Why "universal suffrage" is so hard to obtain in Hong Kong.

Reading more on Hong Kong's history in the 20th Century and there's a lot of clarifying context there. Probably the most important - HK was never a democracy under Britain - it was a (sometimes) benevolent dictatorship for 150 years. It's actually more democratic now than it was under Britain. HOWEVER, the Brits have recently declassified files purportedly showing that it floated the idea of democracy starting in the 1950s and again in the 1980s, but each time China shot it down. (Linked above)

HOWEVER, this perspective is self serving (if you weren't already sceptical of the selective declassifying of documents by a colonial power). First of all, what it floated in the 1950s was not democracy, but self-rule based on the Singapore model, which was not truly democratic.

My impression is that in the 1950s the Brits feared the newly united (communist) China would invade HK and reclaim it, and wanted to set HK up to be independent so that by the time China invaded, HK would already be used to being independent and therefore weaken China's hand while strengthening Britain's - China called their bluff and said if you do that we will invade immediately. In the 1980s, the US proposed making HK self ruling in the lead up to a potential handover, and the Brits agreed, but China again shot it down, probably for the same reasons.

Now, personally I still think HK should get real democracy because that's what China promised them, and a gov needs to keep its promises to its people, otherwise it cannot expect its people to trust it (although it IS possible that China simply had a different understanding of "universal suffrage" even from the very beginning, but in that case the burden is still on the gov to understand its people's understanding).

This also explains why so many of the protests are driven by younger people who were born/grew up post-handover, because they remember China's broken promise but don't remember life under Britain. The victim in all this is HK, who got stuck in this geopolitical tug of war between a coloniser who signals benevolence but has always acted its own interests, and an estranged parent country who feels wounded by the history of colonialism and overcompensates by being paranoid and overbearing to the point of making its child feel suffocated and rolling back a lot of good will that had been accumulated post handover:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myths-about-hong-kong/2019/06/21/d72eb0b2-935e-11e9-b58a-a6a9afaa0e3e_story.html