For anyone who observed the student-led mass protests that gripped Beijing’s Tiananmen Square for seven weeks in 1989, watching students fill the streets of Hong Kong in 2014 is a bittersweet experience. There is a natural instinct for Western observers—reared on Enlightenment values and the notion that history, even in China, moves inevitably toward ever-greater freedom and democracy—to be gratified by what we see happening there. We are uplifted by the spectacle of people struggling not only for liberty but to become “more like us.”

But...