Hong Kong democracy movement gets
new life By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - When a prominent local
commentator and politician wrote "Democracy is
dead, long live democracy" on the opinion page of
a local newspaper a few weeks ago, he thought he
was writing the epitaph for the democracy movement
in Hong Kong.
The democrats, Lau Nai-Keung
maintained, were Johnny-one-note politicians
(after the song of the same name) who mistakenly
placed their sacred cow of universal suffrage
above the bread-and-butter economic issues that
most Hong Kong people hold dear. While the ideal
of eventual democracy would remain alive in the
city, Lau declared, the
one-note democrats were a dying breed over whose
funeral he was happy to preside.
As of
this past Sunday, however, witness the
resurrection. On a crisp, sunny afternoon, more
than 80,000 demonstrators hit the streets to
demand the very universal suffrage that Lau, a
Chinese People's Consultative Conference delegate,
and his pro-Beijing cohorts perceive as a low
priority for the average Hong Kong resident.
And so the familiar paradox of Hong Kong
politics has been crystallized once again: yes,
Hong Kong people want harmony, stability and
prosperity - the relentless themes piped down to
them from Beijing since the handover from 155
years of British rule in 1997 - but they also
want, sooner rather than later, the full democracy
promised in the Basic Law, the constitution to
which the British and Chinese agreed before the
handover.
When nothing else seems to work,
the Hong Kong way of expressing frustration with
Beijing's wary, slow-footed management of their
affairs is to stage mass demonstrations that, like
Sunday's, tend to be models of peaceful, orderly
protest. The largest such post-handover
demonstration occurred on July 1, 2003, the sixth
anniversary of the handover. On that historic day,
500,000 people marched against the National
Security Bill, anti-subversion legislation
proposed by Hong Kong's first chief executive
under Chinese rule, the deeply unpopular Tung
Chee-hwa. Many feared the bill would be used to
restrict freedom of expression. After the march,
Tung decided to withdraw the proposed legislation.
By the time the seventh anniversary of the
handover rolled around, the Standing Committee of
the National People's Congress had tried to end
the democracy debate by firmly ruling out
universal suffrage in the city's elections for
chief executive in 2007 and for all 60 seats in
2008 in the Legislative Council (LegCo), Hong
Kong's mini-parliament. (Currently, only half of
LegCo's seats are directly elected.) But the
Standing Committee's edict only succeeded in
provoking 400,000 people to rally in the streets
in protest, further undermining Tung's authority.
Seven months later, a battered Tung resigned, and
his popular chief secretary, Donald Tsang, took
the helm.
Since then, Hong Kong has been a
much happier place. Tsang, a longtime civil
servant who also served as financial secretary
under the last colonial governor, Chris Patten,
and has been knighted by Queen Elizabeth,
possesses all the political skills that Tung so
obviously lacked. Immediately, as acting chief
executive, Tsang set out to win back the public
opinion that had turned so sour under Tung. He
took a stroll through a popular shopping mall,
chatted amiably with an elderly fruit-shop owner
and boarded a fishing vessel, where he listened
sympathetically as fishermen told him about their
daily lives. In his public speeches and
appearances, instead of the painfully wooden Tung,
Hong Kong residents now saw an articulate,
animated chief executive with a bounce to his step
- and they also liked his trademark bow tie. In
addition, Tsang benefited from Hong Kong's
economic rebound after years of decline as a
result of the Asian financial crisis, bird flu and
SARS.
At its peak, Tsang's popularity
rating topped 70%. He completed his tenure as
acting chief and, with overwhelming support on
Hong Kong's 800-member Election Committee, which
is dominated by Beijing loyalists, easily won his
own term in June. His approval ratings have
remained high, and this year's July 1 march for
democracy was a rather tame affair; only 21,000
people turned out, and it seemed, as Lau trumpeted
in his article, that the democrats were
championing a moribund cause.
Tsang was no
doubt counting on his popularity to help him push
his electoral reform package through LegCo this
month. The package would double the size of the
Election Committee, which is similar to an
electoral college, and add 10 seats to LegCo. Five
of those seats would be directly elected and five
would represent what in Hong Kong's peculiar
political vernacular are called "functional
constituencies", which were contrived to represent
special interests such as doctors, lawyers and
businessmen. But, in a creative Tsangian twist,
these five new functional constituency seats would
be chosen by Hong Kong's 529 district councilors,
80% of whom are democratically elected. Clearly,
the chief executive has stated, his proposals
would advance Hong Kong's democratic development.
Or at least that was the bait for the
weakened democrats. Unfortunately for the chief
executive, however, they did not find it tempting
enough to take. Tsang needs the votes of at least
five of the 25 democrats (in several parties) in
LegCo to achieve the two-thirds majority required
for the passage of his reforms.
After
Sunday's march, those democrats, feeling very much
alive again, are unlikely to budge. It is the
democrats who are strutting this week as Tsang
appears chastened by the multiple messages
conveyed by the protest. The demonstrators were
not only rallying for democracy; they were also
defying him personally, as well as sending a
message to the Hong Kong business tycoons who had
jumped into the democracy fray.
The
chairman of Hopewell Holdings, Gordon Wu,
described plans for the rally as a form of "mob
politics" that would lead to greater distrust
between Hong Kong and the mainland and thus could
only set back the city's bid for full democracy.
The region's chief casino mogul, Stanley Ho,
placed advertisements in a number of local
newspapers accusing the democrats of destabilizing
the city and predicted a turnout of fewer than
50,000 for the rally.
And, in a highly
unusual move, Tsang made a prime-time television
address Wednesday in which he described the
scheduled December 21 LegCo vote on his reforms as
"a crossroads in democratic development" and
appealed for the support of Hong Kong residents.
In his address, he did not mention Sunday's march,
but his message was clear: it would hinder, not
advance, the city's aspirations for democracy. And
just in case anyone was wondering what Beijing was
thinking about all this, on Friday the
deputy-secretary of the National People's Congress
Standing Committee, Qiao Xiaoyang, called any
attempt to link a timetable for democracy with the
government's current reform package "unrealistic"
and "impossible".
Ironically, the ultimate
result of all this cold-water rhetoric seems to
have been to spur interest and increase
participation in the march. Catholic Bishop Joseph
Zen gave the benediction at Victoria Park, the
rally's point of origin, before the swell of
demonstrators began their orderly procession to
the central government offices. Former chief
secretary Anson Chan - dubbed "the conscience of
Hong Kong" - joined in. The slogan-chanting
demonstrators dressed in black to symbolize the
state of democracy in Hong Kong - but not, it was
clear, the state of the democrats.
What
happens next? Beijing has made it clear that, no
matter how many people march in the streets, no
timetable for democracy will be immediately
forthcoming. But the chief executive now needs to
make a concession and at the same time save face.
Most people realize that, caught between
the irreconcilable demands of the central
government in Beijing and the democrats in Hong
Kong, Tsang is in a tough spot. But they also want
to see him succeed.
A way for him to do
that is to add to the bait in his reform package.
If he were to alter the package so that only
elected district councilors - and not the 20% who
are appointed by the government - could vote for
the chief executive and the proposed new
functional constituencies, then the democrats
might bite, especially if he also used the
occasion to affirm his commitment to the goal of
universal suffrage.
And if the democrats
still refused to compromise on their impossible
dream of an immediate timetable for democratic
development, then it is they who would lose the
support of the Hong Kong people, not Tsang. The
ball is now in the chief executive's court, and
the game, much to Beijing's chagrin, is once again
democracy.
Kent Ewing is a
teacher and writer at Hong Kong International
School. He can be reached at
kewing@hkis.edu.hk
(Copyright 2005 Asia
Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing
.)
