LettersHong Kong’s trump card with Beijing and its ticket to greater freedom is the city’s economic power

The attempt to organise a protest in Macau, a Chinese territory that theoretically enjoys the same autonomy as Hong Kong, was quickly stifled by the arrest of seven people and the deployment of dozens of police officers. The truth is that Macau is strictly controlled by Beijing, has less freedom and consequently less economic development.

The Hong Kong crisis continues, even after Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said the demonstration on August 18, which was characterised by a total absence of violence, could be “the start of society returning to peace”.

Previous rallies were often followed by violence. This could partly be due to police officers dressing up as protesters, which creates uncertainty since, as singer and protester Denise Ho Wan-sze, protesters “don’t know who is a friend and who an enemy”.

Beijing, which fears a Hong Kong too wayward to be a good example for the mainland, has used all possible tactics: sanctioning police brutality, having troops stage anti-riot drills in the border city of Shenzhen to intimidate Hongkongers, alluding to the Tiananmen Square crackdown and so on.

In August, Facebook said it removed accounts involved in “coordinated inauthentic behaviour as part of a small network that originated in China and focused on Hong Kong” while Twitter suspended 936 such accounts. Authoritarian regimes always try to intimidate people, so overcoming fear is an important beginning.