'They will definitely take revenge': how China could respond to the Hong Kong protests

Hong Kong has seen its biggest political crisis in decades, but Beijing cannot afford to let the dissent go unpunished

The Communist Party has always been aware of the power of mass protests.

Mao Zedong in 1930 famously used the traditional saying: "a single spark can start a prairie fire" to remind fellow Communists the power of strikes and uprisings when they were a fledgling opposition party under the one-party Nationalist rule.