CHANGE: ‘Sing Hallelujah to the Lord’ has become the unofficial anthem of the anti-extradition protest movement: The presence of Christian groups have made protests look a lot less like the “organized riots” the government said it had to crack down on to bring back law and order.

A friend on Facebook suggests that the Chinese government may have backed off for fear of empowering the churches. It occurs to me that while there are many more communists than Christians in China, there are probably more believing Christians than believing communists.

It’s also the case that — as with the Tea Party — the powers that be are more frightened by bourgeois revolutionary movements than by those of the extreme left or right. And, like the Tea Party, the Hong Kong protesters leave things cleaner than they found them. You can see why the authorities are worried. What if they did that to government? Same worries that united the GOP and Dem establishments — and the press — against the Tea Party here.