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Well then you're not free because your government decides who you can collaborate with. What silly absolutism.

And your argument about police bring restrained is similar to how Israel supporters try to gaslight everyone how Israel is acting restrained against terrorists

I mean, you could say that, but then you'd have to look up the numbers killed and then you'd be embarrassed for making such a comparison.

It's an obviously overused tactic now to paint the students as the bad actor when they have every right to decide how their country is supposed to be run, given that they are the future of their country

This is an obviously shallow take. Hong Kong isn't a country. It's a part of China that the British carved off at gun point. Then they abused and oppressed the Chinese people there for decades. Then, when Thatcher realized that they were going to have to abide by the terms of the lease and actually give it back to China, it was the British that decided on the form of economy and the form of government. And they made deliberate choices to privilege a specific subset of the population that was amenable to being supported of British rule. Compradors, we call them. The British were the ones who came up with the concept of a Hong Kong identity, even, as a way of creating separation between Chinese people in Hong Kong and Chinese people in China.

And the students grew up in a system organized by the compradors, with Western style universities tied directly to Western financial interests (Hong Kong, after all, became a strong British financial hub) and the British were well positioned after occupying the region for a century to really stir the pot.

The student protest movement in Hong Kong was nearly universally shunned by the parents and particularly the grandparents of the students. The grandparents had really gone through the oppression of British rule and they rightly told those kids that they were being manipulated, even shutting them out of their homes for protesting.

But of course, liberals like you see everything in a vacuum. Those students were protesting because they were fully formed intellectual with all the context and not a single thing could have swayed them one way or another - they just know deep down that communist China is evil because they're the future of their country of Hong Kong...

So no, the world, especially China's neighbours, doesn't believe that China will let Taiwan to govern themselves. They'd only allow a puppet government to be in power, like they're doing in Hong Kong.

It's just so sad that you know all these concepts, like puppet government, but you think history started right around the time you graduated high school.

The government in Hong Kong was a British puppet. If you do not understand that, you are either ignorant or willfully ignorant. China, through One Party Two Systems, clearly knows that the government of Hong Kong was British puppet government at the time of the lease ending and instead of doing anything about it allows that government to continue operating for a decade while China focused entirely integrating Hong Kong into national defense. Then China went spy hunting and by 2015 had effectively shutdown all the Western spy networks in China. And then, as they saw Hong Kong and Taiwan being manipulated by the West, they tightened national security so they could go after British puppets in Hong Kong and the students took their bodies to the streets and risked their lives for some fucking compradors. And China, understanding that this was the situation, let the protests rage for weeks and kept having the police back off despite the protestors getting seriously violent. And now it's called down, and the British puppets are gone or in jail, and the Hong Kong system is still operating as an independent government system, but without British manipulation.

You really need to take the wider view here. It's not one sided. Hong Kong is not operating in a vacuum as some group of Chinese people that hate communism. It's literally a British colony, now former colony being manipulated by the British, who have been enemies of China for literally centuries. It will take many decades for Hong Kong to recover from the traumas of British rule. The student protests were a manifestation of that trauma. They had to happen. But they do not represent some sort of signal that China is a brutal evil dictatorship.