Tom Grimmer is a Hong Kong-based consultant and writer.

Open this photo in gallery Protesters walk on an image of Chinese President Xi Jinping in the Causeway Bay area in Hong Kong on Oct. 1, 2019, as the city observes the National Day holiday to mark the 70th anniversary of communist China's founding. MARK RALSTON/AFP/Getty Images

Some time back, I was cycling in the Chinese countryside when I came upon a road crew, eating lunch. I got off my bike and several curious workers came over, offered me a steamed bun and launched into the standard questions a Westerner hears in China: how long had I lived in China, what did my bike cost, what was my nationality. When I replied that I was from Canada, a man who looked to be in his 60s, wearing cotton shoes stained from shovelling asphalt, asked: “Was Canada in the Eight-Nation Alliance?"

I was stunned by the query. The Eight-Nation Alliance – of which Canada was not a member – referred to the foreign powers that intervened to rescue diplomats during the Siege of the Legations in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion of 1900. Here was a man, with probably no more than a grade-school education, asking about an incident from more than a century ago that was clearly fresh in his mind.

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That encounter came back to me as I watched Chinese President Xi Jinping address the crowd at Monday’s massive military parade in Beijing to celebrate the anniversary of the People’s Republic of China. Mr. Xi reminded them that when Mao Zedong stood in the same place on the Gate of Heavenly Peace 70 years ago, he said the Chinese people had finally “stood up.”

I watched the parade on TV in Hong Kong. Three hours later, the most violent day of protest in the past four months of unrest began, which included the first recorded police use of live ammunition on a protester. The teen is currently in critical condition.

What’s the connection between Mr. Xi, the road worker in the cloth shoes and the situation in Hong Kong?

Hong Kong is Exhibit A in what China calls its Century of Humiliation, a period between the First Opium War in the 1840s and the establishment of the PRC in 1949, defined by smash-and-grab colonialism by a host of Western countries and Japan. (China did a pretty good job of humiliating itself for several decades after 1949, but that’s another story.)

The humiliation narrative is driven into school children, and has played out in countless movies and TV shows for decades. Everyone knows it by heart. It is based largely on historical fact. It’s the easiest button to push to stir up nationalism. And Hong Kong – taken from China by Britain in the First Opium War, expanded in the Second and further enlarged with a 99-year lease on the New Territories in 1898 – is its poster boy.

And therein lies the crux of why things look so irreconcilable in Hong Kong. China is no longer weak. Mao’s eventual successor, Deng Xiaoping, knew that poor countries can never be strong, so he set about to make China rich by adopting capitalism in all but name. The other thing Mr. Deng did was play hardball with Margaret Thatcher to get Hong Kong back. While Mr. Xi’s speech yesterday made mention of the “one country, two systems” formula that is supposed to govern Hong Kong affairs until 2047, make no mistake: The Communist Party of China is not big on compromise when it comes to this topic.

In this light, Hong Kong’s protesters seem to want to push the humiliation envelope. Some of them march with the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack; they appeal to the U.S. Congress to pass the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act; they deface national emblems and burn flags. Recently, pictures have flown around mainland Chinese social media of a poster on a Hong Kong university “democracy wall” celebrating not the anniversary of the PRC, but rather the Mukden Incident of 1931, a false-flag bombing that gave Japan the pretext it needed to invade the Chinese region of Manchuria. Not surprisingly, that enraged China’s netizens – not a calm bunch, even at the best of times.

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None of this is to say that China’s handling of Hong Kong has been ideal. A prehandover commitment to full universal suffrage and a directly elected chief executive has not materialized. The Hong Kong government tried to pass the ill-conceived, and now withdrawn, extradition bill that sparked the protests in June in the first place. There have been chilling reports that people Beijing didn’t like were being spirited across the border extra-judicially and then disappearing.

However, it is hard to see how poking China in the eye is going to serve the cause. If the objective on Tuesday was to embarrass Mr. Xi and upstage the macho parade by diverting the world’s attention, mission accomplished.

Now what?

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