Dr Jonathan Eyal, an expert on global security issues at the Royal United Services Institute, said the violent scenes in Washington would offer only "short-term" political advantages to undemocratic regimes. "The Chinese have a history of laughing at parliamentary democracy, seeing it as just chaos, and they have made direct comparisons with the scenes of demonstrators defacing the Hong Kong parliament," he said. "But that's nonsense - in Hong Kong, it's people protesting for the actual right to vote, whereas in Washington it's people protesting a vote they didn't like."