Hong Kong’s Perfect Crisis

HONG KONG—The protesters gathered in a suburb here over the weekend looked much like the hundreds of thousands who have flooded this city’s streets for months. Their faces were covered with masks; they spoke of anger at the government while some piled bricks, bicycles, and road signs into jumbled barricades meant to slow advancing police. At night, a few black-clad men tossed Molotov cocktails into a building lobby, sending flames racing up the walls and thick black smoke billowing out of the doorways.

This building was not a branch of a , which have over the past months become frequent targets of vandalism by anti-government demonstrators. Nor were those fortifying their neighborhood calling for the now-well-known five demands of the prodemocracy movement to be met. Their political allegiances unclear, these protesters were instead pushing back against a plan floated by the government to turn an empty housing estate into a possible quarantine site for those exposed to