One scenario that is off the table is a repeat of East Germany in 1989. Xi Jinping, China’s leader, has made it crystal clear throughout his time in power that, perhaps even more so than his predecessors, he sees Gorbachev as a negative role model, someone who lost an empire and then control of the metropole. The CCP has sent signals to Lam that it will back the Hong Kong government and police taking stern measures, though, if possible, not killing anyone.

This call for no fatalities suggests that a second outcome—one that is not desirable in Beijing’s eyes, but that is not impossible—could be a repeat of what the CCP itself did on June 4, 1989. The Chinese military has several thousand troops stationed in Hong Kong, per the terms of the handover of the city from Britain to China in 1997, so the capacity for a violent solution is at hand. But it would not be costless. Although never as sensitive to Western denunciations as the Soviets, who still considered themselves “European,” China did promise Hong Kong its own social system and a “high degree of autonomy” after regaining it from Britain. A military action would not technically be an invasion, but it would look to the world like one, and would render that promise completely meaningless, exposing Beijing’s domination as hard-edged colonial control.

Xi might be willing to pay this price, especially if he senses disorder in Hong Kong threatening to spread to the mainland—but there seems to be little sign of that happening. It is not 1989, when there were major protests not just in Beijing but in scores of Chinese cities. China also has a chip in the international game today in a way it did not 30 years ago: Donald Trump’s administration has reportedly told officials to hold back their criticism over the crackdown in Hong Kong, and may well remain unmoved by military violence, but would surely try to make use of it to sway the ongoing trade war between the United States and China. There are also already calls for a boycott of the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing over outrage at the gross violations of human rights in the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, where at least hundreds of thousands and likely well over 1 million people, mostly Muslim, are incarcerated in a large network of camps. If there were images of military violence in Hong Kong to go along with the documented horrors in Xinjiang, boycott calls would be amplified dramatically. The June 4 option is there, but it is not an appealing one.

Perhaps more tempting would be a variant of the Polish solution of 1981: Prompt the Hong Kong authorities to declare martial law, deploy their police forces with greater brutality, arrest the protest ringleaders, grant a new round of cosmetic concessions, and hunker down until the crisis passes. The problem with this solution, in the minds of Beijing’s leaders, is that in Poland, it failed spectacularly. The calm that came after the imposition of martial law merely masked the brewing storm. Solidarity never really left the scene, and the image of a mass democratic social movement only grew in the popular imagination. Some leaders were arrested but many more went underground, and they returned in 1989 to bring down the entire Communist system. Beijing must be keenly aware of the risks of outsourcing repression to its local clients. Still, this case seems particularly relevant, as China has so far emphasized that the Hong Kong authorities should handle this on their own, while giving them the same signal that Brezhnev offered Polish leaders in 1981 about the capital being ready to add direct support in a last resort.