Except in America – and perhaps the strategic oil-monarchy Saudi Arabia – the world economy is no single state as dependent as China.

What are China’s leaders do? For months, the anger of the young Hong Kong dammed and discharges into ever larger demonstrations. You want a free election in 2017 about her new head of government, the “Chief Executive” vote. But the Beijing government wants to allow only candidates who are acceptable to her, and so far only sends signals to the hardness.

Protests in Hong Kong:Giant with feet of clay

The in the West often praised for its efficiency and decisiveness Chinese political system has no tools for dealing with large public protest. China has no dialogues, no round, let alone parliamentary procedures that could channel the anger of the people and bring about a compromise.

In mainland China, the Communist Party cadres may console themselves that they send the necessary national security, impose a news blackout and the ringleaders can arrest. In Hong Kong, they can not, at least not without substantial damage to China’s most important economic center – and for his own world-wide reputation.

This is the other, often overlooked, unpleasant side of the Chinese success story of the past 30 years: China has its economy and administration modernized, made ​​hundreds of millions out of poverty and made ​​millions rich – but it was not his political mechanisms at the level of a taken time to travel to the images and messages not in days, but in seconds. As for its internal security, China is still ruled as in the fifties.

In the relatively open stage of its Hong Kong SAR China stands as a giant with feet of clay because – much more fragile, more vulnerable, as he appears in Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu.

The know the protesters in Hong Kong. And since this weekend, they also feel that they can shake this giant.
In early October is China’s Premier Li Keqiang with his half cabinet to government consultations to Berlin. There will be much talk of China’s power, China’s dynamic and China’s stability. All the world needs China – yes, even stability. A panicked Beijing does not help anyone.

But stability requires compromise, and this word must European leaders spell out their Chinese counterparts over again.

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