Claudia Rosett, of the Independent Women’s Forum, had an excellent op-ed in Monday’s Wall Street Journal.  In essence, Rosett compared the PRC of 1989’s Tiananmen Square (she was there) with Hong Kong’s situation today (she was in Hong Kong over the summer), and her essential conclusion is

that for all China’s economic advances, it remains a brutal, dehumanizing tyranny in which the ruling Communist Party would rather destroy people than give them a genuine say in their government.

After all, we’re getting the same thing, so far, in Hong Kong:

Rather than give in to their legitimate demands, the Communist Party is readying its guns.

I agree with Rosett on 99+% of what she wrote.

I do have one point of disagreement, though.

soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army open fire on their countrymen [in Tiananmen Square].

No. The soldiers of the PLA do, certainly, share citizenship with the people of the PRC and of Hong Kong. However, PLA soldiers are not countrymen; the PLA is nothing but a mercenary army in the pay of the despots running the PRC government and the CPC.