“Do you remember the Cheshire Cat?” Ng asks, invoking the creature in “Alice in Wonderland” that in one scene slowly disappears, leaving nothing but its grin. Hong Kong could slowly disappear except for its veneer. Or quickly. “Is [Beijing] prepared to kill Hong Kong?” Ng asks. Young people here, “who have nowhere else to go,” increasingly think they have nothing to lose. Some of them “carry their last wills in their pockets.”

They know they are dealing, ultimately, with a regime that has swept at least a million Uighur Muslims into prisons and “reeducation” concentration camps. China’s national anthem celebrates “millions of hearts with one mind.” Hong Kong’s protesters are defending a society comfortable with many different minds. And they rightly have turned their anger against so-called “smart lampposts” — those likely adorned with facial-recognition technologies that serve policies of social control.

Four decades ago, after President Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to China and as Americans were beginning to travel there in significant numbers, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., tartly observed that too many returning Americans were more voluble about the absence of flies in modernizing China than about the absence of freedom. Now, however, thanks to the ongoing drama in Hong Kong’s streets, it is possible to hope that the West has passed “peak China” — the apogee of blinkered admiration for a nation in which approximately 19% of the human race is saddled with one of the world’s most sinister regimes.