HONG KONG - We know they
are there. We can feel them all around us. But we don't
know who they are and no one will even admit that they
exist.
That about sums up the public profile of
what may be the most important organization in Hong
Kong: The invisible local chapter of the Chinese
Communist Party.
During a time of increased
political pressure from Beijing, with Hong Kong's
promised autonomy seemingly under question and fears
being raised about an unseen hand pressuring the media,
political leaders and the public, the role of the party
in Hong Kong is as mysterious as ever.
Few
people will comment on it because it is deemed to be too
sensitive, and longtime observers of Hong Kong say it is
almost impossible to get anyone to say they belong.
"I covered Hong Kong for 40 years, starting in
1958," said former Times of London correspondent
Jonathan Mirsky, "and I never met anyone who would admit
to being a member of the party."
Respected
Oxford University historian Steve Tsang says people who
do know details about the party are afraid to talk about
it. "They reckon that if they say the wrong thing, they
may have to pay a price," he said.
Many thought
the situation might change after 1997 when there was no
longer any legal justification for maintaining a secret,
underground party on Chinese territory. But it hasn't.
The party remains deeply underground, operating in
tight-knit cells under extreme secrecy. Don't go looking
for the local office of the party. There isn't one.
"The function of the Communist Party branch in
Hong Kong," said a former staffer of the local communist
Wen Wei Pao newspaper who still follows the party
closely, "is to help the central government to stabilize
and monitor the situation."
The former leftist
journalist, who asked to remain anonymous, said the
local party branch stays out of instructing the
government of Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa on policy
matters because Beijing has direct lines of influence
over Tung.
"Instead," he said, "they concentrate
on 'party work'" such as building a United Front,
promoting pro-Beijing policies and supporting political
candidates and causes that the mainland party deems
worthy.
The party is still organized along the
strict Leninist lines that made it such an effective
force for waging revolution in China. One informed
source called it a "pawn to pawn linkage" that
guarantees secrecy. "Even two party members who work
together in the same company won't know each other,"
said the man, who insisted on not being named or
identified because he fears discussing party matters. A
"group leader", the man said, will supervise up to 20
junior members and be under orders to maintain the
underground integrity of the cell. It was estimated in
the 1980s by the Far Eastern Economic Review that there
were as many as 3,000 party members in Hong Kong.
Analysts say the number has not gone up by much since
and that the party recruits very few Hong Kongers into
its ranks.
Its structure, first devised by
Bolshevik revolutionaries in Russia and later adapted by
China's communist leaders, is ideally suited to waging
war or clandestine struggle in so-called "white areas"
not under party rule. It is hard for enemies to
penetrate and even if a revolutionary cadre were
captured in war, chances are he wouldn't have much
information to disclose.
It is also an opaque
structure in which decisions are made by senior leaders
and disseminated to cadres who are expected to obey, not
discuss.
But this is Hong Kong in the new
millennium, not Shanghai in the 1930s when the
Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party were battling
for power in a deadly struggle, with the spoils of the
nation on the line.
"In China, you know who are
the party members," said Tsang, who has written
extensively on Hong Kong history. "But here you can't
prove anything, and that's the point. It's a white-area
party structure - very hush-hush."
"I don't
think role of the party has changed a whole lot" since
colonial times, said John Burns, a professor at Hong
Kong University who is one of the few academics anywhere
to have studied the Hong Kong party. "It is United Front
work, building support for party policies in Hong Kong."
As a result, Burns notes, there are United Front
groups throughout the territory, small patriotic
organizations in the New Territories, women's groups,
trade unions and others that are used by the party to
build support and mobilize public opinion.
The
orchestrated denunciations aimed at Democratic Party
officials in recent months and the relentless chorus of
voices from the business community saying that full
democracy would be dangerous for Hong Kong is part of a
United Front exercise, Burns said. "These people think
they are acting of their own free will," he said. But
they are really part of a strategy devised in Beijing
and carried out in Hong Kong to dampen public support
for democracy in advance of the July 1 demonstration and
the September elections.
While no one will say
he or she is in the party - one well-known political
figure rumored to be a member responded to a request for
an interview by saying "I know nothing about the
subject" - we at least know with some certainty who is
the boss of the party.
The party was in Hong
Kong shortly after its founding in Shanghai in 1921,
according to Tsang, taking a role in a massive General
Strike in the colony back in 1925. But since 1947, when
the Xinhua office was first set up in Hong Kong to
disseminate propaganda on behalf of the communists then
fighting the Kuomintang for control of China, the
news-agency head has also served as the local party
secretary.
From the beginning, Xinhua played an
important role as a conduit between China and Hong Kong.
Openly it was a news agency, of course, but "covertly it
operated as a quasi-diplomatic channel for government
exchange. Hong Kong Xinhua aided PRC [People's Republic
of China] personnel in understanding the local
capitalist society, and conversely it helped accustom
local society to some of the Beijing government's
policies and personnel," according to an article in the
journal Historian by Chu Yik-yi, an assistant professor
at Hong Kong Baptist University.
One major role
for the party then, much as it is now, was to keep
avenues of communication open with Hong Kong's business
tycoons. It was a strategy devised by premier Zhou
Enlai, who outlined a plan shortly after 1949 to
cooperate with the business elite in Hong Kong, the
ultimate goal always being the peaceful reunification of
Hong Kong with the mainland.
In those days, with
Zhou in charge of the Hong Kong communists, the party
even set up an "industrial-business club" in the
territory and invited businessmen to banquets and talks,
according to Chu. "Sometimes," Chu writes, "the
communists in Hong Kong advocated radical action, but
Beijing warned against overt violence" because the
territory was useful to China for business and
diplomatic purposes. Radical cadres were kept in check.
It seems that Chinese policy toward Hong Kong
has changed little in the intervening years and that the
ghost of Zhou, not the radical chairman Mao Zedong,
informs the present day. In his article, Chu quotes a
senior Chinese official from the time as saying that
Zhou stressed two points: "Firstly, Hong Kong should
continue with its capitalist system; secondly, the Hong
Kong entrepreneurs are patriotic and our friends."
The only time the party got out of control in
Hong Kong was during the famous Cultural
Revolution-inspired riots of 1967, a time when the
Xinhua office itself lost touch with Beijing and the
mainland could not restrain its energetic young radical
followers in Hong Kong.
But Xinhua's control as
the manager of the "Hong Kong Macau Work Committee", the
branch of the party in charge of Hong Kong to this day,
was reasserted quickly. It was eventually upgraded in
importance as the handover loomed during talks with the
British in the 1980s.
When Xu Jiatun took over
the office in 1983, he was the first head of Xinhua in
Hong Kong to be a member of the Central Committee, as is
Gao Siren, current head of the Central Government
Liaison Office, the successor to Xinhua's political
functions on behalf of Beijing.
Under Xu, the
party consolidated its hold on members of the Hong Kong
elite, supervised the appointment of Basic Law drafters
from Hong Kong as well as local National People's
Congress (NPC) delegates and paved the way for the
promulgation of the Basic Law.
That all came
undone, briefly, in 1989 as the Tiananmen massacre
panicked Hong Kongers and even led to open revolt when
some local party cadres inside the Xinhua office and the
leftist press sided with the students. Xu, a very senior
communist official, eventually lost his post and went
into exile in the United States. The local party
structure was decimated.
Much of what is known
about the party's structure in Hong Kong now dates to a
1994 memoir written by Xu and published in Taiwan. In it
he discussed the role of Xinhua and its link to the Hong
Kong Macau Work Committee. Reading Xu's thoughts from
that book, one can see that not much had changed since
Zhou laid out his strategy shortly after the revolution.
Discussing his work as head of the local party
branch, Xu wrote, "I raised in the Hong Kong-Macau Work
Committee [in 1983] that we should employ our
'resources' to cultivate a group of pro-China
capitalists in Hong Kong and Macau."
He insisted
that "the middle class was the chief target of the
struggle for the united front work" and that the
strategy was to achieve the support of the "big
bourgeoisie".
After Xu's departure, an informed
source said, the party sent new cadres to Hong Kong to
establish permanent residency status and rebuild
networks in anticipation of 1997. These individuals, the
source said, are working in companies and offices
throughout the territory, managing local party affairs
and orchestrating some of the current wave of
pro-Beijing fussing and fuming in Hong Kong.
The
system has not changed, says Burns, who has examined
internal mainland party documents and is convinced that
Siren, as chief of the Liaison Office, is the current
secretary of the underground party here, just as his
predecessors were in the Xinhua office. "This is a white
area, an enemy area," he said, "and they are trying to
control events."
Gao, therefore, is certainly
one of the most important men in Hong Kong, an official
responsible only to Beijing. "Hong Kong is living in a
one-party state," Burns stated flatly, "only with civil
liberties. But decisions are made for us elsewhere and
we are not allowed to participate."
Most
analysts agree that the situation will not change any
time soon, certainly not unless the party eases its
political control of the mainland. For that reason, we
will likely never know who is and isn't a party member
and what, exactly, they are up to.
To open up
the party, said Burns, would amount to "an admission of
tremendous failure" because it would mean that "one
country, two systems" could not work. Further, if the
local party were to go above ground, it would have to
face something the secretive communist mechanism is
totally unprepared for: competing in the marketplace of
ideas for support. Openness would leave the party with
just two options, says Burns. Either they stand for
election, in which case they might lose, an unthinkable
thought for Beijing. Or "they take power and stage
revolution", a scenario that seems equally far-fetched.
So while Emily Lau and other pro-democracy
politicians in Hong Kong call on the party to step out
of the shadows and into the light, it seems that it
could never do so.
Added Oxford's Tsang: "You
don't want to push them into the open when they are
prepared to stay underground. The prestige of the party
becomes a major issue if they are in the open and when
Beijing's leaders get frightened they become very
reactionary and very strict ... and don't forget, Hong
Kong has no defense."
(Copyright 2004 The
Standard, Hong Kong. All rights reserved. Used with
permission.)
