Hong Kong: the Diverging of Two Systems - the Start of a Freedom

Hong Kong is witnessing the expressed intent of its young people for greater freedoms. Since thousands of university and college students staged a week-long boycott of classes to demand more democracy from Beijing, the students and other pro-democracy groups, continue to demonstrate amid arrests, pepper spray and tear gas attacks from security forces. This past summer when hundreds of thousands of Hong Kongers endorsed an unofficial referendum seeking greater democracy from Beijing, Hong Kong signaled it had reached a diverging point of the "one country, two systems" formula under which it has been ruled as a Special Administration Region(SAR) of the People's Republic of China.

In other words, the aspirations of Hong Kongers demonstrate an inherent flaw of the "one country, two systems" formula: two distinct systems within a unitary manifested integrated nation state is a recipe for failure. One system will attempt to devour the other or to make the competing system a child of the other. The ideology of a market economy versus a socialist economy in a supposed unified land is doomed. The union and tested union of states like the United States(US), the United Kingdom(UK), France and Canada are undisputed examples of the prerequisite of one shared system for the continuity of an amalgamated country. That a region within a system would enjoy freedoms and then willingly forego those liberties to the influence of communism is not consistent with the rights of humans. Thus, an aspiration for greater freedoms has already started in Hong Kong.

Chinese authorities will do much to label as disruptive and as counter productive the demonstrations in Hong Kong, but the sheer numbers of demonstrators - some 60,000 so far this weekend, establishes a determined will by the people of Hong Kong for change - that immediate change they seek is universal suffrage, the right to select from among their people whomever they wish to elect to be chief executive of their city and that they not be limited to a list of Beijing loyalists as the communists are dictating.

Thousands of students and pro-democracy activists are pressing for change from China. In 1989, others did try at Tiananmen Square in Beijing, their desires were crushed by the Chinese army as thousands were killed, injured and jailed. What of Hong Kong's explicit aspirations in 2014?