It’s been 13 weeks since the protests started. From a small crowd in the government district, it’s turned out thousands and is spilling out from Nathan Road in Tsim Sha Tsui to over the waters to Kowloon. More than that, it’s turned deadly and violent.

Unfortunately the violence might still escalate. Tanks and a threatening convoy of armored vehicles are headed south towards Hong Kong. They evoke nightmares of a not-too-distant past in Tiananmen Square when a lone student stood his ground in 1989 as the world watched, perhaps too comfortably distant, and thus practically did nothing more than condemn.

Both disappearances and deaths had followed our global complacency where democracy failed to sprout on parched concrete.

Obviously something snapped in China. The Chinese military’s been called out again. It is not just water cannons, tear gas and blue dye anymore. This time it’s Hong Kong, not Beijing. And there are live bullets and cannon shells primed inside those breeches. Fortunately no one on the government side has yet fired the first shot. Not yet.

It’s such a terrible inconvenience. First of all, on those long weekends when either Mondays or Fridays are declared non-working holidays, one can no longer hop off to the airport and purchase a ticket for one of 129 flights weekly to Hong Kong.

A quick flight to Hong Kong may no longer be feasible. To gain strategic visibility for their deepening cause Hong Kong’s protesters have tactically targeted high intrusive and visible establishments like the airport and the main roads of the business districts, virtually shutting down one of the planet’s busiest.

The protests are no longer just on weekends where initially the Hong Kong protesters still recognized the difference between themselves and the importance of millions of tourists and merchants who make Hong Kong a viable economy and who need its business-as-usual week days to earn a capitalist buck.

South towards the West Philippine Sea our problems with mainland China have not yet escalated to violent proportions and our street protesters remain the Left-leaning kind who take to the streets, rabble-rouse, burn effigies and protest anything from such global issues like the costs of communal toilets for the LGBTQ community or the ridiculous “Duterte-US-China dictatorship” to the rising fines for errant jeepney drivers.

After all there are no communist fronts who take up the cudgels for the weekly trips of Hong Kong viajeras who might have to postpone their September inventory-stocking trips. Neither are there militant fronts who march to protect teachers, nurses, caregivers and accounting clerks from exchanging their education and career to become domestic helpers or nannies serving the wealthy Chinese in the former British Crown colony. Thus our interests are cursory in Hong Kong’s developing revolution as it attempts to regain its democracy.

In 1997 when the British handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese the turnover was considered a success mostly due to the realization that there could be a China with two systems separated by territory — one with a free market capitalist economy and another, ruled under communism’s command economy.

Unfortunately deep-seated and disparate political ideology are in the DNA of both. So much that we’re witnessing a turnover turnaround.

These manifest where the heavy-handed temperament of the Chinese authorities reflects an angered apparatchik’s attitude towards an effective proxy war between western democracy and China. Note the accusation that American flags have not only flown in the protests but American backing is behind it.

Of the handful of issues raised by protesters spawned by their rejection of an extradition bill compelled by the mainland, their demand for autonomous elections as part of political reforms directly challenges China’s iron-fisted rule. Think about it. Hong Kong isn’t just about shopping or domestics anymore. These Hong Kong protesters are fighting for the same democracy we enjoy under the shadow of Red China.