correction
An earlier version of this article misstated how Hong Kong’s chief executive is selected. The chief executive is selected by the election committee.
Melissa Chan, a journalist based in New York and Berlin, is a collaborator with the Global Reporting Centre and a term member at the Council on Foreign Relations.
With the clarity of hindsight, it was inevitable that Hong Kong’s era of freedom would end this way — at this intractable impasse, with police arresting more than 800 people so far this summer, and with Hongkongers raging in the streets against their proxy government run on the broken “one country, two systems” formulation that has ultimately meant control by China’s Communist Party.
