The Western media have secured their prize. Just as it seemed that the Hong Kong Occupy demonstrations were about to peter out, evidence emerged that one of the protestors had been detained and beaten by police. The officers accused have been suspended, and an investigation is under way. The story can return to the top of the front pages. The demonstrators can once more become the heroes of the day.

Owen Jones, a radical left-wing columnist for Britain’s Guardian newspaper, hailed the struggle of the demonstrators against "Beijing’s tyrants" with their "murderous record”. "The protestors have a simple, unarguable case", he fulminated.

China’s leaders are not in fact ‘tyrants’, and if they have a ‘murderous record’, then that record is a distant past echo of the murderous record of the enlightened West - including the Labour Party that Mr Jones supports - which launched a war with Iraq in 2003 based on a pack of outrageous lies. The perpetrators of these lies have never been called to account. Eleven years later, thousands still die in Iraq every month as an aftermath of their actions. Eleven years later,the West is now dropping its bombs on Syria as a direct consequence. In between, they bombed Libya back to the stone age without even declaring war.

But these are arguments for another day. Let us stick to Hong Kong.

With all due respect to the whole of the West, the demonstrators do not have an “unarguable case”. China has reneged on nothing. China has stuck to the schedule to which it agreed in terms of the democratisation process in Hong Kong. While the demonstrators might wish it to be otherwise, China always reserved the right to continue to vet candidates for Hong Kong’s leadership at this stage, and China has every reason to do so.

You would have to be blind, deaf and stupid to pretend that America does not shove its interfering nose into every corner of the planet. You would have to be naive beyond belief to pretend that there is no American interference in the Hong Kong demonstrations, when the territory is riddled with ‘foundations’ and ‘endowments’ run by and financed by exactly the same people who have run the ‘Arab Spring’ and the ‘Colour Revolutions’ in Eastern Europe – movements which have brought mostly misery to their unfortunate beneficiaries.

Beijing has a perfectly valid and legitimate case for continuing to vet candidates for the Hong Kong leadership. Beijing is not prepared to run the risk of Hong Kong falling under the control of someone who is a paid-for American stooge.

Let us extend the discussion a little. What is this democracy that America holds so dear, this democracy that America is so keen to offer to the rest of the world at the end of the barrel of a gun, this democracy for which the demonstrators of Hong Kong have taken to the streets?

Well, for a start, Americans have precisely what the people of Hong Kong do not have – the right to a free vote. As the Americans like to put it: If you don’t like the leaders you've got then hell, you can just “vote ‘em out”!

But this much-vaunted right really has to be subject to a little more demanding scrutiny. Yes, you can vote them out. But who can you put in their place?