Throwing Hong Kong democrats a
bone By Todd Crowell
Underwhelmed might be the best way to
describe the reaction in Hong Kong to the
government's proposals to reform the Legislative
Council (Legco) by adding 10 new seats and
doubling to 1,600 the electoral college that
chooses the chief executive by including elected
as well as appointed district board members.
Of course, the government's proposals had
been known for weeks, so there were no real
surprises in the announcement this week by Chief
Secretary Raphael Hui. The manner in which the
reforms were tabled was curious, however. Why
didn't Chief Executive Donald Tsang unveil the
proposals himself in his annual policy address on
October 14?
The specter of the last
British colonial governor, Chris Patten, still
hangs over the slow evolution
of democracy in Hong Kong. One imagines that Tsang
did not want to be so personally identified with
the reforms. Patten's whole administration and
legacy was defined by his efforts to expand the
number of directly elected seats in the
legislature.
Those electoral changes,
which Patten unveiled shortly after he became
governor in 1992 and implemented in 1995, set off
an enormous row between London and Beijing with
Hong Kong caught in the middle. It is not
surprising that the first Chinese chief executive,
Tung Chee-hwa, would not touch the issue.
It is possible that Hong Kong needed a
respite from all of the storm and stress of the
Patten years in those fragile and nervous early
months following the handover in 1997 as both
sides, China and Hong Kong, got used to each
other. That respite came to a screeching halt,
however, in the huge protest march that took place
on July 1, 2003.
During his seven years as
chief, Tung never talked about political reform,
studiously ignored the democrats and implemented
only those electoral changes that were explicitly
spelled out in the Basic Law, Hong Kong's
constitution. To his credit Tsang has reopened the
issue, although by letting Hui introduce the
measures, he has shown that he doesn't want to be
too closely identified with it.
On the
plus side of the ledger, the proposed reforms
represent the most far-reaching political reforms
under China's flag. On the negative side, they
fall short of providing the "universal suffrage"
many people in Hong Kong desire. Already many
prominent democrats are lining up to denounce the
reforms as not going nearly far enough to bring
full democracy to Hong Kong.
It should be
noted that the term "universal suffrage" has a
special meaning in Hong Kong. Everyone in the
territory has the vote already. It's just that
these votes are channeled into only a narrow
portion of the body politic. Universal suffrage in
Hong Kong for democrats means everybody voting for
all members of the Legco and for the chief
executive, now chosen by an electoral college of
800 members.
Obviously, Tsang would not
have allowed the reform proposals to go forward
without Beijing's approval. In any case, since it
involves a change in the composition of Legco,
which sets membership at 60, any reform would have
to be reported to the Standing Committee of the
National People's Congress.
The central
government seems willing to allow Legco's
expansion provided that the ratio of directly
elected and functional constituencies remains
equal, ie, at 35/35 instead of the current 30/30.
This is why five of the seats chosen by district
board members are being labeled "functional
constituencies", even though functional
constituencies are supposed to represent special
interests, such as lawyers, accountants or civil
engineers.
If all of this is beginning to
sound a little confusing and insider, bear with
me. Hong Kong has a jerry-built, Rube Goldberg
political process because it is patched together
to accommodate a local population that, for the
most part, wants a fully democratic system, while
Hong Kong is part of a country that doesn't so far
embrace any form of democracy.
Nobody in
Hong Kong would be so rude as to suggest that the
whole deal looks awfully Pattenesque, but let me.
The five district board seats are less like
functional constituencies than they are like the
old Election Committee, which under Patten chose
10 Legco members and was made up of - guess what?
- district board councilors.
The only
difference is that after the handover, the new
administration reintroduced the colonial practice
of having the government appoint some district
board members, though they still amount to only
about a fifth of the more than 500 local
councilors. Nevertheless, the democrats have
seized on these appointed representatives as a
fatal flaw in the reforms.
For a while it
seemed as if the democrats would support the
proposal as the best deal they would likely get at
this time. Lee Wing-tat, chairman of the
Democratic Party, even had some positive things to
say about it. But then the veteran democracy
campaigner, Martin Lee, spoke up, hectoring
democrats to get some backbone and courage of
their convictions.
"This is the most
critical moment," he wrote in Next magazine. "If
we cannot defend our bottom line of [full]
democracy, it is pointless calling ourselves
democrats." Lee surrendered his formal leadership
of the Democratic Party some years ago, but his
views obviously still carry considerable weight.
The bottom line for Lee has always been universal
suffrage.
Moreover, the closer the
democrats look at the likely outcome of these
reforms, the more they sharpen their pencils and
do the sums, the more they understand that the
reforms will do little to alter the balance of
power. Assuming that the democrats win three of
the five new directly elected seats and two or
three of the new functional seats, they would
increase their numbers to 30 or 31 out of 70.
Since the first elections in Hong Kong in
1991, the democrats (both members of the
Democratic Party and independent democrats) have
consistently garnered roughly 60% of the vote.
That now translates into about 40% of the seats in
the legislature. If they won 30 seats under the
new arrangements, they would still have ... what?
About 40% of the seats.
At the moment the
democrats seem determined to oppose the political
package put forward by the government. Some 23 of
the 25 sitting Liberal Party members issued a
joint statement urging the government to provide a
timetable and roadmap toward universal suffrage.
Still, the political climate makes it risky for
them to simply oppose these reforms.
Public approval for the democratic members
is low at the moment. The government of Donald
Tsang is very popular, unlike the previous
administration. Beijing seems to be making peace
offerings to the democrats as shown by their
get-together in Guangzhou earlier this month.
Another mass demonstration being bruited for early
December might prove embarrassingly sparse.
The public may look on opposition as being
simply stubborn obstructionism in pursuit of a
utopian cause. The baby thaw with Beijing, which
they are so eager to nurture, would freeze again.
In the end the democrats are in a corner and may
not have many good options other than to accept
the proposals and try for some compromises.
Former Asiasweek writer Todd
Crowell comments on Asian affairs at Asia
Cable (www.asiacable.blogspot.com).
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