Hong Kong is slowly and quietly being overrun.

When the "deal" was struck with China years ago, my friends and I knew it was just a matter of time. That "guarantees" and "promises" from communists were worthless, and that eventually the people of Hong Kong would fall under the jackboot like the rest of China.

Others pointed out that this would be to kill the economic goose that laid the golden eggs, and why would China be that idiotic?

One of the oldest stories in the world is the Scorpion and the Frog. The Scorpion kills the Frog, knowing it means his own death, because he is incapable of doing anything else. The world has many "scorpions," who will destroy what they hate knowing full well their own destruction will follow.

China will crush Hong Kong even though the economic loss would be immense. It is the nature of collectivism. It has been proven time and again that a tyrant will hold power even if his nation is destroyed in the process. A tyrant can tolerate a very high level of misery in his country if his power is great enough.

...Then she saw the answer; she saw the secret premise behind their words. With all of their noisy devotion to the age of science, their hysterically technological jargon, their cyclotrons, their sound rays, these men were moved forward, not by the image of an industrial skyline, but by the vision of that form of existence which the industrialists had swept away—the vision of a fat, unhygienic rajah of India, with vacant eyes staring in indolent stupor out of stagnant layers of flesh, with nothing to do but run precious gems through his fingers and, once in a while, stick a knife into the body of a starved, toil-dazed, germ-eaten creature, as a claim to a few grains of the creature's rice, then claim it from hundreds of millions of such creatures and thus let the rice grains gather into gems.

She had thought that industrial production was a value not to be questioned by anyone; she had thought that these men's urge to expropriate the factories of others was their acknowledgment of the factories' value. She, born of the industrial revolution, had not held as conceivable, had forgotten along with the tales of astrology and alchemy, what these men knew in their secret, furtive souls, knew not by means of thought, but by means of that nameless muck which they called their instincts and emotions: that so long as men struggle to stay alive, they'll never produce so little but that the man with the club won't be able to seize it and leave them still less, provided millions of them are willing to submit—that the harder their work and the less their gain, the more submissive the fiber of their spirit—that men who live by pulling levers at an electric switchboard, are not easily ruled, but men who live by digging the soil with their naked fingers, are—that the feudal baron did not need electronic factories in order to drink his brains away out of jeweled goblets, and neither did the rajahs of the People's State of India.

- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged," 1957