The international community has a separate duty. It is counterproductive to call for an independent Hong Kong or to further inflame the rhetoric. But we should be supporting — urgently and in our own streets — their right to freedom of assembly, association and expression, and to have an independent judiciary. These rights should never have been left at risk by the handover agreement signed in 1997, when the region was returned to China. Hong Kong was given and received as a colony, with all the disrespect to its residents that this implies. Without these rights, residents, simply by attempting to debate and create an equitable, stable future, will pay a terrible price.

China’s strict censorship and control of the media has allowed mainland news sites to propagate the false narrative that Hong Kong residents are under siege from a foreign-controlled cell of hooligans and fifth elements. It is a dangerous and cynical lie, used time and again by military powers to justify violent intervention.

Chinese language, poetics and philosophy are part of Hong Kong’s soul. The questions confronting it have no easy answers: how will Hong Kong maintain itself, neither jeopardizing the Chinese state nor being jeopardized by it? How can Hong Kong — and the separate political and legal system it was promised by Britain and China — survive in this rapidly changing global order?

This question concerns all of us. Illegitimate power relies exclusively on force. China is a sophisticated and influential state, yet satellite images show it has amassed what appear to be over 100 armored personnel vehicles several miles from Hong Kong, as if force is the only politics it knows.

In the years since the handover, China’s rise had been dramatic. The economic infrastructure connecting Hong Kong and China is profound. In the next few decades, when China’s Greater Bay Area project is expected to be finalized, Hong Kong will be part of a megalopolis that will include Macau, Shenzhen, Guangzhou and seven other Chinese cities, comprising 70 million people and producing 37 percent of China’s exports. The Greater Bay Area does not seem compatible with the “one country, two systems” principle. The future demands ingenuity and, most of all, respect for Hong Kong’s uniquely nuanced identity. Over 150 years of history have shown that economic security and constitutional rights are possible in Hong Kong without posing a threat to the Chinese system.

In 1989, Beijing protesters carried a banner that read, “A new path is opening up, the path we long ago failed to take.” It is a warning to us from the past, a plea not to fail again. For 30 years, China has rigorously censored all mention of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations and massacre. The government continues to arrest and detain the elderly parents of those who died. Even now, aged and frail, these mothers and fathers continue to remember their lost children and protest.