Naive student that I was, and embarrassed to be studying at an elite foreign university rather than home fighting the good fight, I tried to enter the fray by writing a rebuttal to Leung, boldly pronouncing that the march of democracy never stops, so he might as well get out of the way. To my surprise, the South China Morning Post published the piece, and to my even greater surprise, Leung responded, with language uncannily similar to his New York Times rebuttal to Martin Lee this month. We went back and forth for a couple weeks before the debate petered out, as did public anger. The SARS epidemic receded. The Article 23 legislation was shelved. The National People’s Congress in Beijing ruled out universal suffrage in 2007, and the top did not blow.

In the years that followed, though I lit candles on June 4 in memory of the students who died in Tiananmen Square, and marched on July 1 in Hong Kong’s annual demonstration for democracy, I grew up. I worked as a corporate lawyer in Central, the financial hub that protesters have occupied in recent weeks. I bought an apartment in the Mid-Levels, home to many of the bankers and lawyers who work down the hill in Central. It felt so seamless, passing from the privilege of my childhood to that of adulthood. And whether it was my parents midwifing China’s petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries or my law firm shepherding the Chinese Internet to the world’s money markets, the mainland fed this privilege.

But not only the mainland. None of who I am today, none of what I have, exists without the freedoms and rights, of expression and to property, that in China are still unique to Hong Kong, all of which allowed ideas and capital to flow freely in to the mainland and out to the world, protected by our laws and independent judiciary. Without any help from the mainland, our city of outcasts—like my great-grandfather who fled here from China’s warring Guangxi region in 1925—built upon this barren rock one of the wealthiest, best educated, safest societies in the world, as readymade for democracy as any place has ever been. What made this possible—our free markets and our free press, our courts and our schools—are not gifts from the Chinese Communist Party; they are the fruits of our own labor.

Today’s protesters are not trying to change China. They are merely asking to preserve that which we ourselves have sown. And if you include the 1.4 million Hong Kongers who say they signed a petition opposing civil disobedience but supporting universal suffrage, a clear majority of the Hong Kong electorate thinks democracy is the best way to do that.

If the government disagrees—if Leung, as he told the foreign media this week, is afraid of a tyranny of the masses who make less than $1,800 a month—then let’s have that debate on the merits of democracy. In Tuesday’s meeting, student protest leaders made their case for why truly universal suffrage would enrich our lives by holding the government accountable to all of us, not just some, but not once did the government explain how pre-selecting candidates for chief executive would make Hong Kong better, or why open nominations would make it worse. Free elections are impossible, we are told, not because they won’t help bridge the wealth divide or sustain our way of life, but simply because Leung’s bosses say so.

I feel for the small businesses and hourly workers who have been affected by the protests, knowing that true democracy, when it comes, will not reimburse them for their losses, and that any benefits they will reap are too far in the distance. So although I have a special fondness for liberally exercising my freedom of assembly in the shopping district of Causeway Bay, having spent most of my adolescence loitering under one of its now numerous Jumbotrons, the police were right to swiftly unblock Hennessy Road, one of Hong Kong Island’s vital arteries, as well as Queensway, another thoroughfare closer to the main protest site in Admiralty. Too many Hong Kongers—the ones Leung doesn’t trust with the vote—depend on those roads just to get by.