Apparently Hong Kong is still boiling...how much longer can this go on?

Please stop violence and return peace to Hong Kong! pic.twitter.com/aHUMS3CecU

— People's Daily, China (@PDChina) December 29, 2019

How long can these protests continue?  We've seen a weird example in France where they seem to be an ongoing issue.  Could we see the same in Hong Kong?  I might be misreading things but I always thought that culturally this couldn't happen...at least for this long but I was wrong.  Will the communist govt intervene?  What has kept them from doing so this long?

TLDR?

What are we missing in the Hong Kong protests?