"The experience of Hong Kong SAR and mainland China would seem to show that the best way to reform communism is to expose the people living under it to a little capitalism."
How is that working out for the DPRK? Despite China being the perfect example of the benefits of reforms, Kim Jong-un decided to kill his uncle (who was seen as too pro China and for advocating for the kind of reforms that China had undergone) and thus seemingly shooting down (literally) the prospects of China style reforms for NK. Or maybe he's a shrewd operator, and will carry out reforms at a later date and hence claim all the credit and perpetuate the Dear/Great Leader cult.
In any case, it wasn't Hong Kong that made China change, it was Deng Xiaoping who made China change and with it the world. He saw the need for reform and eventually had the wherewithal to carry them out. Despite (or maybe because of) being purged more than once, he also put an end to the tendency of authoritarian governments to undergo violent or disorderly transitions of power by putting in place policies for the formal retirement of officials over a certain age and mechanisms for the orderly transfer of power from one set of leaders to the next. He put territorial disputes on the backburner and prioritised economic growth and cooperation. He successfully negotiated the peaceful return of Hong Kong and Macau (in the case of the former, despite Maggie Thatcher's initial wishful thinking stating that Britain would keep Hong Kong Island). The reforms he inititiated have lifted hundreds of millions of people in China out of poverty (in marked contrast to neighbouring India where it had been endowed with a democratic system and a relatively robust infrastructure - that had not been ravaged by invasion, then civil war, then a Cultural Revolution - that to this day hundreds of millions of Indians defecate out in the open because they have no access to toilets!
In short, change comes from within.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
