If we learned anything from mainland China’s slow-motion take over of Hong Kong, it should be that China has option other than rolling tanks in the streets. In Hong Kong it used legal measures and police action to stop protests and jail activists. Then it threatened everyone into silence and shut down independent news outlets, raiding their offices and jailing publishers. And the bottom line is that freedom from the mainland is now just a memory. Hong Kong’s oldest pro-democracy party shut down this month because talk about democracy leads to prison these days.
The Democratic Party, one of the leading voices of opposition in the semi-autonomous city for the past three decades, has started the process of dissolution following recent warnings from Chinese government officials, two of its veteran members told CNN.
“The message was that the party has to be…
