Defending Hong Kong's Students, 29 Sep 2014

...Few groups appreciate stability quite as much as the Big Four audit firms (Deloitte, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Ernst & Young and KPMG), all of whom covet the business of the state-owned Chinese companies that have long favored Hong Kong’s equity markets for public listings. The multinationals proved as much on June 27, when they jointly published a letter calling upon Occupy Central -- the pro-democracy movement partly behind the current protests in central Hong Kong -- to stand down. The warning was specific, prescient and written in language intended to appeal to Hong Kong’s commercially minded citizens...

...No doubt, plenty of Hong Kong businesspeople would like nothing more than to see the students cleared from central Hong Kong immediately, no matter the means. But there are also plenty of moderate Hong Kong bankers, accountants and lawyers who are horrified to see that the authorities' first instinct was to respond with violence...

...If Hong Kong’s business community hopes to preserve what’s unique about their city, it can no longer remain silent about how the local and Chinese governments have chosen to manage dissent there. Rather, they need to be just as vocal about the negative consequences of assaulting unarmed students as they have been about threats to shut down the central business district. It’s time for them to reaffirm how a world-class business city should behave under duress. The Chinese government won’t appreciate the warning, but it’s guaranteed to listen...