Of course it was not. But no one believed there would be nothing to pay for a 79-day unauthorized blockade of major city streets. The bills are now coming due and attempts to collect are being made in several ways. One is calculated to erode yet another important measure of the political autonomy that Hong Kong thought it was being promised back at the beginning when Beijing began its Hong Kong take-over project. This demand for payment is also being presented in a way that confuses the issue, like the alternate definitions of autonomy and independence that have muddled the political reform debate because they mean one thing in Beijing and another here.

Only the price this time is being calculated in the variable definitions of educational autonomy and freedom from government interference in academic institutions. The clamor in the pro-Beijing press began almost as soon as the last streets were cleared in mid-December. But campaigning back on their own campus turf, students now seem on course to score a victory they failed to win on the streets, with some high-powered help from faculty, alumni, and past precedents.

The University of Hong Kong’s law school stood out during the 2013-15 political reform debate thanks to its public spirited professors and the events they sponsored. These included Occupy Central itself. Hence the law school’s place at the heart of this storm. But on July 30, the university’s 10 academic deans joined in issuing an unprecedented protest statement:

“We, deans of all ten faculties of the University of Hong Kong, believe that academic freedom and institutional autonomy, guaranteed by Basic Law Article 137, are the absolute bedrock of higher education in Hong Kong, as elsewhere. We cannot emphasize more strongly the importance of adhering to these principles in all that the University does, particularly at the highest decision-making level. We also call on all parties both within and outside the University to respect these principles. ”

FREEDOM FROM WHAT?

Loyalists chose to make their stand over the candidate for an administrative position at HKU, not the most riveting of political issues to be sure. Except that it entails the entire range of concerns surrounding Hong Kong’s political reform debate. Most everyone thought the deans were referring to the vitriolic loyalist media campaign underway since January to demonize Professor Johannes Chan Man-mun 【陳文敏】, the recently retired head of Hong Kong University’s law school.

He remains under consideration as the leading candidate for one of the university’s top administrative posts known as the Pro-Vice-Chancellor (Academic Staffing and Resources). But the decision, to be made by the university’s governing council, has been twice delayed amid ever more luridly-illustrated assertions that Prof. Chan’s qualifications have not been adequately vetted.

The specific case against him is his alleged lax oversight of law school professor and Occupy initiator Benny Tai Yiu-ting 【戴耀庭】, with particular reference to the handling of contributions used to fund the Occupy civil disobedience protest movement. These allegations were widely publicized after Tai’s e-mail was hacked and the contents leaked to the press last year during the street blockades.

The funds had originally been given anonymously at the request of the donor. They had been held in the account of the Democracy Development Network, a now largely inactive group set up years ago by Reverend Chu Yiu-ming 【朱耀明】 one of the three Occupy founders. The pro-Beijing media continues to demand a full accounting of where the money originated, who gave it, whether foreign force “black hands” were involved, and so on.

But loyalists, campaigning to derail Chan’s appointment, immediately countered the July 30 deans’ statement by asserting that it was he who had violated the principle of academic autonomy, not them. How? They have been repeating the charges for months: by his participation in the political reform consultation exercise last year (with a moderate proposal of his own); by allowing himself to be associated with Anson Chan and her HongKong2020 group, which was also active in its proposals; by being a member of the Civic Party (which he is not nor has he ever been); by turning a blind eye to Benny Tai and all the other goings on in the law school, as a consequence of which its academic rankings had declined. This particular ranking was based on the number of articles faculty members had published in international academic journals.

Turning the academic independence principle on its head in a massive publicity campaign is an effective political tactic since the general public pays little attention to elite-level university management. Professor Chan’s sympathies obviously lie with the democrats; loyalists are entitled to call him out as a political partisan. Fair enough. But are they entitled to prevent his appointment? Loyalists say yes. And they have the power to make it happen by reason of the Hong Kong government’s role in university management, even as they solemnly maintain that academic management should be non-partisan and absolutely neutral.

In fact, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying is the titular head or chancellor of all eight publicly-funded universities. This is an old custom dating back to British days and with it comes the practice of appointing a minority of members on each university’s council. The universities are autonomous and self-governing. But the councils are responsible for financial and human resources and cast deciding votes on major matters … of which Professor Chan’s prospective appointment is one.

HKU’s council currently has just over 20 members, give or take a few vacancies. But current members include six Chief Executive appointees plus the chairman. The ratio of external members to internal (faculty, non-faculty, students) is supposed to be maintained at roughly 2:1.

The lobbying against Prof. Chan has been intense. At first, earlier this year, there were only allegations of behind-the-scenes pressures being exerted by persons unnamed. Later it was right up front. Even the Beijing People’s Daily【人民日報，海外版】, in an article on August 3 called on him to step aside. So much for “one-country, two-systems” autonomy. But far more prominent has been a new member of the council, appointed in March by the Chief Executive and a man after his own heart.

Professor Arthur Li Kwok-cheung 【李國章】, one-time head of the Chinese University and before that dean of its law school, is now a member of Leung Chun-ying’s Executive Council cabinet. Nicknamed “King Arthur” for his imperious ways, he is famous for his disdainful putdowns of all things activist, especially students. He said during a recent TV interview that Occupy student leaders had only come out “to impress their girlfriends.”

After being appointed to the HKU council Li became point man for the campaign against Chan saying, among other things, that Professor Chan didn’t want the position; he just wanted to be a martyr. If he really cared about the university he would step aside due to the controversy he was causing. Chan had issued a statement saying he would not withdraw his name from consideration because to do so would affirm the challenge to academic autonomy.

Although he is not council chairman, Li is the most senior ranking member and it was after his arrival that the council twice deferred a decision on Chan’s appointment. Conservative council members decided the procedure must be changed. Chan’s post could not be filled until a more senior provost had been appointed to supervise him. There was even a suggestion to abolish the post altogether. The delaying tactics seemed set to continue indefinitely in an apparent attempt to force Chan to withdraw his name from consideration.

BREAKING THE SEIGE

So open an attempt at this kind of direct political interference is rare. The only comparable case occurred in 2000 when Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa’s administration targeted HKU pollster Robert Chung Ting-yiu 【鍾庭耀】.  The academic community rallied to his defense and Chung survived. Faculty, students, and alumni have similarly rallied to Chan’s defense with full-page newspaper ads, petitions, commentaries, and countless protest statements of which the July 30 deans’ declaration was only the most authoritative.

Student activists provided a distraction by barging uninvited into the July 28 council meeting, providing more grist for Arthur Li’s mill. But then something happened, which presumably will come to be more fully known in due course. The net result, however, is that Chan’s appointment will not be delayed indefinitely after all because someone has made a decision to try and bring this aspect of the controversy to a close.

It was announced after the council’s August 25 meeting that a new provost could not be found in good time; the file on Chan’s handling of Tai’s funds has been closed with the mildest of reminders to Chan about his negligence in not disclosing the origin of some funds Tai had turned over for the law school’s use; and the committee will vote on Chan’s appointment at the next, September, meeting!

It’s not over yet. The pro-Beijing media in recent days has opened a whole new series of accusations about “shocking” new evidence of black-hand contributions to Benny Tai’s Occupy. A full audit of all accounts must therefore be made ahead of the decision on Professor Chan. But the council pressures that were being exerted to try and force Chan’s voluntary withdrawal have failed and have themselves been withdrawn.

Whether dithering council members can bring themselves to approve his appointment in the face of continuing loyalist antipathy remains to be seen. Loyalists are speculating that his appointment will be voted down.

Had Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying not appointed Arthur Li to HKU’s council, and had Li not acted as a battering ram intent on overturning the university’s original nomination of Chan, this issue would never have escalated into so clear a case of political interference.

As for the students, they now have a new cause. They’ve begun a campaign to reform university management. Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, they say, should not double as chancellor of the universities and he should not be able to appoint so many members to the governing councils. This custom is a holdover from British days, used by the colonial government to control the universities. The students say that since Beijing has granted Hong Kong a high degree of autonomy, the Chief Executive has no need for such extensive powers.

The post A Win for Academic Autonomy at HKU? appeared first on The Nanfang.

During all the hours of discussion and all the miles that were travelled between Hong Kong and Beijing and Hong Kong and Shenzhen, someone must have wanted to discuss with Beijing officials their ideas about the end game.  Yet Hong Kongers seemed content to keep asking for promises and Beijing was happy to give them.  But no one seemed inclined to demand or provide definitions as to just what was being promised.   If the long-term future was ever a subject for discussion, it almost never entered the debate.  And for sure, Beijing never said a word, for public consumption, to indicate where they thought the universal suffrage bandwagon was headed.

Now, finally, some Hong Kongers are beginning to identify the problem, explaining it in terms of the lessons learned from last year’s experience when demonstrators occupied city streets for 79 days.  They were protesting Beijing’s refusal to acknowledge local demands for anything other than the fixed formula Beijing had decreed for Hong Kong’s first universal suffrage election in 2017.  Now they are contemplating the reasons for Beijing’s adamant refusal and concluding that Beijing has no intention of ever allowing Western-style elections to be introduced here.

For their part, Beijing and the Hong Kong government are now laying on more mainland-style plans.  These call for a post-2014, post-Occupy Hong Kong youth policy: economic benefits and patriotic inducements like more jobs, more cross-border opportunities, more chances for young people to identify with President Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” sequence.  And especially no more political reform debates. Beijing is hoping to solve this problem during the coming election cycle when pro-Beijing candidates are tasked with winning enough seats to overturn democrats’ June 18 veto of Beijing’s election plan.

But before wasting too much time on their so-called de-politicized youth outreach programs, Beijing and the Hong Kong government should consult Hong Kong’s younger generation pro-democracy activists because they have begun talking along different lines entirely.

WHAT ARE THEY THINKING?

In one way, the new outlook dovetails nicely with Beijing’s absolute refusal either to withdraw last year’s restrictive election design or allow modifications.  The new thinking is: so be it.  Tedious tinkering with incremental electoral reform proposals – moderation and compromise – don’t touch the far more basic long term issues that should concern everyone worried about Hong Kong’s political future.  And should have been of concern to everyone all along.

Beijing officials and local loyalists spent most of the past two years talking up Hong Kong’s Basic Law, promulgated by Beijing in 1990 to serve as Hong Kong’s constitution during its first 50 years after returning to Chinese rule (1997-2047).  “Study the Basic Law,” has been the constant refrain.  Master the Basic Law and all will become clear, like especially why Beijing insisted on its sovereign right to make the political reform decision regardless of Hong Kong’s demands.

The younger generation has taken the injunction to heart and now sees where the crux of the problem lies: in the Basic Law itself.  The new watchwords: amend it!

One of the first such presentations has recently come from none other than Hong Kong’s most politically precocious teenager, Joshua Wong Chi-fung 【黃之鋒】.   As a secondary school student in 2011-12, he initiated the successful campaign of resistance against a new compulsory patriotic political study curriculum for all Hong Kong students.  He then held his own among the older college student leaders of last year’s Umbrella/Occupy protest movement.  Now 18 and a college student himself, Wong has moved on to the larger cause of preparing Hong Kong for a future that that the youngsters like to say belongs to them.

He spelled out some ideas in a recent Ming Pao Daily opinion piece, “The Democracy Movement’s Next Phase”, published on August 2.  The ideas are those that could be seen emerging during the universal suffrage protest movement.  Campaigners were acting out the beliefs that had sustained the movement since its inception in the 1980s.  But the assumption then, in the 1980s, had been that when the Basic Law promised “eventual” universal suffrage, the promise would allow Western-style free-choice elections.

Wong mentioned the letter that Chinese leader Zhao Ziyang 【趙紫陽】wrote to local students in May 1984.  It was in response to one the University of Hong Kong Students Union had sent to him, asking about the future of democratic election s here.  Premier Zhao had written back assuring them that democratic rule would be allowed in Hong Kong.*

That hope had sustained Hong Kong’s democracy movement for 30 years, even as the promise had been pushed back by Beijing from one election cycle to the next, beginning in 1988 (and Zhao himself fell from power in 1989).   A successor generation now inheriting the movement from its elders can see that it is leading nowhere.  The elders had assumed they were working to reunite with a democratizing China.  Now everyone can see – most clearly from the recent political reform episode – that cross-border pressures to integrate are growing but China itself shows no signs of democratizing or allowing democratic rule to take root in Hong Kong.

Hence the new idea, springing from all those injunctions to study the Basic Law, that its ambiguities should indeed be studied.  They should also be debated, clarified, and understood for the possibilities and pitfalls they contain.  The problematic points can be amended with the aim of permitting the kind of genuine autonomy that Hong Kong originally thought had been promised.  But time is passing and there is none to waste.  All of this should be done well in advance of the expiry of Hong Kong’s 50-year Basic Law guarantee in 2047.

During the coming decade or so, suggested Wong, a common forward-looking program on the Basic Law’s basic points of contention should be drafted and the public must be drawn into the effort through a series of referendums and elections that can prepare the ground for Basic Law amendments.  But however the struggle unfolds, if Hong Kong is not willing to lose its prized judicial independence and freedom of political expression, then the democracy movement must not abandon the cause of autonomy.

His argument adds perspective to the “local-ist” counter-current that has formed recently within Hong Kong’s democracy movement and has begun to take hold among the student generation as well.  This is the trend that evokes tense charges of “independence” from Beijing after every skirmish.  The trend has also led to some basic disagreements between younger and older democracy movement veterans over the symbols and ceremonies that commemorate the Hong Kong movement’s past struggles and present identity.  But the basic need to reaffirm the promise of autonomy has grown as the reality recedes.

BEIJING’S LONG-TERM VISION

That Beijing calls autonomy independence is, of course, just what Joshua Wong is referring to when he says a rectification of names is in order. If Beijing means one thing and Hong Kong another, the words need to be reconciled.  But for that to happen Hong Kong must demand definitions and Beijing must stop speaking in riddles created by its communist party rhetoric.

Which leads to the one major problem with Wong’s presentation.  He writes that Beijing has changed its meaning of “one-country, two-systems” and changed the meaning of autonomy underlying the two-systems promise.

Far more likely is that Beijing has not changed.   Probably Hong Kong (and everyone else) simply misunderstood what Beijing meant and Beijing was happy to let the misunderstanding stand uncorrected because it was in everyone’s interest not to clarify. Probably Hong Kong (and everyone else) simply misunderstood what Beijing meant and Beijing was happy to let the misunderstanding stand uncorrected because it was in everyone’s interest not to clarify.  Hong Kong’s smooth transition back to Chinese rule was at stake.  So was Britain’s honor.  And Beijing’s international reputation.  And Hong Kong’s peace of mind.

People have been arguing this issue back and forth for years, but it was revived last year when Beijing issued it’s “White Paper on the Practice of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ Policy in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region” (June 10, 2014). **   This document was part of the then intensifying effort to remind Hong Kongers that it was their duty to respect Beijing’s sovereignty and consequently its right to issue election reform decrees.  Many here said the White Paper changed the rules.  So does Joshua Wong.

The argument has yet to be concluded one way or the other.  But in contemplating the question about Beijing’s original promises, people have often quoted then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping’s commentaries on the Basic Law while it was being drafted in the 1980s.  Especially, people like to recall Deng’s expansive promises about the 50-year promise for one-country-two-systems being extended for another 50 year stretch after 2047, and maybe even another 50 years after that.

Re-reading one of the main speeches (Deng Xiaoping talking to members of the Basic Law Drafting Committee on April 16, 1987) it should have been a stretch even then to conclude that what he had in mind for Hong Kong was the same sort of idealized Western-style democracy that Hong Kong students thought Premier Zhao was promising in his friendly 1984 exchange with them.

Deng thought the committee was doing great work and later called the final result a “creative masterpiece”  –  no doubt because it was just what he wanted.  In April 1987, he reminded drafters that Hong Kong’s post-1997 system of government should not be a Western copy.  It should not have the separation of three powers –  executive, legislative, and judicial.  Nor should it have a British or American parliamentary system with two-house representation.  But people should not call the results democratic or not depending on the presence or absence of those features.

China, by contrast, had “socialist democracy,” a unicameral legislature, the National People’s Congress, which best conforms to Chinese realities and avoids much wrangling.

“Would it be good for Hong Kong to hold general elections?  I don’t think so,” he said.  Hong Kong affairs needed to be administered by Hong Kong people but it wouldn’t do for them to be elected by a general ballot because such people should be “patriotic” and patriotic candidates would not be the guaranteed winners of open free-style elections in Hong Kong.

He also said that the anchor for Hong Kong’s new two-systems arrangement was the mainland’s communist party-run system.   And that, he emphasized, would not – must not change.  He said Beijing would allow Hong Kongers to attack the Chinese Communist Party verbally.  But if they should try to convert words into action and try to turn Hong Kong into a base opposing the mainland system under the pretext of democratisation, that would not be allowed.

So probably Beijing has not backtracked on its Hong Kong policy.  But the two-systems arrangement also allows enough leeway for Hong Kongers to push the boundaries and make of it what they can.  That should include demanding the definitions that will allow them to keep the system with all its rights and freedoms safe and separate post-2047.

The post Hong Kong Shouldn’t Be Surprised: Deng Xiaoping Spelled Out Limits of City’s Autonomy Long Ago appeared first on The Nanfang.

The two men were given their walking papers apparently without much prior notice and minus the usual courtesies, but as they drove off into unexpected early retirement, the implications especially of the reshuffle at the Home Affairs Bureau began to reverberate.  In light of political events just passed and those to come, the consequences are likely to lead all the way from here to the District Councils election this coming November, the Legislative Council election a year from now, and the Chief Executive election/selection in 2017.

All things considered, CY Leung has taken a real gamble with the Home Affairs appointments and he may have just scuttled his chances for the second term he has hinted broadly that he wants.  But there is much ground to cover on the way to that result and CY’s gamble might actually pay off.  He is, after all, the man who elbowed his way into the 2012 Chief Executive selection race when no one thought he had a chance because Beijing officials had already settled on someone else to fill the post.

TSANG vs LAU

Key to the risk Leung has taken are the two men moving in and out as head of the Home Affairs Bureau and the changing nature of Hong Kong political life they represent.  Both are pro-Beijing loyalists to a fault.  But one can boast a life-long commitment,  is party-line through and through, and accustomed to the old ways when Hong Kong’s patriotic community, as it then liked to call itself, was honored with appointments to the people’s congress delegation of neighboring Guangdong province.  Mainstream colonial Hong Kong kept the community in its place and the general public ignored them one and all.

This is Tsang Tak-sing, now 66, who won fame within the patriotic community during his student days when he was sentenced to two years in prison.  His crime: handing out seditious anti-British leaflets during the late 1960s when China’s Cultural Revolution crossed the border briefly and spilled over into Hong Kong.  His pamphleteering skills were put to good use in a youthful memoir, “Sunrise Over Stanley Prison,” that circulated for years among admirers after his release.  He became a journalist, was hired by the pro-Beijing Ta Kung Pao newspaper, and rose rapidly to become its chief editor in 1988.

Lau Kong-wah, now 58, began his political career as a pro-democracy activist, joining the movement when it began in the 1980s, ahead of the return to Chinese rule.  He was a member of United Democrats, forerunner of today’s Democratic Party.   So Lau was there at the start, when activists began making the transition, trying to learn how to be politicians and contest elections.  These the British finally introduced here, first at the district level in the 1980s (when today’s District Councils were called District Boards), and in 1991 for a minority of Legislative Councilors.  But then something happened.

Lau withdrew from United Democrats in the early 1990s, lost two elections to then firebrand democrat Emily Lau Wai-hing 【劉慧卿】, and decided to try his luck elsewhere, formally switching sides in the late 1990s.  He had already begun community organizing work around his Shatin home base in the New Territories and set up his own group, Civil Force 【公民力量】, in 1993.   Civil Force seems to have been well rewarded by his new friends.  The group allied with the main pro-Beijing political party, Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), after he joined in the late 1990s.  Lau went on to become one of its vice-chairmen and never looked back, nor did he miss a chance to thumb his nose at the colleagues he left behind on the campaign trail.

Civil Force still contests elections as a separate group and does not declare its DAB affiliation on campaign fliers.  But Shatin constituents no longer care whether Civil Force candidates are democrats or not so pervasive and reliable are the neighborhood services the group’s members are providing –  friends in need for sure and they dominate the Shatin District Council as a result.  In fact, the DAB and its allies now have majorities on all 18 of Hong Kong’s District Councils where voters reciprocate in return for the same kind of well-funded community outreach efforts.

WHY HOME AFFAIRS?

Because community organization and District Council management are part of the Home Affairs Bureau’s multi-task portfolio, with projects to approve and funds to allocate.  The Bureau is also responsible for youth work and civic education as well as sports, entertainment, and culture.   The more pertinent question is why Tsang Tak-sing was placed at the helm there in the first place since he is from the party-managed people’s congress tradition.  Western-style electioneering and community outreach have never featured on his resume.

His appointment was reportedly made at Beijing’s behest and suggests just how out-of-sync its effort to impose mainland ways can be.  Tsang took up the post on July 1, 2007, when Beijing was still working to reverse the impact of Hong Kong’s unexpected 2003 rebellion against Beijing’s demand for national security legislation.  It was in official minds that a tried-and-true “traditional” loyalist should be placed in charge of such work.

Except that Tsang Tak-sing’s only real qualification was his political loyalty, a view that he himself helped reinforce.  He apparently felt ill-suited for the assignment and made no secret of his intention to serve for one term (2007-12) only.  He also did not hide his sense of resignation when there seemed no one else to succeed him in 2012.  It was a duty performed with no apparent enthusiasm.  His replacement thus makes perfect sense:  an active player experienced on the local election scene, a beneficiary of the pro-Beijing camp’s grassroots success, and someone well-versed in its strategy and tactics for winning elections.

The timing is also right:  a change of leadership ahead of the coming election cycle when Hong Kong’s all-important political way forward hinges on the outcome.  Pro-Beijing forces have already declared their one and only aim:  win enough seats to guarantee a two-thirds Legislative Council majority.  This is necessary to pass Beijing’s design for the 2017 Chief Executive universal suffrage election that pro-democracy legislators have just vetoed.  Clear victories four months from now in the District Councils election would boost morale and momentum, a first step up the ladder, with campaigning due to begin in earnest after the summer recess. If all that could come to pass, Leung’s thinly veiled desire for a second term could easily become reality.If all that could come to pass, Leung’s thinly veiled desire for a second term could easily become reality.

BUT WHY INSULT A LOYAL ALLY?

Herein lies the risk that CY Leung has taken by showing Tsang Tak-sing the door in so unceremonious a fashion.  Leung himself came out to make the brief announcement, damning with faint praise, so it cannot be blamed on anyone else.  An unnamed administration “source” made it worse with an online explanation: Beijing and Leung were not satisfied with Tsang’s performance and were holding him responsible for inadequate youth work seen as a factor underlying the Occupy protest movement last year.

The source was subsequently outed: a pro-CY Leung website and Facebook page called “Speak Out HK.”  Readers also thought they could identify the culprit, none other than Democratic Party defector and now CY’s information coordinator Andrew Fung Wai-kwong【馮煒光】.

Fellow loyalists sprang instantly to Tsang’s defense.   Insult one of us and insult us all they are saying.  His appointment in 2007 was seen as a breakthrough for “traditional leftists,” as they took to calling themselves in the early 2000s, when there was much grumbling about being passed over for plum posts that were all going to latter-day patriots – holdovers from the colonial past.

Tsang is so loyal a team player, said sympathizers, that if someone wanted him to leave, all anyone had to do was say the word and he would be gone.  Instead, Tsang was the last to know.  Shabby treatment indeed for a lifetime spent in devotion to the Motherland.  Tsang’s achievement, editorialized his old paper, lies in his patriotism not his position as bureau chief.   Former colleague Li Yi, now known for his pro-democracy commentaries in Apple Daily, returned to his roots with a sympathetic defense of Tsang.

But no one has been more outspoken than his elder brother Jasper Tsang Yok-sing 【曾鈺成】.  In his case, too, loyalist credentials extend back to student days and family as well.  Additionally, he was founding chairman of the DAB in the 1990s, is currently a DAB Legislative Councilor, and presides as president over the Legislative Council.  It is generally assumed but never openly said that the Tsang brothers are not only pillars of the traditional patriotic establishment but members as well of Hong Kong’s as yet unacknowledged underground communist party branch.

Initially, Jasper Tsang said he was surprised at the news and knew for certain his brother had not initiated the move.  Later he wrote and posted an article about leadership qualities, saying it was just a thought piece, but denouncing arrogance and egotism.  Then he gave a radio interview blasting the “stupid” and “pig-like” source who had put it about that Tsang Tak-sing was derelict in his duties and somehow responsible for Occupy (July 27:  South China Morning Post, Standard, Ming Pao).

Nor did the pushback end with a few commentaries and Facebook posts.  As it happened, a large DAB delegation was just then paying a visit to Beijing to try and explain how they lost the political reform vote on June 18.   The official in charge of Hong Kong, Zhang Dejiang 【張德江】 admonished them to win a two-thirds majority in the coming 2016 Legislative Council election.   But the group also returned with a not-so-subtle message for CY.

The DAB’s new chair, Starry Lee Wai-king, announced that Beijing had not made up its mind about Leung’s second term and any speculation to that effect was premature.  He himself had fueled the speculation after his own trip north a few weeks ago when he said Beijing leaders had praised his work, although they seem not to have wanted to go on the record because there was no subsequent official statement to that effect.  Lee also made a point of saying that Leung’s administration would suffer if officials were worried about losing their jobs in more sudden reshuffles.

So what might Leung have been thinking when he set this damaging train of events in motion?  Calculating and opportunistic a politician that he is, the Home Affairs change makes perfect sense.  But why antagonize a key sector of the pro-government coalition that has been nurtured by Beijing since 1949 and whose enthusiasm CY will need if he wants a second term?  He cannot have failed to anticipate the impact Tsang Tak-sing’s summary dismissal would provoke.

No doubt he was taking the patriotic community for granted —  calculating that they can be counted on to obey Beijing’s command no matter what and Beijing will anoint him for a second term no matter what —  if only his team can orchestrate victories in the coming elections.

He might also have thought to score a few points among democrats and any remaining colonial types since Tsang Tak-sing is no longer the friendly young journalist everyone wanted to meet in the 1970s.  By the 1980s he was already affecting the style of a humorless ideologue who did not suffer “dissent” lightly, as if taking the polemical headlines of his newspaper too much to heart.   This trait was epitomized in his public mockery of former chief secretary Anson Chan during a Legislative Council debate soon after he was appointed bureau chief in 2007.   He addressed her as a “sudden democrat” who couldn’t distinguish between working for the people’s benefit and for that of colonial officials.

But any points won for embarrassing Tsang will be outweighed many times over by the negatives registered from appointing Lau Kong-wah to replace him.  Using the likes of Lau and Andrew Feng in such provocative roles will only reinforce the antagonism Leung himself generates among pan-democrats.   With Lau in particular, CY may inadvertently succeed in doing what they have never been able to accomplish on their own:  unite around a common cause to defeat a common adversary.  Denying him a second term might be just the cause that can do it.

The post CY Leung May Have Just Sealed His Own Fate appeared first on The Nanfang.

But if Beijing is so adamant that nothing but 8.31 will do as the design for Hong Kong’s first Chief Executive election via universal suffrage, then how come pro-Beijing tea-table pundits find discussion of possible ways around 8.31 so irresistible?  Is it just the challenge of the search that beckons, or too much time on their hands, or the knowledge that sooner or later a way out of Hong Kong’s political predicament must be found? 

Common sense, they are saying, decrees that the current stalemate cannot continue indefinitely.  The first universal suffrage election for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive was to have been held in 2017 if a two-thirds majority of Legislative Councilors approved Beijing’s restrictive format. 

The decision would then have served as the precedent for all elections to come, said Chinese officials shortly before the Legislative Council veto.   But even if the existing way of Election Committee selection prevails for the coming 2017-2022 term, no one seems to be assuming stagnation beyond.  Yet Beijing is evidently still thinking in terms of 8.31 as the precedent.  Solutions must therefore be found.

All who know and accept Beijing’s way of governing agree that political “face” – shorthand for the sovereign right to rule – is an unchallengeable absolute.   That means everyone must recognize and respect the constitutional authority bestowed on the central government and the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) by the Basic Law.

The best solution, say loyalists, would be defeat for enough pro-democracy candidates in the coming 2016 Legislative Council election to deprive them of their one-third veto-proof minority.  Or they might undergo a mass conversion to Beijing’s one-true-way.

But the tea-table talk is not about such uncomplicated solutions.  It’s about the challenge of finding ways to accommodate both Beijing and Hong Kong’s pro-democracy partisans all at the same time. 

In these hypothetical scenarios, the 8.31 decision issued by the NPCSC must remain sacrosanct.  Still, that doesn’t mean its underpinnings and inner workings cannot ever be rearranged and adjusted.  Surely no responsible government would allow itself to be bound and gagged in that way for years on end.  The task, therefore, is to retain the decision while working on adjustments within.

The demands of Hong Kong’s younger generation for changes in Article 45 of the Basic Law to permit public nomination – or direct public participation in the nominating process – need not be summarily dismissed in these scenarios.  The demands may not be welcome in Beijing.  But they add a useful dimension to the campaign for democratic elections here that the Hong Kong public needs to consider before it can make an informed decision one way or the other. 

Unlike college students who have been the chief drivers of the campaign for civic nominations, the general public is not so well schooled in the various institutional details that can make an election more or less democratic.  How candidates are nominated and who does the nominating can make all the difference between an open free-choice election and its mainland-style communist-party-managed counterpart.  

The Hong Kong government’s promotion campaign for 8.31 deliberately exploited public ignorance on this point by assuming that the average voter didn’t care very much about how candidates were nominated.

But unlike the younger generation of democracy partisans, the old-time loyalists would not contemplate a solution without 8.31.  Instead, among the variables to ponder, the Election Committee is an obvious target.  Loyalists can appreciate the contradiction:  Beijing is demanding unqualified deference and respect for 8.31; but 8.31 decrees use of an existing committee system that generates neither deference nor respect.  Deference is one thing; blind obedience something else.

According to 8.31, the nomination of Beijing-approved candidates would be endorsed by the existing Chief Executive Election Committee renamed the Nominating Committee.  Yet this august body has been routinely mocked for years as a collection of sinecure positions for local pro-Beijing and pro-business elites whose primary qualification is their conservative acceptance of the status quo.

Democrats actually bear a measure of responsibility for this committee because they have always essentially thrown up their hands in defeat, confounded by its complexity …  too difficult to redesign, they said, which is one reason why civic nominations seemed an easier alternative during the past two years of campaigning for electoral reform.  

Otherwise, the main moderate suggestions for changes in the committee itself were either cosmetic or redundant.  Like adding District Councilors to the 1,200-member committee.  This would only reinforce its loyalist-conservative bias since loyalists and conservatives hold majorities on all 18 District Councils for reasons of funding, underlying organization, and government management that democrats are now powerless to reverse. 

But loyalists also appreciate the possibilities provided by the vaguely-worded and infinitely malleable Basic Law.  Article 45 says only that nomination of candidates for universal suffrage Chief Executive elections should be done by a “broadly representative nominating committee.”  Article 45 does not specify that only the existing committee will do.  Nor does Article 45 define “broadly representative.”

Charles Mok Nai-kwong 【莫乃光】represents the Information Technology sector, one of the Functional Constituencies that help create the committee.  He is one of the few “small sector” democrats representing these constituencies but all of those few would be happy to see a systemic overhaul.  So perhaps Mok could organize his IT constituents to provide some computer-generated models of broad-based representation.  These should be able to simulate more democratic alternatives that Beijing and the Hong Kong public could use for reference and creative application.

Charles Mok has generally aligned himself with the moderate wing of the pro-democracy camp.  But they are now faced with some hardline choices emanating on an almost daily basis from official sources.  The moderates are being challenged to break with their “radical” colleagues, publically profess adherence to the Basic Law, and redefine their core values to disavow international norms in deference to Hong Kong’s special characteristics.  Bitter medicine indeed, and not likely to be swallowed any time soon.  Much better to drink tea with the old-timers and undertake the tedious task of designing some plausible solutions.

The post Could Beijing Change It’s Mind on Hong Kong Democracy? appeared first on The Nanfang.

Calculated in the cold light of day, pro-democracy Legislative Councilors – 27 in all plus one independent – did an uncharacteristically audacious thing when they voted on June 18 to defeat the government’s electoral reform bill for the 2017 Chief Executive election. They defied Beijing’s August 31, 2014 ultimatum on its design and defied moderate instincts from across the political spectrum, both local and international, that counseled compromise in the face of Beijing’s sovereign political authority. Ultimately, they even defied public opinion among Hong Kongers themselves who succumbed to those same instincts and turned against the veto by a fairly large margin in the days just before the June 18 vote. The main tracking poll, conducted by the University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Program, ended with 47 per cent in favor of approving Beijing’s restrictive format and 38 per cent against.

Much history lies behind those contradictory results, a history that explains both the determination to hold the line against a mainland-designed electoral reform package and the failure of the general public to respond in kind. Pan-dems’ determination and the public’s failure to reciprocate is a perfect reflection of the democracy movement’s mixed progress to date. It also indicates the work yet to be done if democratic aspirations are ever to be realized here.

Everyone has been learning the hard way: by trial and error. It’s clear now that pan-dems (and many others as well) misunderstood Hong Kong’s new post-colonial Basic Law constitution.It’s clear now that pan-dems (and many others as well) misunderstood Hong Kong’s new post-colonial Basic Law constitution. They just assumed its promise of “universal suffrage” meant Western-style free-choice elections. But Beijing also misunderstood. It initially accepted conventional colonial wisdom about Hong Kongers being a strange type of people devoid of all interest in politics. Beijing consequently underestimated the demand for “real” elections. Beijing also compounded those mistakes by surrounding itself exclusively with “safe” members of Hong Kong’s conservative pro-business and pro-Beijing elites.

Both sides then learned more in 2010 when Democratic Party chairman Albert Ho Chun-yan 【何俊仁】, negotiating for all pan-dems, agreed to compromise on a relatively minor Legislative Council (Legco) reform measure. His compromise provoked a rebellion within his own ranks, accentuating the division between pro-democracy radicals (so-called) and moderates. His compromise also cost his party many votes in the subsequent 2012 Legco election as the “radicals” set out to teach him a lesson.

Now at least everyone has a clearer understanding. Beijing knows it has a full-blown democracy movement on its hands and pan-dems are under no illusions as to what Beijing means by “universal suffrage” (or at least what it doesn’t mean).

The next big step for pro-democracy partisans, assuming they remain determined, is to convey for wider public consumption what they have learned by trial and error but have so far failed to articulate clearly even among all their own adherents: Beijing is already presiding over a mainland-based “universal suffrage” regime.

The plans for Hong Kong in 2010 and in 2017 (there was an aborted 2005 reform plan as well) were all based on the same mainland-style principles and designs. These guarantee “safe” results via communist party-vetted candidates, indirect elections, and party-managed procedures all up and down the line from the basic level upwards throughout the country.

Too many moderates even among pan-dems themselves, much less the wider voting public, are still thinking in terms of a gradual step-by-step evolution toward something like Western free-style democracy. But Beijing already has its own model so if Hong Kong doesn’t want a similar mainland-style party-managed electoral system, then many more Hong Kongers need to be clear about the institutional underpinnings that will make all the difference.

As it is, the general public does not know what is at stake because the details are not being explained in that light. This lapse is being reinforced from two directions: both from within by moderate pan-dems themselves, and from the hardline administration of paramount leader Xi Jinping.

RONNY TONG UPSTAGES ALBERT HO

Ronny Tong Ka-wah 【湯家驊】epitomizes the dangers from within – perhaps. Since he has yet to articulate the long-term institutional and political implications of the various options he has championed, it’s not clear whether he worries about them or not. Maybe he just doesn’t think they’re important enough to bother trying to explain.

But he does now about self-promotion and how to stage a tearful press conference for maximum effect. This he did on June 22, when he announced his long-threatened decision to quit the Civic Party. Tong was one of its founding members, in 2006, but he has continued to fulminate since the 2010 reform controversy about what he sees as the party’s radical drift. He says he wanted the party to become a moderate bridge builder between Beijing and Hong Kong and he can no longer live with its strong adversarial stand on many issues.

He did keep his promise to vote with the party against the government’s electoral reform bill on June 18. But he did so with ill-concealed bad grace blaming his fellow democrats as much as Beijing for the failure to reach an accommodation. He alone among pro-democracy legislators refused to endorse last year’s Occupy street blockade protest against Beijing’s restrictive August 31, 2014 reform decision. He also scoffed at the focus on public opinion ahead of the June 18 vote, as though what the public thinks about universal suffrage reform is of no consequence. Tong comes across as being more like an old-style Chinese intellectual reformer than a modern-day democratic politician. But there are many like him.

He recently formed his own group, a think-tank with several other like-minded moderate academics and professionals. They call it Path of Democracy 【民主思路】and plan to do pertinent research aimed at mending the rift between radical and moderate political perspectives. Hong Kong, he says, must learn how to compromise with the central government, must learn the value of giving and taking, and so on.

Nevertheless, Ronny Tong still has political ambitions and is planning to turn them against fellow pan-democrats to the limited extent he can. In a surprise move, he also resigned from his Legislative Council seat saying that since he had been elected as a Civic Party member and was no more, he owed it to his constituents to stand down. Except that by doing so he is precipitating a by-election that seems calculated to preempt Albert Ho’s plan to do the same thing albeit for a different purpose.

Perhaps because of the disruptions his 2010 compromise caused, Albert Ho became a staunch supporter of the veto vote. He declared some months ago that he aimed to resign his Legco seat in protest against the government’s bill. His idea was to precipitate a by-election campaign that would focus specifically on the electoral reform issue.

Ronny Tong has now preempted that idea and turned it to his own designs. He will be promoting a moderate young Civic Party protégé to contest the by-election and inherit the seat, assuming some irritated radical doesn’t decide to contest as well to try and teach Ronny Tong a lesson. That would cede the seat to a loyalist candidate as has happened many times before in the factional contests among pan-dems. Tong is also thinking about sponsoring like-minded moderate candidates to run in the 2016 Legislative Council election. Albert Ho meanwhile has abandoned his plan to resign in protest against Beijing’s restrictive reform demands.

So it looks like business as usual. Of the two big uncertainties that need to be resolved if Hong Kong’s quest for something other than a mainland-style election system has any chance of succeeding, one is already on shaky ground.

A unified pan-democratic camp would banish the wasteful habit of factional infighting, the better to convince Beijing – the other big uncertainty – that a unitary form of party-managed political rule is not a good fit for Hong Kong. Not surprising then that Beijing, for now, sees no way but its way on the road ahead.

BEIJING’S RESPONSE

The line that was repeated constantly by officials ahead of the June 18 vote will become the loyalist theme song for all the campaigns to come. Make no mistake, said Zhang Xiaoming 【張曉明】, Beijing’s top representative here. We have kept our part of the bargain, it’s the democrats who are responsible for depriving Hong Kongers of the precious right to elect their Chief Executive by universal suffrage. Zhang said the 28 Legislative Councilors who voted against the government’s bill would be forever blamed. But there was a silver lining. The two-year debate had helped inform the public about the limits of Hong Kong’s autonomy and about the central government’s overriding authority. He left it to others to spell out yet again what that means.

Andrew Fung Wai-kwong 【馮煒光】was at one time a Democratic Party moderate, but shocked everyone a few years ago when he did a 180-degree turn. Fung is now information coordinator for Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying. It is Beijing, he wrote, that has the ultimate authority, the right to appoint Chief Executives and all principal officials. In other words, since according to the Basic Law Hong Kong’s Chief Executive is appointed by Beijing, and since that right is not just formal but substantive, so the popular universal suffrage vote cannot proceed on its own as an autonomous exercise.

Not all the University of Hong Kong’s law school professors are politically suspect pro-democracy sympathizers. Albert Chen Hung-yee 【陳弘毅】is one of the others and is known for his precise humorless renditions of Basic Law chapter and verse.

Responding to the students’ argument that Beijing had exceeded its authority by spelling out in such detail how the 2017 Chief Executive election must be conducted (in the August 31, 2014 decision), Chen said essentially that Beijing was elaborating the rules to its own advantage as needed. He said it “has become a constitutional convention” for the National People’s Congress Standing Committee to say more rather than less and to issue conditions for election methods.

He also said it was wrong for pan-dems to sacrifice the rights of millions of voters since he thinks those voters are not too concerned about how the candidates are nominated. He criticized pan-democrats for not accepting that people like them, who he says work against the central government, cannot be nominated for Chief Executive. He also criticized them for not wanting a pro-establishment candidate to win via universal suffrage and thereby to receive a popular mandate.

There is no such thing as a false popular mandate or fake legitimacy, he was quoted as saying, because a vote is a vote however the nomination is conducted. He also said he hoped the by-election Ronny Tong’s resignation necessitated would be a good test of the public’s mood. If a moderate or pro-establishment candidate wins the seat, Chen thinks it would signal a shift among voters … in a constituency where pan-democrats have long enjoyed the advantage.

The post Hong Kong’s Democrats Face A Moderate Backlash After Reform Veto appeared first on The Nanfang.

The Hong Kong government’s election reform bill, which adhered closely to that decision, needed a two-thirds majority in the 70-seat Legislative Council to pass. With 28 legislators voting against and a majority of their pro-government colleagues walking out in protest, the bill went down to defeat. All 27 pro-democracy legislators voted against. Only one pro-establishment legislators joined them. It was a surprisingly fast and uncomplicated end to a convoluted and tumultuous a two-year controversy. The government tabled its Chief Executive election reform bill only yesterday, on June 17. Debate was expected to drag on for three days but legislators had ended it in by mid-day on July 18.

Ironically, public opinion swung sharply in favor of the government’s bill just before the vote. The most reliable three universities tracking poll, being conducted by the University of Hong Kong’s Public Opinion Program, recorded 47 percent in favor of the bill versus 38 percent against. Those lobbying to defeat the bill had obviously done a good job of holding their legislators to account. But opponents did not do all they could have done to sharpen their arguments for the sake of those members of the general public “waiting to be convinced”, meaning those who did not like the government’s electoral reform proposal but could see no other option but to accept it.

LAST-MINUTE TEMPTATIONS

The reason everyone was expecting a climb-down was because it had happened before, and because all the powers that be were trying so hard to make it happen again right up until the very end. Especially, memories of the past 2010 experience loomed large. In 2010, just like now, pro-democracy activists had wrung pledges from all like-minded (called pan-dems for short) legislators to hold the line on a minor electoral reform bill. It concerned the addition of 10 more seats to make a total of 70 in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. But then Beijing gave a bit at the very last minute and Democratic Party leaders agreed. They had been entrusted by a coalition of pan-dem parties to speak for all but the 2010 deal was cut at the last minute without anyone ever explaining the implications or provenance of the indirect mainland-style electoral model the government’s 2010 proposal was based on.

Had that vow to veto held, accompanied by the explanations needed to back it up, Beijing would have learned an early lesson on the limits of its ability to impose mainland-style party-managed electoral designs here. But neither Beijing nor the Hong Kong government needed to take that lesson from the 2010 experience because it was never clearly articulated in that way. Hence Beijing carried on as before and issued its restrictive August 31, 2014 ultimatum.

It was this ultimatum that sparked the Umbrella/Occupy protest movement last fall and kept major city streets here blockaded for 79 days. But the Hong Kong government then proceeded as though Occupy had never occurred. The government also ignored all the proposals (except those from loyalist and conservative parties) that emerged during year-long community consultation exercises in 2013-14. Accordingly, voters would only have been able to tick the boxes beside one of two or three names approved by Beijing and endorsed by the conservative 1,200 member designed-for-purpose Hong Kong Nominating Committee. The result would have been a mainland-style managed election designed to provide popular approval and legitimacy for communist party-designated candidates.

Only this time, in the wake of Occupy and thanks to all those consultation exercises that seemed to go on forever, far more concerned citizens understood the implications. Activists, strengthened by the emergence of a more politically alert younger generation, held their aging legislators’ feet to the fire by making them repeat in public many times their vow to veto the government’s plan for a “fake” universal suffrage election. And this time, Beijing had no concessions to grant, for reasons of its own that were only articulated two weeks ago at the very end of the campaign. With nothing more to offer beyond Beijing’s official hard line, loyalists and allies nevertheless tried every means possible to probe pan-dem defenses and weaken resolve. Some means were humorous, others definitely not.

One such effort concerned pay-to-play favors for pan-dems in need. Since most of them do need, it seemed a ploy worth trying. One rumor in late March preceded a break in the Democratic Party’s defense line by one of its leading members. The Democratic Party was a natural target because it has so many moderate members, the remains of numerous “Young Turk” defections that began in the early 2000s. Many of these moderates made no secret of their disagreement with party legislators’ vow to veto the election reform bill.

But later even “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung claimed to have been approached by a middle-man who allegedly promised him he would never have to worry about money again, if only he would break his vow. Foolish idea, scoffed one loyalist. Everyone knows Long Hair is such a bandit he would take the money and vote against the bill anyway.Foolish idea, scoffed one loyalist. Everyone knows Long Hair is such a bandit he would take the money and vote against the bill anyway.

More creative was the June 12 Reuters report citing “senior Chinese officials” both in Beijing and Hong Kong who were quietly confident they could turn the handful of pan-dem legislators needed to pass the reform bill. A “source close to China’s leaders” reportedly said implementing Beijing’s electoral reform plan for Hong Kong was important because it could then be used as a model for eventual changes in China as well. ‘If the Hong Kong experiment was successful, (similar) elections would be held on the mainland one day.’

Everyone had been trying to guess what concessions Beijing might plausibly make to induce a 2010-type climb-down by a handful of moderate legislators. But some in Beijing were thinking different thoughts entirely, with the idea of trying to lure pan-dems by evoking the memory of their first lost love. That 1990s dream was for Hong Kong to stand as a beacon and serve as a model for the democratic transformation of all China, the dream that lives on in the June Fourth candlelight vigil’s controversial “end one-party dictatorship” slogan.

And then there was the bomb plot, dramatically orchestrated by the Police Organized Crime and Triad bureau and announced just in time to make the evening news on June 15, two days before the electoral reform bill was due to be debated in the Legislative Council. That made it impossible to determine, before the vote, who might have masterminded the plot and who might be claiming to be associated with something called the National Independence Party.

Long Hair’s League of Social Democrats red rose logo was prominently displayed among the items laid out on the evidence table for TV camera crews to film. He promptly denied any association. Triad society members were involved in some of the few violent incidents that occurred during Occupy last year. But since most organized crime types have cross-border connections, it will probably never be known (except inside the police department) what sort of provocateurs might have been involved. What the authorities here also know, however, is that the one thing best calculated to turn public opinion against activists of any kind is the threat of violence they might pose. So much effort for so little reward. In the end, all the schemes came to nothing.

WHAT NEXT FOR PAN-DEMS?

For them the veto is really a watershed moment because of what they have finally been able to do by standing united against so important an ultimatum from Beijing … and also because of what can happen during the coming election cycle. For them it’s make-or-break time and they probably won’t have many more chances to revive their declining fortunes in an environment where all the powers that be – economic and political – are ranged against them.

If the vow to veto had been broken, it probably would have meant the end for Hong Kong’s democracy movement. The same kind of increased factionalism that occurred after the 2010 episode would have intensified. New more radical groups formed post 2010 to punish the one-time standard-bearer Democratic Party, leaving it further weakened by more infighting. Any kind of a coherent movement would have been even more difficult to sustain now, in the wake of a climb-down over 8.31.

But only the most basic precondition for coherence has been achieved. Now they all have to fulfill that promise by bringing their fractious acts together and cooperating enough to hold the line again, this time for the 2016 Legislative Council election. They will also have to do that in the face of almost certain defeats and disappointments during the District Councils election a few months from now.

This prospect looms because pro-Beijing forces – led by the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) and its many conservative allies – now hold majorities on all 18 of Hong Kong’s District Councils. There is little hope of pan-dems making much of an impact at that level where voter loyalty has been built on the social services that the well-funded DAB and friends are providing. Pan-dems lack the resources to succeed at the neighborhood level where they initially had little interest in competing and have now lost all hope of doing so on anything like an equal footing with their loyalist/conservative adversaries.

But that will still leave the Legislative Council elections a year from now when loyalists and conservatives will invoke vows of their own. They have already said they aim to throw all their considerable resources into winning the four additional seats that would allow them to pass all political reform proposals without having to worry about their pro-democracy opponents.

If on the other hand, pan-dems can learn to do what they have never succeeded in accomplishing before – by treating the DAB rather than one another as their chief election rivals – then they might just hold onto those four seats and perhaps even win a few more. They could then proceed to revive the coherence of their movement on the basis of those electoral victories. Otherwise, pan-dems will be further reduced to an inconsequential force carping and play acting from the sidelines.

WHAT NEXT FOR BEIJING

Beijing needed that victory, but if it had been bought at the cost of breaking pan-dems’ will to resist, there would have been little joy and not much reward in terms of the stability and legitimacy needed to improve Hong Kong’s governance. For pan-dems it may be make-or-break time. But for Beijing it’s now back to the drawing boards as decision-makers find themselves in a place they obviously did not anticipate: uncharted territory.

As the threat of a veto grew more real, official Beijing didn’t know what else to do except repeat the old slogans that by Beijing’s own actions were being deprived of the original meanings they were supposed to convey. The most striking indications of the pressure this is creating for Beijing officials was their first-ever resort to straight-talking about plans for Hong Kong’s political future, and then the awkward rush to back pedal afterward.

Through all the years since the 1980s when planning began for Hong Kong’s return to Chinese rule, Beijing stuck to the bland assertions and undefined promises that were written into Hong Kong’s new Basic Law constitution. These had been reduced to a few catchy slogans about one-country, two-systems, high degree of autonomy, 50 years without change, eventual universal suffrage elections, and so on, all conveniently left open to diverse interpretations. Not surprising then that pan-dems carried on with conventional Western assumptions and definitions.

For their part, Beijing officials seem to have assumed, without ever saying so in public, that they would be able to impose their definitions of mainland-style autonomy and mainland-style party-managed elections as and when needed. But those definitions are needed now and a significant number of Hong Kongers are obviously not ready, just as they weren’t ready in 2003 over national security legislation or in 2012 over compulsory patriotic political studies for all students.

What to do with such resistance when a forceful crackdown is not possible? So in the face of Hong Kong’s threat to veto a major central government decree, Beijing officials found themselves finally trying to explain just what sort of universal suffrage election they have in mind for Hong Kong.

Beijing officials have developed the habit of traveling to the nearby border city of Shenzhen to say what they have to say to Hong Kong. It’s an easy commute from here and Hong Kong representatives were invited to final lobbying sessions. The sudden switch to straight talking occurred there, first at a seminar for Hong Kong District Councilors and others on May 20, and then at a meeting with Legislative Councilors on May 31.

At the May 20 seminar, the speaker was Zhang Rongshun 【張榮順】, vice-chairman of the Basic Law Committee of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (SCNPC). According to the China Daily account, Zhang explained that “Beijing intended to use universal suffrage to resolve Hong Kong’s problems. Some issues have remained unresolved for the past 18 years.” Consequently, a negative political culture had developed fueled by ongoing internal disputes that were making it impossible to achieve anything. The central government could not allow such an environment to continue, said Zhang, which was why Beijing would not compromise by withdrawing or revising its 8.31 decision.

Speaking in Shenzhen to Hong Kong Legislative Councilors on May 31, the Basic Law Committee’s chairman, Li Fei 【李飛】 was even more straightforward, saying what no Beijing official had ever acknowledged throughout all the long universal suffrage debate. The 8.31 decision, he explained, would regulate not only the 2017 Chief Executive election but future elections as well. This revelation was not part of his prepared remarks but came apparently as an elaboration afterward and led news stories here for days afterward.

The 8.31 decision is clear, he reportedly explained. It is not limited only to the year 2017 but begins in 2017 and will include any Chief Executive universal suffrage election thereafter. All will be conducted according to the 8.31 decision. Its effect will not be limited to one election only. Its effect will be long term. This is a very important decision issued by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. As long as it is not implemented, the necessity of revising it does not exist.

No sooner had the impact of this statement been registered than Hong Kong government officials scrambled into damage-control mode. Their Beijing counterparts must have calculated that a real crisis was at hand so they needed to lay it on the line in order to induce compliance, as Beijing officials are accustomed to doing. But if so, the sudden lapse into candor backfired, reinforcing pan-dem legislators’ determination to veto – no other choice now, they said.

Since then, officials in Beijing and here have tried their best to dial back on Li Fei’s assertion that the 8.31 decision’s party-managed electoral format sets the precedent for all Hong Kong Chief Executive elections to come. They have been saying that of course there could be revisions in the future, but they were talking the same old promises without definitions and minus Li Fei’s candor.

Of course, Beijing has the power and the option to put an end to it. But in all likelihood, the protections provided by Hong Kong’s one-country, two-systems arrangement will carry on for a while longer. So everyone will have the time and opportunity to learn by doing and work toward solutions. But a real solution will depend on two big hypotheticals: If pan-dems can get their act together and rebuild the electoral strength of their movement; and if Beijing can bring itself to accept that the communist party’s one-size-fits-all form of unitary rule is not a very good fit for Hong Kong.

The post Hong Kong and Beijing Are Now In Uncharted Waters appeared first on The Nanfang.

Hong Kong’s demand for universal suffrage is the same. Civic Party legislator Dennis Kwok Wing-hang 【郭榮鏗】paid a visit to Beijing in late April along with his fellow barristers on their regular biennial trip. He surprised everyone when he returned saying that in order to solve the electoral reform deadlock – between Beijing’s August 31, 2014 (8.31) ultimatum and Hong Kong’s democratic aspirations – communication and trust must first be established between Beijing and the democratic camp.

Kwok promises to honor his pledge to veto Beijing’s plan when it comes up for a vote in the Legislative Council, probably next month. But he said once past that hurdle it is essential to establish trust.

He is right, of course. Only he didn’t go on to say how that trust might be established. Neither do any of the others, whether here or in Beijing, who like to say the same thing. The trust deficit that moderates think they can overcome with dialogue and compromise will probably be better served if they begin by confronting reality instead of trying to skirt around it with polite platitudes and deferential courtesies.

This way of talking is supposed to be laying the groundwork for building trust. But so far it seems only to be sending out confused signals and producing endless inconclusive exchanges punctuated by periodic angry outbursts like the Umbrella/Occupy street blockades last year.

Nothing better illustrates this failure to communicate than the much-advertised opinion piece that appeared in the pro-Beijing press on May 4. And nothing better illustrates the gulf that separates Beijing and Hong Kong’s democracy movement on the matter of political ideals, aims, and the specific arrangements needed to translate them into reality.

BEIJING’S ANSWER TO THE TRUST DEFICIT

Author of this article was Zhang Xiaoming【張曉明】, director of Beijing’s Liaison Office here, but the message comes straight from Beijing party central and can be read as its response to Hong Kong’s current political reform deadlock. Beijing, in this version, is saying exactly what it means and this is no soft fuzzy message about compromise, dialogue, and trust. More like democratic elections for Hong Kong governed by the venerable old communist party principle of democratic-centralism.

Director Zhang is inspired by Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s new doctrine on the power of positive thinking, otherwise known as his iterations on the “four comprehensives” and its corollary about confidence in the Chinese political system, the “Chinese Dream,” and so on. Zhang’s title: “Be Confident in Our Political System, Promote Universal Suffrage with Hong Kong Characteristics.”

He emphasized that the Hong Kong government’s Chief Executive election proposal for 2017 conforms to Hong Kong’s special constitutional status, the special conditions for democratic development here, Hong Kong’s complex social and political environment, and the need to benefit all sectors.

The official proposal is therefore constitutional, democratic, appropriate and moderate. There is no such thing as an “international standard” for universal suffrage. Rather it must conform to the special characteristics of each society and in Hong Kong’s case that means it must be implemented within the context of one country, two systems. Hence Hong Kong must be confident in an electoral system that is tailor-made for Hong Kong with its own special characteristics.

In other words, he wrote, this election is not just about Hong Kong. It’s also about Beijing, one country with two systems, and the imperative of maintaining national security in both systems for the benefit of the one country.

That means Hong Kongers must not see this election as being just about themselves. It’s also about Beijing’s concept of one country and nothing must be allowed to undermine the integrity of the party-run unitary “socialist system.” The word “socialist” in this context refers not to the economy but to the communist party’s preeminent governing role.

It follows that if Dennis Kwok and many others aim to build trust, they should begin by explaining – for everyone’ benefit – what the moderates’ outreach to Beijing might entail. Presumably, everyone in the democratic camp at least shares the desire to preserve Hong Kong’s inherited rights and freedoms.

So how far should pan-democrats go in setting Beijing’s official heart at ease? What would be enough, when the champions of Xi Jinping’s system dismiss pan-dems as “dissidents” whose demand for rights might bring risks to the concept and reality of “one country” that Beijing could not tolerate?

CONFIDENCE PLUS: A New National Security Law

Nor is Zhang Xiaoming’s mention of national security in an article about election reform mere idle rhetoric. A new national security law 【國家安全法】is in the works and it will specifically mention Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. All are to be held responsible for safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial as well as political integrity.

This is being interpreted as a broad hint that Hong Kong must do its duty, as Macau has already done, and implement the Basic Law’s Article 23 mandate to pass legislation that was shelved after the upsurge of popular protest in 2003. The legislation must ban acts of treason, secession, sedition, and subversion against the central government in Beijing, as well as the theft of state secrets and political activities by foreign political organizations.

There is even a suggestion being floated in Basic Law promotion circles here to establish a procedure whereby the Hong Kong government itself could ask the central government to declare a state of emergency and impose the mainland’s national security laws here if Article 23 legislation remains on the shelf. This procedure would soften the dramatic blow of direct central government intervention and is being promoted as a means of preserving Hong Kong’s autonomy.

In fact, it would make intervention easier since it is the same procedure Beijing introduced in 2004, after the big 2003 protest, to tighten Beijing’s control of Hong Kong’s electoral reform process. Beijing’s 2004 decision introduced the “five-step” process whereby the Hong Kong government must first request permission to begin electoral reform. It’s this new maneuver that gave Beijing the procedural authority to issue its 8.31 decision last summer curbing pan-democrats’ aspirations for a “genuine” universal suffrage election in 2017.

TRUST THE VOTERS

The gulf seems unbridgeable. Long ago, when Basic Law drafters had just completed their task, Beijing’s then paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, was effusive in his praise. Thanking them for their handiwork, he called the results a “creative masterpiece”.

Creative it surely was in bridging the two systems – by using words like “universal suffrage” with double meanings – suitable for pleasing both sides. Unfortunately, it was so successful that everyone could and did read into it what they wanted.

Now the fault lines that drafters so creatively smudged over have reached a break point because the time has come to clarify some important meanings. Besides universal suffrage, Hong Kongers are discovering, for example, that the “autonomy” they thought they had been granted by the Basic Law is actually only mainland-style autonomy, meaning autonomy as Beijing choses to define it for any given situation.

Still, the crisis has not yet reached the stage where Beijing is likely to throw caution to the winds, declare martial law, and call out the People’s Liberation Army, which just happens to be headquartered right next door to Hong Kong’s main government buildings, along the freeway that protesters blockaded last year. So there is still time to work this out and the path ahead seems clear even if no one can be sure where it will end.

President Xi Jinping will be the final decision maker. Keen student of party history that he must be given his firm commitment to the communist party’s institutions and traditions, President Xi must know and respect the party’s old mass movement rules. These have, since the 1920s, held that when the wider public is genuinely mobilized and engaged, wrongs can be righted and things can get done that otherwise could not be done. A mobilized mass of voters should count for as much as the old Maoist-style campaigns that gave rise to the party’s mass-line convictions in the first place.

Therefore, if Beijing refuses to revise its 8.31 ultimatum, and if pan-democrats’ vow to veto holds, then the confrontation will carry over through the coming election campaigns for the District Councils this year and the Legislative Council next. Loyalists have already begun campaigning and will do everything they can to win four more seats in Legco. That would give loyalists and their conservative allies the super two-thirds majority necessary to guarantee passage of Beijing’s plan.

If, on the other hand, pan-dems can finally get their many acts together and block the loyalist bid to gain full control of the council, then President Xi will be obliged to give more thought to Hong Kong’s’ latest exercise in voter-based political defiance.

It’s a gamble but it might just work … unless something better comes along first.

The post Beijing and Hong Kong Don’t Trust Each Other, Making Political Reform Almost Impossible appeared first on The Nanfang.

All things considered, he was right. It would have been better for their cause had demonstrators followed Lai’s advice when he gave it and staged an orderly forward-looking strategic retreat. Sympathetic observers generally agreed that the street sit-ins were an effective means of protest at first but then went on for too long, pursued unrealistic goals that could not be achieved by the means adopted, and allowed adversaries to gloat over the “failure” of Hong Kong’s longest most dedicated campaign for democratic elections.

Beijing has yet to budge on any part of its restrictive August 31 (8.31) decision that precipitated the street occupations and Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying probably never even thought once about resigning as protesters demanded. Even worse, say the concerned observers, Hong Kong’s democracy movement is now fragmenting again into all the disparate pieces that came together suddenly last year on September 28 when the street sit-ins began. In fact, there are even more disparate pieces now than before.

Downcast and discouraged everyone surely is but the pessimism is premature.Downcast and discouraged everyone surely is but the pessimism is premature. Hong Kong’s democracy movement might be receding back into another period of irrelevance, as has happened many times before. This current phase is only the latest local agitation in a long sequence of abortive political reform efforts that extend back to the British colony’s earliest days.

Or the movement might inadvertently be doing just what Jimmy Lai suggested, since the disarray is not random. The new line-ups are being driven by fears about premature compromise and capitulation and no one is willing to bet the fears are unfounded. Hence the disarray is also being driven in anticipation of the need for a renewed pushback against mounting pressures to accept Beijing’s design for Hong Kong’s political future.

The movement is splitting and Beijing is trying – with some success – every means possible to exploit the divisions. Yet without them the movement would be even more likely to dissipate. It might still, but if anything comes of this struggle beyond what Beijing has so far been willing to offer, then much credit must go to the energy of the younger generation that is doing what it can to hold Hong Kong’s aging pro-democracy veterans to their pledges.

REGROUPING: SEPARATE WAYS FOR A COMMON CAUSE

Earlier this year Yvonne Leung Lai-kwok responded to questions during an informal gathering of sympathetic observers. Leung was last year’s University of Hong Kong student body president. She was also one of the student leaders who stepped into the void last September when Professor Benny Tai’s Occupy Central idea took off without him.

The older generation stood aside then and let students take the lead because they had come forward right after Beijing announced its 8.31 decision, when Benny Tai was blindsided by Beijing’s intransigence and seemed uncertain about going through with his carefully rehearsed street occupation protest. It had actually been planned to last only a few days. The police had also rehearsed their removal tactics, so the whole exercise was supposed to have been short-lived. One reason it wasn’t was that the students were not alone.

They took the initiative at the head of a much larger grouping that had already been planning to follow Benny Tai’s lead. This is the Civil Human Rights Front that organizes the annual July First protest marches, a new tradition that began in 2003. All kinds of single-issue concern groups unite on that day around their one common cause as champions of Hong Kong’s civil liberties. It is also a march were political parties and elected politicians take a back seat. They join but never in the lead. This custom has developed in deference to ever-present suspicions and accusations about politicians exploiting idealistic goals for opportunistic purposes.

The politicians were criticized by some last year for not playing a more direct leadership role in the occupy movement. The reasons derive from this endemic suspicious tradition and not necessarily from lack of courage.

Yvonne Leung retold the story about how the all-city student leaders realized after a month or so that it was time to de-occupy. But like Jimmy Lai, the students could not convince everyone else that it was time to go and, also like Jimmy Lai, they couldn’t just walk away; a leaders’ retreat while the ground troops stayed behind on the street to face police clearing squads alone.

Those divisions are now reasserting themselves with some students and some others deciding to go their separate ways. The basic division remains, between “radicals” and “moderates,” for want of better words to describe them. Only this is not just a division between young and old or students and non-students, although it is both. But it’s also appearing among the students themselves as well as between and within different political groups and parties, more like a rebellion from below – between leaders and the rank-and-file – than anything else.

Most dramatic is the disarray within the all-city Hong Kong Federation of Students that played the lead role in Umbrella/Occupy. With over half a century of controversial history to its credit (the British thought it was a hotbed of pro-China pro-communist radicalism in the 1970s), the HKFS until recently represented students at all eight government-funded tertiary institutions here. Students at several universities have just held referendums to decide whether to go it alone or remain within the federation.

So far, four universities have voted to disaffiliate: the University of Hong Kong was first to go followed by Polytechnic University, Baptist, and City university. The latter voted on May 7. The Chinese University’s referendum had to be aborted after supporters fumbled the preparatory signature campaign. They say they’ll try again next semester. Of those voting, only one, Lingnan University, has remained within the federation.

Students say they have many grievances stemming from the 79-day Occupy protest, lesser complaints like lack of adequate consultation and disagreements over tactics. Leaders are “undemocratic” – being only indirectly elected by the various student bodies – didn’t pay enough attention to the views of everyone else, and so on. But the more basic underlying reason seems to be the moderation of HKFS leaders themselves, allegedly too intent on trying to win official concessions, too fixated on the unprecedented student debate with officials in mid-October. Without follow-up plans for what to do next, they are too inclined to listen to the professional politicians. These were helping out behind the scenes, with logistics and office space in the Legislative Council building just adjacent to the main Harcourt Road tent-city encampment.

Of greater importance to the democracy movement as a whole, however, are two additional decisions that have just been made. On April 27, the remaining members of the HKFS – in deference to the new climate of dissent – decided that the federation will not be among the sponsors of this year’s annual June Fourth memorial vigil in Victoria Park.

The event commemorates Beijing’s 1989 crackdown on its own 1980s democracy movement and the HKFS has been among the sponsors every year since. Attendance has continued to grow, bolstered by increasing numbers of cross-border travelers and mainland students who want to experience an event that is banned everywhere else in China.

Last year was the first when the growing mood of antagonism among local activists toward mainland influence had a noticeable impact on June Fourth commemorative events. Dissenters held their own rally across town with several thousand attending … police said 3,000, sponsors said 7,000. The basic theme was meant as a direct challenge to the mainstream Victoria Park event. It has always mourned the demise of the 1980s mainland democracy movement along with the violence in Tiananmen Square on June Fourth and has retained “down with one-party dictatorship” as a (more-or-less) constant slogan.

This year attendance at the counter-current rallies will be higher because the HKFS will be joining them rather than the Victoria Park event. We need not concern ourselves with democratizing the mainland and patriotic unification themes, say the dissidents. Protecting Hong Kong from the encroaching influence of mainland political ways and means should be our first priority. Ironically, Beijing might now see more to its liking among the Victoria Park crowd than the autonomy-first outliers who are vilified daily in the pro-mainland media as traitorous seekers of independence.

Finally, as if all that was not enough, the youngsters have just dealt another blow to the old guard. Young Joshua Wong Chi-fung, a freshman college student, was the hero of the 2011-12 anti-patriotic education protest and is now much more besides. He has just led his old middle-school student group, Scholarism, out of the informal coalition that was preparing to campaign for veteran Democratic Party legislator Albert Ho Chun-yan who is planning to resign his Legislative Council seat. Ho’s idea is to use the subsequent by-election as a protest referendum against the Hong Kong government’s electoral reform bill based on Beijing’s 8.31 decision.

In a statement released on April 28, Scholarism said it had decided not to participate in the referendum campaign, which has been building into an extension of last year’s Umbrella/Occupy movement. The reason: Scholarism wanted to distance itself from the professional Legislative Council politicians some of whom now seem to be losing their nerve and not sufficiently determined in their vow to veto the government’s electoral reform bill. The group decided to pull out in order to free itself from the constraints they anticipated within the by-election campaign. Key to the decision was a commitment they would have had to make about holding in abeyance all disagreements with the democratic camp.

The support coalition had initially included five political parties, plus Scholarism, and the HKFS. The latter’s participation is now also in doubt as is Albert Ho’s resignation project itself since it was counting on the students to provide a major source of enthusiasm and energy.

CLOSING THE GAP

So the retreat and regrouping have now been accomplished. All that remains of Jimmy Lai’s “three R’s” advisory is the third part: return – the most difficult stage of all. The question is how to return and how best to use what little time remains in this long running debate.

The government’s reform bill based on Beijing’s 8.31 decision will be voted up or down before the coming summer recess within the next two months. Consequently, attention is now focused on the simple up or down choices that must soon be made, on the public’s opinion about those choices, and its impact on the 27 pro-democracy legislators’ vow to veto.

The government’s saturation-style promotion campaign has moved into high gear and seems to be registering some success. Pan-democrats are on the defensive as they take up their street-corner positions with fliers and stump speeches. And listening to their talking points, it seems clear why they are not “closing the sale” with a winning argument.

A poll was commissioned by TVB in late April, soon after the Hong Kong government released its final version of the 2017 electoral reform plan based on Beijing’s restrictive 8.31 decision. Close to 51 percent of the 1,000+ people polled said “pocket it.” The results: 50.9 percent said pass the bill; 37.9 percent said veto it; 11 percent were undecided.

But when the respondents in the same poll were asked whether they actually liked the government’s proposal, 35.5 percent said they did not; 35.3 percent said they did; and 25.1 percent were undecided. Seems like about 15 percent of the respondents would like some good reasons not to pass the bill but hadn’t yet heard them.

A similar gap appeared in the first results of the three universities’ tracking poll that began in late April. This poll is being conducted by three universities with reliable polling reputations: the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University, and Polytechnic, with results announced every Tuesday. The first two announcements on April 28 and May 5, were virtually identical. The latter showed 47.6 percent in favor of passing the bill; 36.4 percent said veto.

Unfortunately for democracy movement campaigners, their closing summations seem weaker than their openers. Pro-democracy legislators know what their constituents can do to them if they backtrack now. The Democratic Party’s experience after Albert Ho’s sudden compromise decision in 2010 over a minor Legislative Council electoral reform bill remains uppermost in everyone’s mind. As a result of that 2010 decision, many of its members quit the Democratic Party, voters punished its candidates in the 2012 Legislative Council elections, and Albert Ho later said the abuse he received all along the route of the July 1, 2010 protest march transformed it into the “worst experience” of his entire life.

With that experience in mind, pan-dem arguments now seem directed primarily at their own constituents in an effort to try and reassure them that last-minute deals will not be done. But to do that, campaigners are invoking arguments that are not likely to get very far with people on the margin who don’t yet understand why the bill should not be accepted, even though they don’t like it. The government’s line that “we know it’s not perfect, but it’s the best we could do under the circumstances and think how wonderful it will be to vote for your own Chief Executive, etc., etc. … ” seems to be working.

In contrast, pan-dem legislators are invoking the hallowed argument about voting their conscience regardless of the opinion polls. Alternatively, pan-dem legislators are adopting a legalistic argument: since the Basic Law requires a two-thirds majority vote in Legco to pass the electoral reform bill, then a one-third public opinion poll reading will be sufficient to justify their veto.

The explanations that might have followed from the initial catchy “pocket it forever” 【戴一世】retort to the government’s “pocket it first” 【戴住先】slogan are not being expanded and emphasized. Those explanations should be emphasizing Beijing’s insistence that 8.31 is as far as it has to go in meeting its Basic Law constitutional obligation for universal suffrage Hong Kong elections.

Such arguments should be asking why Beijing refuses to provide any other definitions for future, post-2017, elections beyond the vague Basic Law phraseology “if there is a need.” The Barristers’ have just returned from their biannual visit to Beijing where they seem to have inquired only about what “if there is a need” might mean, but not whether Beijing would ever allow a free-choice Chief Executive election here. If they have just fatalistically accepted that the latter is impossible, as some are now suggesting, then why isn’t the public being let in on that secret?

Such explanations should also be spelling out in detail how easy it will be for Beijing to engineer a candidate line-up that will give current Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying a clear popular mandate. There can only be three candidates. If he is one and Regina Ip is the second, who might qualify to give pan-dems a “chance,” as loyalists are saying.

And such arguments should be pointing out that “universal suffrage” elections are common all over China today, all with same inbuilt Communist Party control mechanisms that are present in Beijing’s 8.31 decision for Hong Kong’s Chief executive election in 2017. The voting public there is endorsing and giving credibility to the party’s candidates. If that is the future Beijing is planning for Hong Kong, then maybe Hong Kong voters would like to know before they advise their legislators to “pocket it first” and worry about the consequences later.

The post Hong Kong’s Divided Pro-Democracy Camp Left With Few Options appeared first on The Nanfang.

Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor 【林鄭月娥】heads the government’s political reform task force and she made the slogan her campaign theme in anticipation of Beijing’s restrictive design for Hong Kong’s 2017 Chief Executive election. It’s the first that will attempt to realize the democracy camp’s 30-year quest for – and Beijing’s decades’ old promise to allow – universal suffrage elections here. Beijing’s framework was formally announced on August 31, to be known thereafter as the 8.31 decision and giving Carrie Lam’s campaign theme an increasingly hollow ring.

Now her slogan has backfired completely because the task also fell to her to admit that Beijing’s 8.31 framework does not contain the prospect of a future better deal, as the Chinese saying implies【袋住先】. In this case it means once and for all. Democracy partisans have a favorite rejoinder: “pocket it forever”【袋一世】.

The formal Hong Kong government report on its second consultation exercise and the proposed legislation, soon to be tabled in the Legislative Council, was announced on April 22.

Lam’s new slogan is “2017: Make It Happen!” In presenting the final draft to the Legislative Council last Wednesday she had to admit that with the 2017 Chief Executive (CE) election, assuming it is conducted according to Beijing’s 8.31 formula and the Hong Kong government’s election design based thereon, the Basic Law’s mandate for a universal suffrage CE election will have been realized. There is no constitutional obligation to reform the CE election method further and she said there would be no formal promise, written or otherwise, in that respect. No definitions about anything either.

Law was nevertheless loath to admit that “pocket it first,” really meant “pocket it forever.” If there is a need, and it would have to be proven, then changes could be introduced. But any future initiatives would be up to the discretion of future Chief Executives who might not be too eager to launch new political reform projects after the uproar this one is causing. She has nothing to offer but the same vague official promises that have been used to disarm democracy campaigners since Basic Law debates began and the law was being drafted in the 1980s.

DETAILS

These had already been introduced in preliminary briefings. There are no surprises. The proposed reform bill that the Legislative Council must vote on sometime before its summer recess will be based on the same four-sector committee with its 38 subsectors that was initially designed by Basic Law drafters and spelled out in its Annex I. The four sectors and 38 subsectors ae listed in Annex VI of the government’s just released document on the second consultation. Committee members are elected by eligible voters in the respective special-interest sub-sectors, which correspond to the Functional Constituencies that also elect half the members of Hong Kong’s 70-seat Legislative Council.

In the course of Hong Kong’s current political reform cycle, the public has finally learned – not formally but in the course of various arguments – that from the start it was always the Basic Law’s intent to use this committee, and only this committee, not just to endorse Beijing’s choice for Chief Executives before the promise of universal suffrage was realized. The same committee was always intended to nominate Beijing’s choice of candidates afterward as well!

Maybe if the public had known this all along, pro-democracy partisans would not have wasted the past year and more campaigning for some form of “civic nomination” whereby the general public could also participate in the nomination exercise.

According to the government’s formal proposal, prospective candidates must collect 120 endorsement signatures from among the 1,200 committee members in order to pass the first “gate.” Each committee member will be able to recommend only one person and each person can collect only 240 endorsement signatures. This would produce between five and 10 preliminary candidates.

Selecting the final candidates from among this pool of hopefuls will be done by the 1,200 committee members via secret ballot. They must vote for at least two of the hopefuls but can additionally vote for as many others as they like. To qualify for a place on the public ballot, however, candidates must receive the votes of at least half the 1,200 members of the committee. Once the public does finally get involved, the ultimate winner will be the candidate who receives the most votes regardless of how many or how few.

So the public has actually been put through a grand political charade during the past year and more that the official consultations have been underway. Not surprising that anger erupted into the Occupy Central movement once Beijing finally made known its intentions in the form of that 8.31 decision last summer. In effect, the public was lured into an elaborate guessing game for which only Beijing and local loyalists knew the answers.

Both the main pro-Beijing political party and the Federation of Trade Unions submitted their reform proposals along with everyone else last spring. But loyalists said they were trying to hew as closely as possible to what they knew Beijing wanted, and their proposals were pretty much a perfect match. At the time, democracy campaigners said if that was really what Beijing wanted, then it would be no deal and they would veto any such proposal. What no one said was that what Beijing wanted would be the only election framework allowed and that everyone else was wasting their time agitating for anything else.

LET THE PUBLIC DECIDE

The 27 pro-democracy legislators who vowed to veto the proposal if it corresponds to Beijing’s 8.31 decision are so far holding firm (Mar. 13 post). Even the tenaciously moderate Ronny Tong said the government’s formal proposal is “hopeless” and must be voted down. He sat glumly in the Legislative Council chamber while others in his caucus walked out in protest last week when the government’s final plan was being presented. Tong disapproves of such radical gestures and refuses to join them. But the government’s final verdict was too much even for him because it had completely ignored all the moderate suggestions that he and others like him had also submitted in good faith last year. For all their good intentions, they also did not realize that Beijing’s option was the only option.

The next question, then, is where to go from here. Possible scenarios are proliferating, like those explored by the Democratic Party’s moderate Nelson Wong. Analysts are trying to anticipate what is the worst outcome and the best that might result if the veto holds, and if it doesn’t. Nothing like agreement yet.

Meanwhile, and much to Ronny Tong’s distaste, the battle for public opinion is heating up, since everyone but him seems to understand that since the issue is about democratic elections the public really should be allowed to have a say, one way or the other.

To counter the government and loyalist-sponsored polls, three reliable academic opinion monitors are joining forces to run a tracking poll beginning now and ending on the eve of the Legislative Council vote, whenever that is. Results will be announced on Tuesdays and only one question will be asked: “do you support the political reform proposal for the 2017 chief executive election as mapped out by the government?” The three pollsters are: Hong Kong University’s Public Opinion Program (POP), the Chinese University’s Centre for Communication and Public Opinion Survey, and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s Centre for Social Policy Studies.

As of now, the scenario that has the most possibilities seems to be the veto. This will create a huge uproar but in the process, everyone will be forced to focus more directly than they have so far on where the demand for universal suffrage is taking Hong Kong. If, as seems likely, Beijing is intent on using the exercise to put Hong Kong on course for a mainland-style people’s congress future, then the public should know now and not have to wait until the end of some other far off consultation exercise to learn the truth of Beijing’s intentions.

Anticipating a veto, pro-Beijing forces – the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) and the Federation of Trade Unions (FTU) – are already preparing for the next Legislative Council elections in 2016. Their goal is to add to their supply of Legislative Council seats and with only four more, they will be able to re-introduce the government’s reform bill, pass it with the necessary two-thirds majority, and hold the 2017 Chief Executive election on time, in accordance with Beijing’s 8.31 mandate.

But bearing in mind loyalists’ plans, already widely discussed and no longer just among themselves, pan-democrats will finally realize that they are fighting for their political lives. That would be not just for their individual small groups and parties, but for the one project larger than themselves that has kept them all going since the 1980s.

Under those conditions they might just stop competing for advantage with each other, and design a strategic election plan that will keep loyalists from out maneuvering them as has happened in almost every election that has been held since 1998. That was first post-handover election and essentially the last – except maybe the 2003/4 District Councils and Legco elections – where pro-democracy candidates ran to win and not just for the experience or to accumulate a few more votes for their individual groups and factions.

Theoretically, that would be the best possible solution: let the voters decide. Pan-democrats have spent most the past year campaigning for civic nomination to give the public a role in the nominating process. The 2016 Legco election could become a form of civic nomination by other means.

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In crisis situations the risks might seem worth the gamble, like when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was contemplating election defeat and jettisoned decades of moderate international commitments in favor of a two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Never on my watch, he declared, and it worked. He mobilized the right wing parties, said what they wanted to hear, and won a handy victory on March 17.

Then he tried to have it both ways, backtracked and said, after all, he didn’t really mean it. So did he or didn’t he say what he really meant the first time and what he really intends to do in the years to come? Facts on the ground suggest the former. So too do the conditions he attached to his qualified backtracking. Time will tell.

As decision time approaches here for an up or down vote on Hong Kong’s 2017 Chief Executive election reform proposal, Beijing and some influential onlookers are engaged in the same sort of opportunistic risk-taking. The prize is not a general election victory but rather winning the battle for public opinion and pressuring a handful of Hong Kong’s Legislative Councilors to swing the all-important vote for approval. Beijing’s tactics might succeed or they might not. But the fact that such verbal gymnastics now seem necessary suggests just how intense the political reform controversy has become, and how intent Beijing is on winning.

At issue is Beijing’s August 31, 2014 ultimatum on the design of Hong Kong’s first universal suffrage Chief Executive election promised for 2017. The design anticipates a Beijing-style election with Beijing vetting the candidates prior to the public vote. All 27 pro-democracy legislators in Hong Kong’s 70-member Legislative Council have vowed to veto the proposal in its current unadulterated form and Beijing says it’s that or nothing. If all 27 hold the line, they can kill the the reform bill that needs a two-thirds super-majority to pass.

BEIJING: National People’s Congress Speeches

The word games – as opposed to steadily advancing facts on the ground – began almost a year ago, in June 2014, when Beijing issued the tough-talking White Paper. It’s subject was “one-country, two-systems,” the policy that Beijing designed for governing Hong Kong after the British left in 1997. Provoking the controversy here was an apparent official change of emphasis, tone, and terminology. This last focused in one case specifically on a simple Chinese word, 治 that can be translated several ways.

Before the official English translation of the June White Paper made its appearance, that word had always featured in the context of a key slogan used to advertise one-country, two-sysems: “Hong Kong people running … or ruling, or governing … Hong Kong.” But one White Paper sentence had been translated as “administer,” and with implications for the all-important independence of Hong Kong’s judiciary.

Last December, days after police cleared the last of Occupy Central’s political protest barricades from Hong Kong city streets, the Hong Kong government went even further than the White Paper and changed the translation on its official fact sheet. The long-proclaimed governing formula was no longer “Hong Kong people running Hong Kong” but only Hong Kongers administering Hong Kong.

Had the policy changed? Beijing insisted it had not. But one thing followed another and Beijing’s public information campaign accelerated. A lecture series, also in mid-December, placed the whole problem in perspective as Beijing sees it and in a way that Beijing was only for the first time articulating in public.

Hong Kong, said the official speakers, had yet to identify with the Motherland. One-country, two-systems had not changed; it was just that too many people stubbornly refused to understand it the way Beijing meant it to be understood. And why did they persist in harking back to the good old days under British colonial rule, with reference to the political rights and freedoms that were then the norm? The speakers prescribed a period of “re-enlightenment” to put Hong Kongers on the right track, looking forward not back, so as to properly understand that their prized one-country, two-systems autonomy did not mean they could make important political reform decisions for themselves.

Fast forward to the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress (NPC) earlier this this month and the message seemed to be there for all to hear – or not. Keynote introductory speeches come during the convocation of the NPC’s companion honorary body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), ahead of the main NPC sessions. In his report, CPPCC chairman Yu Zhengsheng 【俞正聲】did affirm the one-country, two-systems governing policy. But he had nothing at all to say about its two key slogan promises that have been used to put local hearts at ease since Deng Xiaoping’s day. There was no mention of “Hong Kong people running Hong Kong” and no “high degree of autonomy” either.

What did it mean? Were everyone’s worst fears coming to pass so soon? Mild-mannered Ming Pao Daily, ever the voice of pro-democracy moderation, seemed positively indignant. There must be a reason why those two slogans were omitted from so important a national document, said the March 5 editorial. If there is no difference between mentioning and not mentioning, then why not mention? “We think the people of Hong Kong have a right to know what is happening with Hong Kong policy. The authorities have a responsibility to explain clearly to the people of Hong Kong.”

No sooner said than done. Like Benjamin Netanyahu the day after his election victory, the final report of this year’s NPC session reinserted the slogans. This came in the form of Premier Li Keqiang’s 【李克強】official government work report: “We definitely will not waver in carrying out the policy of ‘one country, two systems,’ with ‘Hong Kong people running Hong Kong,’ and ‘Macau people running Macau,’ in accordance with a high degree of autonomy”.

Only there was a catch at the end of that sentence. The policy would be implemented “strictly in accordance with the constitution and the Basic Law.” Beijing’s hard lines on everything as articulated during the past year have proclaimed them to be strictly in accord with the Chinese constitution and Hong Kong’s Basic Law. Like Netanyahu’s backtracking the day after his election victory, Premier Li’s use of the comforting slogans probably signals no change whatsoever in Beijing’s hardening lines on one-country, two systems and political reform.

LONDON: Brave Hearts, Weak Wills

Never ones for simple straight talk when something circumspect will better serve contradictory purposes, British officials excel at carefully-crafted obfuscation.Never ones for simple straight talk when something circumspect will better serve contradictory purposes, British officials excel at carefully-crafted obfuscation. Only one thing seems clear: London has taken Beijing’s point about just how much political capital Chinese leaders have invested in winning this reform showdown with Hong Kong’s democracy movement over the August 31 decision. It is fundamental to the Chinese Communist Party’s unitary form of rule because the party knows no other way of governing and calculates that it has too much to lose by experimenting with something else.

For its part, London evidently calculated that challenging Beijing on so important an issue was not worth holding the line for Hong Kong on the question of “genuine” rather than mainland-style managed universal suffrage. Better to suffer the mockery of a few more pundits than risk more of Beijing’s wrath, especially considering all the lucrative investment opportunities it now controls.

The sequence unfolded like so. Long ago, in September 2013, British Foreign Office minister Hugo Swire made headlines here with his signed opinion piece published simultaneously in English and Chinese. The important thing about the coming electoral reform, he wrote, is that “the people of Hong Kong have a genuine choice to enable them to feel they have a real stake in the outcome … And of course, Britain stands ready to support in any way we can.”

Beijing’s media campaign went into overdrive and has remained there ever since on the theme of “foreign force” responsibility for all that pro-democracy campaigners are doing here. Unphased, British parliamentarians went ahead and organized a select committee to look into the subject. Parliament can monitor British government policies but recommendations are not binding.

Beijing banned committee members from coming to Hong Kong as part of their inquiry, at which point it became clear that Foreign Affairs Committee (FAC) lawmakers and their Foreign Office colleagues were no longer on the same page. Parliamentarians expected at least a stern rebuke to Beijing from the Foreign Office on their behalf for the unprecedented insult since British citizens otherwise enjoy visa free access here. Proof positive of just how far apart they had grown in the wake of new Beijing claims that London’s legal right to concern itself with Hong Kong had expired at midnight on June 30, 1997.

More proof came in the person of Hugo Swire himself who had done a turn-around by the time he visited Hong Kong this year, on January 8. He told pro-democracy Legislative Councilors, without qualification or explanation, that they should do what Beijing was demanding and accept its August 31 decision. Nor was he alone in the testimony he gave to the FAC trying to reach its own conclusions on Beijing’s implementation of the one-country, two-systems policy in Hong Kong.

One after another, Foreign Office officials endorsed the idea of “genuine choice” as Swire had done in 2013. But they seem not to have delved very deeply into the institutional underpinnings of Beijing’s August 31 decision or they would at least have noted that “genuine choice” and the election framework mandated by that decision are mutually exclusive. Much like Netanyahu’s back-tracking on the two-state solution. Beijing editorial writers commended London for finally seeing the light.

In due course, both the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee and the British government’s Foreign Office issued their Hong Kong reports. These at least provide a nice contrast and suggest why Beijing is adamant in pursuing its strict definition of unitary government. If only the National People’s Congress would contradict China’s Foreign Ministry in such terms!

When it was published, earlier this month, the committee’s report said the election reform proposals did not offer a genuine choice to the people of Hong Kong and the report cautioned against allowing political tensions here to remain unresolved.

The Foreign Office report, which is a bi-annual exercise, did push back against Beijing’s new line that London has no right to monitor developments here. But Beijing’s main point had not been about London’s legal right to monitor Hong Kong’s post-1997 progress and Beijing’s effort was not in vain. The Foreign Office report featured a vaguely argued gloss on the important issue of political reform: too bad the August 31 decision is so restrictive … still, something is better than nothing … and maybe something more will come later …

DITTO THE AMERICANS

After bearing the brunt of the “foreign force” accusations for two years, Washington also took refuge in a “two-part” solution. The British House of Commons was at least able to register its concern and expedite its reporting within less than a year. The U.S. Congress chose a more circuitous route that must jump through several legislative and executive hoops before being implemented. But last November, responding to Hong Kong’s Umbrella/Occupy street protests then still underway, a bipartisan bill was introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

This will, if passed, revive the annual U.S. government reports on political developments here. These reports were originally mandated by a 1992 law passed when concerns about Hong Kong’s post-1997 future were at their height, but are no longer required. The new bill seeks to revive the annual reporting mechanism “for 10 years or until the Secretary (of State) certifies that Hong Kong has held free and fair elections for 2 consecutive Chief Executive and 2 consecutive Legislative Council periods.” ***

Manning the fort here in Hong Kong, however, Consul General Clifford Hart told pan-democrats in late January that Washington preferred they ‘take something rather than nothing’ and accept Beijing’s terms for the 2017 Chief Executive election.

The whole wide world seems to have rallied to Beijing’s side, against those 27 pan-democrats and their vow to veto. The world seems not to appreciate that this is not an ordinary policy decision where compromise is the name of a successful game.The world seems not to appreciate that this is not an ordinary policy decision where compromise is the name of a successful game. Beijing’s August 31 framework has coopted Hong Kong’s long-sought goal of universal suffrage. In its place is a precedent-setting mainland-style design that can only lead to a mainland-style one-country, one-system conclusion.

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