Hong Kongers, and especially the city’s students, have been on the streets for five months now. This has become an existential cause for many of them, and they are showing few, if any, signs of weariness.

Their struggle has intriguing echoes of the “spirit of struggle” that Xi Jinping urges on the Chinese people, a phrase he used sixty times in a speech to officials at the Central Party School in Beijing last week. The development of Marxism and of a socialist nation was full of difficult struggles, the president said, and achieving a great dream also takes a great struggle.

One of China’s more persistent stereotypes, especially among the northern mandarin elite of the imperial and now the communist dynasties, is that the Cantonese-speaking people of the south — especially Hong Kongers — are greedy folk readily satisfied by the opportunity to make money. How hollow that perception seems today.

Please click here to read the full “Hong Kong’s spirit of struggle” article published at Inside Story, written by Griffith Asia Institute Industry Fellow, Rowan Callick.