Yeah - again, I know people who grew up in Hong Kong and still have family there (and they’re not right-wingers, to be clear). They were perfectly fine and happy with being administered by the PRC - frankly, there are a lot of benefits to that.

But the crackdown on civil rights and democratic rule was the thing that caused so much protesting. And the crackdown incited the protests and riots, not the other way around - it was effectively a police riot that kicked all that off. A concept I’m familiar with, by the way, as a unitedstatesian, because our police are generally pieces of shit, moreso than the general baseline.