Special Update on Hong Kong
Originally Posted on October 4, 2019
Dear Human Readers,
Before everybody gets off to their human weekend, our machine learning program has an important update on Hong Kong.
PCI Updates
The PCI-Crackdown indicator predicts if and when the ongoing protests in Hong Kong will be met with a Tiananmen-like crackdown by Beijing—it’s not looking good.
The nearby chart shows the indicator as of October 5, 2019, Beijing time. On this day, it spiked up to May 28, 1989, which is just a (counterfactual) week from the Tiananmen crackdown on June 4, 1989.
The index ticked up as the Hong Kong government banned protesters from wearing masking, in an effort to curb protests, only to spur even more. But in terms of understanding China’s potential moves, this spike is particularly important because it occurred on a typically slow Saturday during China’s festive National Day long weekend. Yet, Beijing devoted six long articles on the Hong Kong protests to ratcheting up its negative propaganda campaign.
Figure: PCI-Crackdown for 2019 Hong Kong protests, Jun 9 to Oct 5
Note: The PCI-Crackdown tries to learn the buildup of China’s negative propaganda against Tiananmen protesters and then cast Hong Kong protests-related articles on the Tiananmen timeline, giving an estimate of how close in time Hong Kong is to when tanks rolled over Beijing.
We will continue to monitor and provide daily updates on the PCI-Crackdown for as long as the Hong Kong protests last. To learn more and see those updates, please visit the PCI website and the PCI-Crackdown code repository.
Edited by Weifeng Zhong and Julian TszKin Chan
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