1. It is trivially the case that many have overthrown such systems sans guns. See, for example, the DDR, Poland, Hungary etc. 2. The HK protest movement is not

1. It is trivially the case that many have overthrown such systems sans guns. See, for example, the DDR, Poland, Hungary etc. 2. The HK protest movement is not about “communism”. The left in Hong Kong, apart from a very small section represented by newspapers such as Ta Kung Pao, is against the CCP and government. That is because the people you refer to as communist here don’t care very much for class struggle or Marxism. They care about power, and so they have sided with the oligarchs instead of the professional and working classes. That’s why they kept laissez-faire capitalism but not the limited progress towards democracy under the British that took place in the 1990s. For this reason there are large numbers of tycoons in the HK political establishment. 3. It is unhelpful to try to shoehorn one’s bugbears into everything without reference to the specificities of the particular situation into which one is trying to shoehorn something.