Occupy Hong Kong

I’m sitting in my room, in a hotel surrounded by a moat (literally) up in the New Territories.  It is traffic blockades I fear, not tear gas, I guess that is how you become living in the suburbs.  Last I saw, the game shifted to the protestors playing “dribs and drabs concessions” in response to a line-in-the-sand, “empty out by Monday” demand from the authorities.  Such games can go on for a while, especially since the protestors don’t quite have the coherent leadership and management capabilities to enforce an immediate concession, and so the powers that be will tolerate a good deal of sloth.  In between are the Hong Kong police, many of whom (most of whom?) sympathize with the protestors.  The businessmen seem more skeptical.  If you type “PLA” into the Twitter search function, and not much interesting comes up, probably things are OK.  Those three little letters stand for “People’s Liberation Army,” they look like this.  There exists an equilibrium where this event accelerates a) the pace of reform in China, b) a further crackdown in China, or c) both.