Since his ascendancy to power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has made no secret of his goal to purge the Western influences that he believes are contaminating China. In Hong Kong, he has been working to erode the limited political freedoms and rule of law that make Hong Kong the special region of China that it is — and that have long made Hong Kong economically valuable to China, ironically enough.

Nearly all us in Hong Kong who are Chinese are refugees or the descendants of refugees from China. We have no illusions about what happens to people when they come up short in the eyes of the Communist Party. Everyone in Hong Kong knows that introducing the possibility of imprisoning us in China, as the extradition treaty does, would signal the end of life in Hong Kong as we know it.

In Beijing’s view, of course, Hong Kong’s colonial past undermines its legitimacy as a Chinese society. Never mind that the system of limited freedoms that the British introduced to Hong Kong existed long before Communism was established on the mainland. (Communism is itself a Western import to China, by the way.)

The inconvenient truth is that Chinese people in Hong Kong (and in Taiwan) live better than any Chinese in Chinese history. This gives moral force to our way of life. It also shows the extraordinary things Chinese people can accomplish when given the freedom to do so.

Hong Kong’s moral force has also been economically good for China, since the moral force of our free society cannot be separated from its prosperity. It is not likely that Beijing agreed to have the government of Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, suspend consideration of the extradition bill just because a lot of people marched against it. No doubt President Xi learned much about capital flight and jittery investors during those protests and saw how badly China still needs a prosperous and functioning Hong Kong.