Hong Kong’s Umbrella Revolution. Photo by Pasu Au Yeung via Flickr

Of all the places in the world associated with political instability and popular revolution, Hong Kong probably comes quite far down on the list. Until recently, the city had developed a reputation as ‘apolitical’ and heavily materialistic. Behind the imposing skyscrapers lining Victoria Harbour, Hong Kong has become a seething cauldron of anger directed against the gradual erosion of its autonomy and staggering levels of income inequality.

In just over a decade, Hong Kong politics has become increasingly polarised, with young people feeling alienated from Mainland China and the values of the Communist Party. Pro-business moderates are finding themselves marginalised by hardline neo-Communists who fervently believe in an ‘ever-closer union’ between Hong Kong and the Mainland. The city’s insular politics have long been divided into two main camps known as the ‘pan-Democrats’ and the ‘pro-Establishment’, both of which are broad coalitions incorporating a range of political parties from across the conventional left-right spectrum. Ever since the Governorship of Lord Patten in the late 1990s, the primary debate in local politics has been that of universal suffrage and the degree of influence that Peking ought to have over Hong Kong’s internal affairs. Technically speaking, the city is a ‘Special Administrative Region’ of China enjoying full autonomy over all aspects of its affairs except for foreign policy and external defence. In reality, both the legislature and executive are controlled by the Communist Party in defiance of popular opinion, since a consistent majority of 60% of the population have supported the pan-Democrats in every election since the late 1980s – an appropriate parallel would be to imagine David Cameron granting Scotland total autonomy but reserving the right to appoint 55% of all Members of Scottish Parliament as well as the entire Scottish Executive.

Yet, truly worrying is how C.Y. Leung’s administration is using the protests as an excuse to move the city closer towards a police state. Apart from using tear gas against domestic protestors for the first time since the riots of 1967, during which pro-Communist terrorists (some of whom are now prominent members of the government) launched a bombing campaign against the colonial government and local moderates, extrajudicial beatings and unconstitutional strip searches have been systematically carried out by the police over the past few days. The last remaining pan-Democrat newspaper was physically blockaded earlier this week, damaging its commercial viability, especially as leading firms (including British banks such as HSBC and Standard Chartered) have already been pressured into pulling their advertisements. Pan-Democratic lawmakers have been arrested for bringing equipment back to their offices purely on suspicion of ‘abetting illegal behaviour’, while student leaders were kept in solitary detention without just cause. Instead of responding to the legitimate grievances of peaceful protestors, the government has resorted to bribing Hong Kong’s powerful triads and persuading them to attack protest encampments in full view of the local and international media. The apparent frontrunner to succeed C.Y. Leung is a former Security Minister notorious for her hardline approach towards protestors and avid peddling of conspiracy theories.

The room for consensus is shrinking by the day as China seeks to evade its legal obligations towards the people of Hong Kong, who have been repeatedly promised genuine universal suffrage. In recent weeks, a handful of moderates have called for protestors to return home in exchange for beginning negotiations with the government, which were abruptly cancelled a few days ago. Put bluntly, Hong Kong’s youth have had enough of a deeply corrupt status quo whereby a handful of pro-Chinese businessmen reap monopoly profits through vast conglomerates permeating every aspect of daily life in the absence of meaningful competition laws. – the city currently sits atop the Economist’s crony-capitalism index, ahead of Russia, Ukraine and Mexico. Indeed, Chief Executive C.Y. Leung openly declared his opposition to universal suffrage on the grounds that it would grant excessive power to the bottom 50% of the population, for which he has been compared to Mitt Romney by Paul Krugman.  It is to their immense credit that the protesters thus far have remained essentially peaceful and have carefully calibrated the demonstrations in such a way as to maintain pressure on the government without actually disrupting the daily routines of most citizens. With only three (normally congested) tunnels and two underground lines connecting the two main parts of the city, it would have been all too easy for students to totally shut down all business and trade if they really wanted to do so.

However, the Chinese government is in no mood for any sort of compromise, and negotiations will achieve, at best, cosmetic concessions. The student protestors and their supporters across Hong Kong should maintain their resolve and reject any proposal that will restrict electoral choice. Universal suffrage and regular elections are meaningless in the absence of genuine competition – President Putin was ‘democratically’ elected, but hardly anyone considers his Russia to be a truly democratic country. Ever since 1997, Hong Kong has lived under an abnormally tolerant authoritarian regime, but for all its glamour and civic liberties, it remains at its core a dictatorship, its leaders lacking any kind of popular legitimacy. With the legislature powerless and marginalised by the current series of events, the students on the street represent the city’s last and perhaps best hope. The moderate opposition has tried to negotiate with China for the best part of 30 years, and all it has to show for its efforts is a continuous erosion of the city’s civic liberties and autonomy.

When Britain handed back Hong Kong to Peking in 1997, it did so based on the belief that it had constructed a system of legally binding guarantees that would ensure the city’s freedom for at least 50 years. Instead, the Chinese Communist regime has systematically broken these promises to the point that an overwhelming majority of Hong Kong’s people are now demanding their rights. With 60% of the city’s population rejecting Peking’s proposal, the only way forward for the protestors and their allies in the legislature is to ride this wave of popular anger and veto any proposal that fails to comply with international electoral standards. By ensuring that any future government in Hong Kong will lack popular legitimacy and reminding the international community of this fact, the youth who continue to bravely resist an increasingly violent police are able to cause China a considerable degree of embarrassment. Already, there are growing signs of popular dissent in China’s teeming cities as workers protest against a unaccountable government and staggering levels of income inequality. Hong Kong might once again be able to play its historical role as the incubator of revolutionary ideas for the rest of the country. As long as the protestors are able to keep up the  momentum, time and history is ultimately on their side. Accepting a deeply flawed compromise will only strengthen the Chinese leadership and consign Hong Kong to political, social and economic oblivion.

Protesters in Hong Kong take to the streets. Photo by LingHK via flickr.

According to Samuel Huntington in his book The Third Wave, political negotiations will succeed only when “guarantees that neither side will lose everything become the basis of agreement”. For Hong Kong, it is precisely this prospect of “losing everything” that has been the cause of much public worry recently. That both sides have long been at loggerheads underscores the cul-de-sac quality of what is fundamentally an ideological clash: Whereas Hong Kongers’ anti-establishment views is tolerated by a feeble government, any such attempt by their Mainland counterparts would more often than not entail prosecution by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), justified under the brand of “subversion of state power”.

In the Hong Kong of 2013, cries for the materialisation of a democratic agenda remain as vocal as ever, with the July 1 Protest proving a prime.  Notwithstanding the arrival of typhoon Rumbia, 450,000 people braved the inclement weather to march in protest of a variety of dissatisfactions, such as exorbitant property prices jacked up in part by mainlander home buyers, the indefinite responses to calls for universal suffrage, the implementation of propagandistic education packaged under the ironic misnomer ‘Liberal Studies’, and the Chief Executive’s alleged right-leaning credentials.

As the city metamorphosed into a hub of discontent, anti-Beijing groups raised a long-standing question: will the capital ever accommodate the city’s democratic demands within its dictatorial framework? This question unearths a case of irreconcilable differences wherein divorce cannot be a way out, given the geographical circumstance and historical lineage binding the two sides, thus leaving compromise as the only solution. In the words of Bao-hui Zhang, a professor from LingnanUniversity, “negotiated democratisation is the only viable strategy for Hong Kong’s political breakthrough.”

Beijing: Contradictory Signals

Ironically, Beijing has itself to blame for sowing the seeds of Hong Kong’s oppositional currents. Prior to the Handover, the CPC pacified Hong Kongers’ ‘transitional anxiety’ by making liberal promises to reassure locals that their freedoms would remain unchanged under 50 years of autonomous rule. Most controversial is Article 45 of the Basic Law, which stipulates that “the ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage…[through] a gradual and orderly progress”. Rife with definitional ambiguity, this clause has proven a key source of tension between the Central Government Law Committee and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy forces. Upon the appointment of Qiao Xiao-yang as the Committee Chairman, the National People’s Congress’ initial guarantee of a ‘popularly elected’ Chief Executive suddenly came with strings attached, expressed as highly implicative preconditions positing  that whoever is elected must “love the country” and not “confront the Central Government”. These are indeed ominous words from the viewpoint of Hong Kongers, and their proliferation in recent CCP announcements makes this an ever greater cause for concern.

A close examination, however, reveals that the CCP has in fact always been adamant on maintaining an authoritarian mode of governance, bar none – not even for a ‘special administrative region’. In 1996, Beijing supplanted the democratically elected, incumbent Legislative Council with a provisional dummy, wherein members were ‘elected’ by an electoral college formed entirely by the CCP. Such an act, despite all the mollycoddling rhetoric, speaks volumes about Beijing’s bottom line when it comes to dealing with Hong Kong. Interestingly, this fact is often absent in local media discourse. This example of tacit censorship bodes ill for Hong Kong’s press freedoms, as the vested business interests of media moguls inevitably tip them towards adopting a pro-establishment stance so as to tap the vast financial opportunities in the Mainland, resulting in a growing infiltration of CCP-tinted viewpoints into local media content and a decrease in press transparency.

Hong Kong: Constrained but not Chained  

In order to turn the tables in its favour, the city must come to terms with the structural problems inherent in its politics. According to Joseph Cheng, a professor of politics at the City University in Hong Kong, the post-1997 electoral systems have been “designed to ensure pro-government forces a Legislative Council majority”, obviously attested to by the example of the finance industry gaining “one bank one vote” as opposed to “one member one vote” in functional constituency elections. Yet the pan-democracy camp must also be held to account for their incompetence. One example is the Democratic Party, whose lack of political guile and constructive stratagem has resulted in it going from the party with the largest Legislative Council majority in 2000 to that with the smallest in 2012.

This unfolding of events has led more disillusioned citizens to take to the streets themselves as a last resort. Nevertheless, public pressure as collective resistance is likely to yield minimal tangible returns, at most functioning as an impetus for the government to launch negotiations with Beijing. What will make or break the success of these negotiations, is the leverage that Hong Kong has in this political ‘transaction’.

This implies treating the idea ‘negotiated democratisation’ not as compromise, but as a business venture. The question to ask is not when Beijing will consent to grant Hong Kong what it wants, but what the Chinese government will stand to gain as a result of Hong Kong becoming more democratic. Given Beijing’s top priority of balancing rising economic prowess with national stability, the local government should highlight how allowing greater political transparency in Hong Kong will both boost foreign investor confidence and help China gain ‘image capital’ – a win-win situation that plays directly into Beijing’s concerns. Protests alone are no longer good enough.

It seems the pan-democratic subjects are starting to grasp the imperative of compromise, as both the Democratic and Civic Party have jettisoned the hard-line disposition that previously characterised their stance. Instead, they have opted for a moderate way of communication, softening insistence on rigid conditions regarding a precise timetable, all the while holding fast to the principle that the attainment of universal suffrage must nevertheless remain the city’s ultimate goal. Hong Kongers can only hope that such moderation efforts will bring about some concrete breakthrough in the future.

Hong Kong citizens take to the streets. Photo by Remko Tanis via Flickr

Anti-mainland sentiment continues to brew in Hong Kong as locals call for the democratic reforms outlined in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s pseudo-constitution. Recent administrative developments associated with the mainland’s wider integration strategy only add fuel to the fire. Hong Kong citizens have the heart for change – that has been proven time and time again – but they must remember that democracy is still only a form of government. It is just one cog, albeit an essential one, to be added into Hong Kong’s governing engine. For the engine to work, the question is not simply “when can we elect our own leader and legislators?” but rather “how should we address Hong Kong’s structural problems in light of China’s current agenda and Hong Kong’s role within it?”

China nowadays has a radically different agenda compared with three decades ago. In the early 1980s Deng Xiaoping first entered negotiations with the British government over China’s resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong. Fresh from its introduction to capitalist market principles, China was not then the economic titan we recognize today: the world’s second-largest economy, largest exporter and a real presence in global affairs.

For China, whose economy already verges on superpower status, the next rational step can only be a principle-based one. Everyone acknowledges China’s sizable contribution to global growth, but other countries may be wary of its rise. China knows that to surpass the United States, global acceptance and approval of its governing values is necessary. When Gu Kailai, wife of the former leading politician Bo Xilai, received a suspended death sentence for the murder of British businessman Neil Heywood, the court voiced as explicitly as possible China’s adherence to the rule of law.

In an age where the Chinese middle-class energetically type away on China’s biggest social network, Sina Weibo, discussing and criticizing the central government’s every move, China realizes that there is progressively less it can get away with should it overlook the law or human rights – values that Western powers hold most dear. Hong Kong is a financial powerhouse and an internationally recognized city in its own right. Perhaps it may also be said to be China’s glamorous but rebellious poster-boy for these Western values.

Party Politics

Based on the announcement of Hong Kong’s previous Chief Executive Donald Tsang, Hong Kong is almost certain to attain universal suffrage for the election of its Chief Executive in 2017 and its Legislative Council in 2020. China has no significant reason why it should renege, at least formally, on these constitutional promises to Hong Kong. Short of a full-blown challenge to China’s sovereignty, the success of the “one country, two systems” model in Hong Kong continues to be in China’s best interests.

Of course, that does not do away with concerns about mainland manipulation of general elections or distrust of the mainland in general. However, Hong Kong’s issues, and indeed the keys to its survival, go beyond a lack of true democracy. It is one thing to demand true democracy; it is another to translate true democracy into good governance.

Herein lays one of Hong Kong’s structural problems: a lack of political talent. Members from any one political party are too spread out amongst the District Councils, the Legislative Council and the Executive Council for any one party to secure the power necessary to effectively govern. Even the largest political party, the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) can only fill just under a fourth of the total number of governing seats. What is needed is a combination of young political talent and urging of Hong Kong’s political parties to move towards some more concrete division of the political spectrum.

The most obvious division would be Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp against the pro-Beijing camp. The term “opposition camp” is often applied derisively to the pro-democracy camp by proponents of Beijing’s authoritarian stance, but despite the term’s contemptuous nature it is not completely without substance. The different factions of the pro-democracy camp are capable of uniting against flagrant dangers to individual rights and freedoms in Hong Kong – for example a march organized by the pro-democracy camp against the proposed anti-subversion law in 2003 attracted 5 million protestors. However, for them to evolve past their present status as mere pressure groups, these groups must increase the number of members who possess the political acumen required to govern well.

Facing the Future

The importance of this cannot be emphasized enough in the face of the perilous future Hong Kong faces beyond its bid for democracy. A drastically aging population, growing income inequality, rising house prices, and questions of unification with the mainland are but some of the obstacles Hong Kong’s future politicians will have to grapple with. The politicians, if democratically elected, must have an effective presence across all branches of civic life. The worst that can happen under a democratic framework is for crude politicians to derail concerted action with petty squabbles.

It is frequently said that the only way to get things done in Hong Kong is to take to the streets. Good governance under a democratic framework would move debates in parks into the politicians’ chambers, provided that elected officials are sufficiently capable and professional. It is presumably on China’s agenda for Hong Kong to eventually be granted universal suffrage. Those who are pessimistic may see Hong Kong’s economic worth slowly being sapped by other major financial cities in China but they ought not to exaggerate Hong Kong’s downfall just yet. Hong Kong remains an international financial centre and the primary offshore Renminbi trading hub. Most importantly, it still has the rule of law. Those keen for universal suffrage ought to build up the competency of Hong Kong’s institutions in preparation for receiving their most coveted prize – democracy.