By simply remembering the 1989 murder of hundred of thousands (no official estimate exists) of pro-democracy activists that ended seven weeks of protests in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, the people of Hong Kong on Tuesday struck fear in the heart of Chinese President Xi Jinping's regime.

As the last outpost of relative freedom in China, the Hong Kong protests exemplify the sort of personal freedom that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't have to deal with because it doesn't tolerate it elsewhere in China. Remembering those who died for freedom in 1989, the Hong Kong protesters sent a clear message to Xi: We stand against your authoritarian rule.

This is Xi's Catch-22.

After all, Hong Kong's relative freedom is a grave threat to Xi's ambitions but also a great necessity. It's a grave threat in that it proves people will reject Xi's master plan for their future if given the choice. Leading a country of approximately 1.4 billion people, the possibility of insurrection is always a real concern in Beijing's halls of power. Xi's problem is not simply that the urban classes demand more rights. It's that roughly 580 million people still live in grinding poverty in the rural hinterlands. If those citizens agitate for better lives commensurate with that which their urban counterparts receive, they will undercut Xi's reliance on them as a servile class. And they will have the mass of numbers to cause big problems.

But Hong Kong's relative freedom is also a necessity for Xi, who holds it up as a mirage of his better nature. To win the world to his imperialist Belt and Road economic agenda, Xi must trick the world into believing that he offers mutual benefits. Allowing Hong Kong residents some freedom thus allows Xi to pretend that his true nature is misunderstood — that, the detention of millions of innocent Muslims in concentration camps aside, Xi isn't that bad a guy.

But as with mirages in the desert, Xi's is a fiction we must ignore. To entertain Xi's lies is to make room for his evil. And as at Tiananmen, that evil has a natural conclusion: the trampling and destruction of human lives.