Previously we noted General Secretary Xi Jinping’s craving for the appearance of legitimacy.

Two historically adjacent examples show how Xi could polish the image of his political party’s right to rule without crossing his redline of sharing political power.

First, United Kingdom rule over Hong Kong for more than 150 years demonstrated a “manifest destiny” for authority by protecting fundamental legal, but not voting, rights for people. Second, Deng Xiaoping showed Chinese that the Communist Party could protect people’s property rights without toppling the party. Providing legal protections under both the UK and Deng’s regimes raised standards of living for people under their rule.

Neither the UK nor Deng ran their administrations as democracies. Despite complaints, citizens of both regimes generally accepted elevated livelihoods as sufficient to confer legitimacy upon their governing bodies.

That Xi Jinping chooses to regress Deng’s reforms suggests motivations other than doing good for the 1.4 billion people he increasingly oppresses.

Freedom lovers around the world could not only help Chinese people escape oppressive strictures but could tilt the world a little more towards peace by making observations like these more insistently, more loudly, and yes, more articulately. Public narrative pushes questions into Communist Party deliberations that can change the world.