The dynamics of unorganized mass protests is that the movement will bend, in its internal contradictions, to the direction of the most well organized, motivationally driven and materially supported element.

Take the classic Tiananmen color revolution. It was originally an outcry against the runaway inflation of the 1988-9 period caused by the package reformers winning out against the gradualists. This led to an introduction of shock therapy by primarily Deng Xiaoping’s (I would indeed argue that his role played a major part) and Zhao Ziyang’s urgings, which led to historically high prices unseen in the history of the People’s Republic. Price stability was then re-introduced in late 1988 to prevent economic catastrophe but this led to backlash both from parts of the population that were outraged at this poorly conceived obsession with a “big bang” reform having taking place at all in the first place and the incipient liberal comprador-aspirants who thought the price stability initiative meant the end of the liberalizing reforms and their profit-seeking opportunities.

Both elements were present in the initial protests. The former (the Western journalistic and academic trick at the time was to dub every socialist and leftist element in socialist state politics as “conservative” to deliberately obfuscate their identity) were the socialist contingents, including Maoists and Ultraleft elements, who wanted a return to the Mao era rather than some capitalist restoration. Obviously, the color revolution elements, backed up by the West’s unfettered media penetration in China (which is how they captured those pictures they wave around nowadays), won out. They constructed that tacky Statue of Liberty clone “to Democracy” in Tiananmen Square, which appropriated and hijacked the imagery and messaging of the protests once the Western media started proliferating pictures of it, and the entire movement became a full blown color revolution aiming at capitalist restoration, even though large contingents of the participants wanted nothing of the sort.

This is how it works. Victor Bevins (a soc-dem), wrote a book called “If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution” that essentially dissects the systematic co-option of every single unorganized mass protest movement in the 2010s. The most infamous being the Hong Kong color revolution attempt, where public frustration over the affordability housing and the dynamics of the frozen economic and political system of Hong Kong due to China’s concession to Britain with the 50 year “1C2S” policy preventing any substantive mainland intervention or introduction of socialist governance to Hong Kong, which boiled over through an extradition case of a murderer. This was then easily was hijacked by the Trump I admin and the Western NGOs operating in Hong Kong, and co-opted as a “democracy” and “independence” protest.

As for Nepal, I incidentally made a comment three months ago back in May:

… the Trump administration specifically has had a long-running fixation on flipping Nepal into a Himalayan Baltic/Ukraine against China (and India as well, for that matter) since his first term. They got Nepal to sign onto the USAID “Millennium Challenge Compact” (the same name borrowed from the wargame against Iran) during Trump 1 and it was ratified by Nepal’s then-Communist Party coalition led parliament (Maoist-Centre and United-Socialist) in 2022. I wouldn’t be surprised if the effect of that $550 million agreement is primed to begin making waves in Nepal now, especially now with Trump 2 and the libs now leading the government.

It’s not to say that things will necessarily progress in that direction, but that the external interests have been clearly demonstrated and many of the requisite pieces have likely been set in place.