“Hong Kong’s virtual rebellion was spawned by a proposal to have those legally accused extradited to the Chinese mainland to face communist law and the Chinese brand of justice.

For free market democracies looking to establish mutually beneficial trading relationships with China as the latter accedes to the top of the heap as not only the region’s most influential superpower economy, but arrayed against the United States, one set to replace our former colonizer as our preeminent trading partner, it bears analyzing China’s failed experiment in reconciling free markets with its authoritarian command economy.

We are of course referring to Hong Kong.

The geographic extent of China’s failure in the former British Crown colony frighteningly extends to an inner region in upper China called Xinjiang, and heaven forbid that such failure eventually encompasses territories adjacent to its unilaterally declared nine dash line in the West Philippine Sea where porous marine boundaries violated by armed behemoths extend Chinese hegemony far beyond its borders.

Simply draw a straight diagonal line from where we suffer unwanted intrusions as our aquatic and submarine resources are systematically plundered. Extend that line northwest to the farthest reaches of China. There at the far end of an ominous nowhere is a territory we would do well to study if we indeed want to understand the crisis faced by Hong Kong.

Xinjiang is in the upper reaches of China in between Mongolia to its northeast and the Muslim tribal territories that populate Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan in the far west. The geography and Xinjiang’s strategic centrality among these countries partially explains the unique alien population of Xinjiang.

Xinjiang is a Chinese gulag, a political hard labor camp. It is populated by dissident denizens forcibly dragged there by China’s notorious criminal justice system as inflicted on both neighbors and Chinese, there imprisoned in what the Chinese ominously call “reeducation centers.”

Such ignominy seems well deserved save for a small group of countries that support China’s coerced hegemony and what it has hidden in the deepest and darkest recesses of the Xinjiang region surrounded on both flanks by ancient civilizations comprised of farmers, shepherds, herdsmen and perhaps the most soulful meditative people in the modern world. Definitely far from the cliché image of a political dissident. Much less of a criminal deserving of an effective lobotomy to keep him in line.

To understand the looming imagery of Xinjiang in relation to the ongoing struggle in Hong Kong against authoritarianism sweeping across the region in the guise of economic expansionism allow us to review Hong Kong’s recent past and see where fears had initially been spawned.

Let us reference an intellectual at another far end of our increasingly conflict-ridden globe. Paul Salem is the president of The Middle East Institute. He was an often quoted expert on the “Arab Spring” that chronicled uprisings across the Middle East from Libya, Egypt and even Syria bearing witness to drastic upheavals and regime changes from ancient cultures and the most unchanging of religions. Among a number of books Salem wrote is “Winning the Battle, Losing the War: Addressing the Conditions that Fuel Armed Non State Actors.”

Noting how the prolonged illness of a dictator in Egypt and a small school campus protest in Syria among college students had led to some of the most extended “Arab Spring” seasons whose impacts perpetuate today across both the Eastern and Western hemispheres, Salem noted how the most seemingly insignificant incidents can kickstart the fall of the most powerful governments and civilizations.

Hong Kong’s virtual rebellion was spawned by a proposal to have those legally accused extradited to the Chinese mainland to face communist law and the Chinese brand of justice apart from the democratically influenced system in Hong Kong.

The proposal effectively removed the experimental firewall between China and Hong Kong as it raised the ominous and fearful images of Xinjiang where lawyers, human rights advocates, Mongolian dissidents and freemen opposing China from the neighboring Muslim states undergo “reeducation.”