Hong Kong’s business is everyone’s business: as protests rage on, world leaders should make sure China knows that
- A violent suppression of Hong Kong protesters could have stark consequences for world trade, and even world peace
- It is, therefore, in world leaders’ interests to draw clear boundaries for Beijing over how to respond to them
During the protests over the presidential election results in Iran in 2009, I was teaching an MBA course at the University of Malaya. Three of my students were Iranians, one of whom looked like he was in his early 50s, about my age. We had established a friendly “old guys” rapport during the first weeks of the course and I was enjoying learning as much from him as I hoped he was from me.
At a break one evening, after the protests had turned deadly, I walked over to talk to him. “Crazy stuff back home,” I said, trying to make conversation, but not sure what his politics was. “I hope your family and friends are all OK.”
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. When he began, he spoke quietly. He said that he had demonstrated when he was young, decades earlier, full of the same outrage and bravado Iranians were showing in 2009. His voice began to crack as he told me that he had been imprisoned as a result, horribly losing a few years of his life for demonstrating. “Those young kids,” he said, beginning to choke up. “They have no idea what those people are going to do to them.”
The week before the elections, then-US president Barack Obama had given a speech in Cairo that gave hope to many in the Muslim world that his administration would be conciliatory after eight years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq. His speech, and his tough words towards the mullahs when the violence began, seemed to give hope to the protesters that somehow the US would help them.
We didn’t.
