The images from Hong Kong over the past two weeks were stunning. On Sunday, June 15, one million Hong Kong residents flooded the downtown streets, demanding that city authorities scrap a bill which would allow mainland China’s communist government to extradite fugitives from the semi-autonomous region. Protesters feared that Beijing would use the law to pursue political targets, effectively ending Hong Kong’s special status as a haven for dissidents and political freedoms. After days of clashes between protesters and police, Hong Kong’s Beijing-backed chief executive, Carrie Lam, suspended the bill last week.

Many observers took this as a major victory for Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. The sense of triumph only grew after another protest march the following Sunday swelled to what organizers said was around two million participants, or about a quarter of the city’s total population—making it the largest protest in Hong Kong history. Protesters demanded a complete withdrawal of the bill as well as Lam’s resignation. Lam offered a public apology on Tuesday.

But it would be a mistake to consider this victory more than a temporary reprieve. The Chinese Communist Party is a master of attrition. Over the past two decades, it has developed a playbook for gaining influence and eroding criticism both inside and beyond China’s borders. Since assuming office in 2012, Party Chairman Xi Jinping has intensified pressure on free speech abroad and overseen a sweeping crackdown on civil society and expression in the mainland.

The success of these most recent protests is an ego blow, given Xi’s image as an unassailable leader. The party will aim to avoid such a humiliating public defeat in the future. That’s why, rather than retreating from its steady campaign to exert ever more control over Hong Kong, it will probably accelerate its assault on the region’s traditional freedoms, undermining Hong Kong’s ability to host such massive anti-Beijing demonstrations again.

One area in which Beijing will likely redouble its efforts is in establishing informal control over formal political institutions. After the handover, Hong Kong started out with a certain degree of political autonomy under the Basic Law (its mini-constitution), and a strong tradition of civic mindedness to support self-governance. For Beijing, the prerequisite for reducing political freedoms in Hong Kong is to undermine fair representation and self-government. Forty of the 70 members of the Legislative Council, Hong Kong’s unicameral representative body, are directly elected, while the other 30 are elected indirectly by functional constituencies, which largely represent Hong Kong’s business community. Since the 1990s, and especially since the return of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to mainland China in 1997, the fortunes of Hong Kong’s business elites have become increasingly linked to the mainland as investment and economic interdependence deepened. Thus, representation in the Legislative Council skews towards pro-Beijing groups.