Am I wrong to fear another Tiananmen?

For Beijing, the tens of thousands of protestors choking the centre of Hong Kong are such a dangerous outrage that mainland media cannot report on them. The real outrage is this: China agreed to hold free elections in 2017, but now a Beijing-appointed committee will determine whether candidates for chief executive can be relied on to toe Beijing’s line.

On 6 September, a Chinese embassy official wrote to the Times that in 2017 there would be a one-man one-vote election in Hong Kong. He omitted to mention that Beijing has selected the committee that will approve the candidates. On 15 September, Ambassador Liu Xiaoming wrote to the Daily Telegraph attacking Lord Patten, Hong Kong’s last governor, for criticising Beijing’s arrangements for the election and for claiming that those arrangements are a denial of democracy.

It is not unusual for Beijing to declare that black is white. What is scandalous is that the Foreign Office immediately ‘welcomed’ Beijing’s ‘confirmation’ of election ‘through universal suffrage’.