The biggest challenges to the brittle present system in China don’t come from outsiders concocting destabilizing plots in an imaginary, inimical West, but from Chinese people themselves, which is precisely what the people of Hong Kong are, as Beijing itself has always insisted. Once they get a whiff of them, people everywhere, it turns out, like freedoms of speech and association and the right to fair and impartial justice, and having a more or less direct say in the choice of their leaders.