The umbrellas are taking their toll on Beijing. The Central Committee may have managed, so far, to avoid major bloodshed in its standoff with Hong Kong demonstrators, but the clash between democracy defenders and guardians of Communist doctrine is reverberating in many of China’s provinces and is dimming its hope of peacefully annexing the independent island…

BEIJING — The story would sound familiar to many mainland Chinese: An employee of a state-owned company goes on a mission to move his embezzled fortunes, and himself, to the United States. Revenge, greed, lust and even murder follow. It’s a story that sounds plausible in Chinese politics, and the sort President Xi Jinping’s “fighting tigers”…