had come out and said 'hey we know we promised your first fully-democratic election in 2017,

but we're going to approve any of the candidates who can run.' People started protesting and

then few days later, the thing that really escalated it was when Hong Kong police came

out with an unprecedented level of force to crack down on the protesters, which only further

outraged a lot of people in Hong Kong, drove more people into the streets where they're

now shutting down the financial district. To understand what's really happening here,

the larger forces at work, you have to go back to 1997. That's the year of what people

in Hong Kong call the handover, when it went from one of the last vestiges of the British

Empire to part of China. As part of the handover, China promised that Hong Kong would be able

to keep this really unusual level of freedom, and it would get to have these first fully-democratic

elections in 2017. It's called the One Country, Two Systems policy. So when China reneged

a little bit on its plan for the 2017 elections, it looked to a lot of people in Hong Kong

like it was the beginning of the end of One Country, Two Systems. And the thing that you

have to understand is that it's about more than just democracy, although that's important.

There's a kind of sense of Hong Kong exceptionalism. People there are much more affluent, much

more worldly. They really see themselves as very distinct from the rest of China. And

any move like this that feels like it's pulling them into the dictatorial rule of the communist

party in China is very scary to them. And part of what really makes that so scary is

the memory of Tiananmen Square, right, which happened in 1989 in Beijing. That memory is

much, much stronger in Hong Kong, where they hold an annual vigil every year. They're keeping

the flame alive for their fellow Chinese who can't. So, when police started coming

out in force late in these protests, they thought 'hey this doesn't look like Hong Kong,

this looks like Beijing.' So what you're seeing is not just a fight for, can we keep the election

rules that we have for 2017, it's a fight for, can they stay Hong Kong or are they going

to become just like the rest of China?