I'll all for standing up to the man, but let's get real, this battle is unwinnable. Even if all of Hong Kong decided to really start fighting to preserve their way of life, China would just declare martial law and that will be that.
I am pretty sure you had no idea about the mass protests[1] that are ongoing in the past few years either. How can you look at this crowd of several hundred thousand protesters and claim that they are powerless?
Another Tiananmen square probably can't happen again in the digital age. Or maybe it can, but only due to our defeatist indifference.
If it starts to look like they're getting uppity, they'll get a visit from their local Party leadership and gently encouraged to stop their foolishness. Escalate as appropriate.
Defeatism is precisely appropriate here. You have to ask yourself how badly you want change. Enough to put your family's livelihood at risk?
Nothing here is worth fighting a war over, and that's what it would take to meaningfully change the way politics is conducted in China. Everybody's best bet is to just fall in line and hope the Party doesn't totally bungle this five year plan.
If you were concerned about being governed by Communists, you had 13 years to get the hell out. And if you weren't concerned about being governed by Communists...well, you clearly hadn't been paying attention to history. Tiananmen Square (1989) alone should have been a wake-up call to China's future subjects.
This doesn't make what's happening now less appalling, but HK residents had ample opportunity to avoid the inevitable. Compare that to other dictatorships that sprung up relatively overnight; in Turkey, for instance, Erdogan has been president for little more than 2 years.
To add, I don't know much about Hong Kong, but it's pretty difficult to leave Turkey if you're a citizen, not many countries want to give you a Visa meaning only the educated, upper class, is able to leave. If you're proposing a solution you should propose one which doesn't leave behind all the poor.
This is exactly why my father-in-law sent all 5 of his kids to the US for college. All 5 now have US passports and can leave Hong Kong if and when it becomes worse than they can stand. So far, 2 of them have made the move.
Good luck with immigration. Britain certainly didn't want to let many of its former subject leave.
As an aside, the United States alone has brought in more than 7 million immigrants from all over the world, in just the past decade.
Your contempt for those people who are fighting for their freedom in their own country is astonishing.