“Be extremely subtle even to the point of formlessness. Be extremely mysterious even to the point of soundlessness. Thereby you can be the director of the opponent's fate.”
― Sun Tzu
I speak not of confrontation with the central government but confrontation with many aspects of the things in "the system" that currently underlines and defines how the cerntral government thinks and operates.
The ambiguities introduced by the word "system" here is in no means unintentional in that it needs not even be political or geopolitical: it can be cultural, it can be like you said ideological, it can be legalistic, it can be infrastructural or componential, it can even be technological, transnational, game theoretical, self-regulatory, etc. It's a board spectrum having to do with the emergent phenomena in the power structures that spread across different industries and establishments in and outside of China. As much as the Chinese central government is central and monolithic in nature, there are many shades to it, and for everyone involved in running this conglomerate (including those at the top) it is a constrained optimization problem to survive, diversify future risks, etc. Ultimately we are dealing with human nature and the status quo here. There are some beauties and there are lots of ugliness. But it is definitely not immutable. It will continue to change.
What they are currently doing to Hong Kong is shooting themselves in their own foot. It is a very short-sighted move and likely they are aware of the many cons that come with it too. Now the question is what they are going to do next to minimise damage and how the system that constraints them can be confronted to encourage more freedom of Chinese expression.
In the next twenty years China will probably overtake the States in terms of market sizes, but very unlikely in terms of science, art, technologies, etc. And without all those wonderful human endeavors China as of now is and will continue to be (if there are no changes) pretty much just one giant sweatshop, except for small parts of Beijing and Shanghai, etc where the manufactured consent are being examined and there are still traces of liberal arts (and also maybe parts of Yunnan where the hippies live). One could argue that it was necessary for China to position itself as a sweatshop in the post-Mao era (1975~1989) under the darwinism-inspired mindset on national progress [1], but as times change we are coming to a point where "the system" needs to be adjusted to encourage more freedom of Chinese expression and confrontations challenging the status quo. The act of postponing it or doing things aimed to diminish it is very short-sighted, backward-thinking, self-mutilating, and sad, and it would continue to screw up the reward systems of capitalism for innovation domestically, and to an increasing degree around the world due to its sheer market size. And I hope that is not the direction we as a civilisation is heading towards.
“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.” ― Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Confrontation needs not be violent.
[1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1tg5mmd