It has been a hot summer in Hong Kong, in every sense. Massive protest rallies have rocked the city since June; on two occasions they have involved more than a million people – out of a total population of 7.4 million. The protests have taken on a weekly rhythm, as those of the gilets jaunes did in France earlier this year, stirring up every Saturday or Sunday, spreading into the outer reaches of the territory. The face-off between protesters and police has become more and more confrontational as the weeks have passed, and protest events have been planned for every weekend in August and on into September. After that, there will be elections for the district councils, and, next year, for the city’s Legislative Council. If there is to be a showdown between political forces – the protesters, the government of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR), the central government’s liaison office in Hong Kong, and the party bosses in Beijing – what form will it take? Will it resemble the violent confrontation of Tiananmen in 1989, or will it be an electoral battle?
This summer’s protests were triggered by a government-sponsored bill to amend Hong Kong’s extradition law. But when I met some of the leading figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in Taiwan at the end of May, they told me that the bill was just one of several urgent issues. None of them anticipated that a new, spectacular phase of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy was about to unfold. (...)
The Umbrella Movement emerged during a dispute over arrangements for the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive. As far as Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, was concerned, this was unfinished business. People in Hong Kong didn’t realise at the time what Xi had in mind for them. They assumed the plan was still to honour the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitution, promulgated in 1990, according to which the ‘ultimate aim’ is that the CE will be elected by ‘universal suffrage’, ‘in the light of the actual situation’ in Hong Kong following a period of ‘gradual and orderly progress’. The same language is used about elections to the Legislative Council. In the annexes of the Basic Law concerning methods of election, the year 2007 is mentioned as a possible deadline for procedural changes, marking the end of the transitional phase following the handover of power from Britain to China.
The main political parties, pro-Beijing and pro-democracy, all agreed that universal suffrage should be used in the election of the CE in 2007 and the legislature in 2008, but this didn’t happen. Alarmed by a surge in political protests in 2003, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), supposedly China’s supreme constitutional authority, issued an interpretation of the Basic Law which stipulated that Hong Kong would require Beijing’s approval before it attempted to amend the electoral system. Any proposed amendments must be approved by a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Subsequently, a conservative proposal put forward by the Hong Kong government was defeated in the legislature by pro-democracy members, who demanded the introduction of universal suffrage in 2007 – or, at least, a road map and timetable for achieving it.
No progress was made over the next few years, during which there were splits in the democratic camp. To allay public frustration, both Hu Jintao, China’s president at the time, and Donald Tsang, the CE, promised further reforms. An NPCSC decision reached at the end of 2007 explicitly stated that although there would be only minor modifications for the double election of 2012 – of both CE and legislature – ‘universal suffrage’ would come into force for the 2017 CE election, and would then be extended to the Legislative Council. Accepting this as the road map, the Democratic Party, Hong Kong’s largest political party, decided to negotiate with the Hong Kong government and Beijing over a proposal for reforms to the procedures for the 2012 elections.
But by this point new factors were affecting Hong Kong’s politics. The most significant was the rise of China, which made itself felt more forcefully after 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics and the global financial crisis. In 2009, the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC, Chan Koonchung, a Hong Kong novelist and cultural critic living in Beijing, published a dystopian tale, The Fat Years, about a rising China under ironclad one-party rule. By 2012, Chan was arguing with pro-establishment Chinese intellectuals about their latest theory, according to which ‘one country, two systems’ wasn’t designed merely for Hong Kong but would bring about the wholesale rejuvenation of Chinese civilisation. This thinking connects Beijing’s rule to the concept of tianxia, or ‘all under heaven’, an idea drawn from classical Confucianism, in which the periphery subordinates itself to the authority of the sovereign centre, while the centre assumes responsibility for the periphery’s security and development. In that same year, Xi Jinping came to power. He was impatient with anyone who didn’t want to acknowledge the Communist Party’s absolute authority. The new thinking on Hong Kong, if subsequent developments are any indication, was readily espoused by Beijing. Meanwhile, in the summer of 2012, before Xi’s inauguration, Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong teenager, began a campaign against a proposed ‘moral and national education’ programme, and organised a rally attended by more than a hundred thousand people. The radical activism of Wong and his comrades announced the arrival of the younger generation as a formidable new force in Hong Kong’s politics.
As the dust settled after the 2012 elections, anxiety and frustration grew in Hong Kong over the lack of progress towards real democracy. Would Beijing renege on its promises again? Early in 2013, taking inspiration from the Occupy movement, Benny Tai Yui-ting, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, floated the idea of ‘Occupy Central’ as a way to speed up democratisation. He was joined by Chan Kin-man, a sociology professor, and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Since 2005, pro-democracy activists had organised mock referendums to demonstrate that the Hong Kong public was ready for participatory politics. They believed that the ‘gradual and orderly progress’ towards universal suffrage was being delayed on the basis of the phrase in the Basic Law that said amendments would be made ‘in light of the actual situation’ in Hong Kong.
Occupy Central tried similar tactics in June 2014. In previous years, Beijing had attacked such efforts for their lack of credibility or – when the legislators collectively resigned in order to trigger an election – for wasting taxpayers’ money. In 2014, however, Beijing turned up the aggression. The State Council in Beijing issued a white paper explicitly stating that in China’s institutional design for Hong Kong the ‘two systems’ must be subordinated to the ‘one country’, and that the CE must both ‘love the country’ and ‘love Hong Kong’. The method of electing both the CE and the legislature must safeguard ‘the security and interest of the state’ against foreign interference. On the last day of August 2014, the NPCSC published its decision – known as the ‘8.31’ decision – on the election of the 2016 legislature and 2017 CE. Technically, Beijing agreed to allow ‘one person, one vote’ in the CE election. But in reality it had shifted the focus to the issue of who should be allowed to stand. There would be no more than two or three candidates, and the bar for nomination would be very high. Candidates would be chosen by a committee sure to be pro-Beijing and pro-business.
Both the white paper and the 8.31 decision were decisive in the emergence of the Umbrella Movement in late September 2014. Together, the two documents signified, first, that Beijing had once again broken its promise to bring universal suffrage to Hong Kong. Second, that by granting a narrowly defined ‘universal suffrage’ while imposing severe limits on the selection of candidates, Beijing was closing the door to further electoral reforms. And third, that Beijing had surreptitiously changed the criteria for evaluating the ‘actual situation’ in Hong Kong. By emphasising ‘one country’ over ‘two systems’, the two documents interpret Hong Kong’s ‘actual situation’ as a matter not of how ready Hong Kong’s people are to act as politically capable citizens, or how willing they are to participate in public life, but how ready they are to follow Beijing’s orders. From now on, there would be no rules or principles to follow, no process of argument or reason to rely on. Instead, there would be the game of trying to interpret the signs made by Beijing officials. This is the new understanding that is at the root of today’s protests. In 2014, however, many were not yet fully aware of this new normal.
The Umbrella Movement was started by students like Wong. The Occupy Central trio soon joined, and their 79-day action lasted until mid-December 2014, when police removed the last protesters one by one. The occupation cost the protesters dear. One of the leading organisations behind the movement, Hong Kong’s city-wide college student union, was plagued by disputes over tactics and strategy, and saw public support dwindle. Several student union branches withdrew their membership. Young ‘radicals’ started talking of the Umbrella Movement as a ‘failure’. This may be too harsh a verdict. In the face of pressure from Beijing, several new organisations emerged, led by young people advocating self-determination or outright independence for Hong Kong. These groups launched a campaign aimed at ‘reclaiming’ (guangfu) local places. Young people who’d been involved in the Umbrella Movement began to connect social welfare issues and disputes over development projects to overall political reform. (...)
Lessons have been learned from previous protests. The authorities always try to destroy a movement by identifying its leaders. The current protests have no leadership and are highly decentralised. Social media is the main vehicle of mass mobilisation. This time round, there have been no internal splits. Yet the solidarity is not rooted in political discipline: even when brothers climb a mountain together, each has to make his own effort. One action may be followed straightaway by another, or by a few days’ rest. Bruce Lee’s saying becomes a golden rule: ‘Water can flow or it can crush. Be water my friend.’
This summer’s protests were triggered by a government-sponsored bill to amend Hong Kong’s extradition law. But when I met some of the leading figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement in Taiwan at the end of May, they told me that the bill was just one of several urgent issues. None of them anticipated that a new, spectacular phase of Hong Kong’s struggle for democracy was about to unfold. (...)
The Umbrella Movement emerged during a dispute over arrangements for the election of Hong Kong’s chief executive. As far as Xi Jinping, who came to power in 2012, was concerned, this was unfinished business. People in Hong Kong didn’t realise at the time what Xi had in mind for them. They assumed the plan was still to honour the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s constitution, promulgated in 1990, according to which the ‘ultimate aim’ is that the CE will be elected by ‘universal suffrage’, ‘in the light of the actual situation’ in Hong Kong following a period of ‘gradual and orderly progress’. The same language is used about elections to the Legislative Council. In the annexes of the Basic Law concerning methods of election, the year 2007 is mentioned as a possible deadline for procedural changes, marking the end of the transitional phase following the handover of power from Britain to China.
The main political parties, pro-Beijing and pro-democracy, all agreed that universal suffrage should be used in the election of the CE in 2007 and the legislature in 2008, but this didn’t happen. Alarmed by a surge in political protests in 2003, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC), supposedly China’s supreme constitutional authority, issued an interpretation of the Basic Law which stipulated that Hong Kong would require Beijing’s approval before it attempted to amend the electoral system. Any proposed amendments must be approved by a two-thirds majority in the legislature. Subsequently, a conservative proposal put forward by the Hong Kong government was defeated in the legislature by pro-democracy members, who demanded the introduction of universal suffrage in 2007 – or, at least, a road map and timetable for achieving it.
No progress was made over the next few years, during which there were splits in the democratic camp. To allay public frustration, both Hu Jintao, China’s president at the time, and Donald Tsang, the CE, promised further reforms. An NPCSC decision reached at the end of 2007 explicitly stated that although there would be only minor modifications for the double election of 2012 – of both CE and legislature – ‘universal suffrage’ would come into force for the 2017 CE election, and would then be extended to the Legislative Council. Accepting this as the road map, the Democratic Party, Hong Kong’s largest political party, decided to negotiate with the Hong Kong government and Beijing over a proposal for reforms to the procedures for the 2012 elections.
But by this point new factors were affecting Hong Kong’s politics. The most significant was the rise of China, which made itself felt more forcefully after 2008, the year of the Beijing Olympics and the global financial crisis. In 2009, the sixtieth anniversary of the PRC, Chan Koonchung, a Hong Kong novelist and cultural critic living in Beijing, published a dystopian tale, The Fat Years, about a rising China under ironclad one-party rule. By 2012, Chan was arguing with pro-establishment Chinese intellectuals about their latest theory, according to which ‘one country, two systems’ wasn’t designed merely for Hong Kong but would bring about the wholesale rejuvenation of Chinese civilisation. This thinking connects Beijing’s rule to the concept of tianxia, or ‘all under heaven’, an idea drawn from classical Confucianism, in which the periphery subordinates itself to the authority of the sovereign centre, while the centre assumes responsibility for the periphery’s security and development. In that same year, Xi Jinping came to power. He was impatient with anyone who didn’t want to acknowledge the Communist Party’s absolute authority. The new thinking on Hong Kong, if subsequent developments are any indication, was readily espoused by Beijing. Meanwhile, in the summer of 2012, before Xi’s inauguration, Joshua Wong, a Hong Kong teenager, began a campaign against a proposed ‘moral and national education’ programme, and organised a rally attended by more than a hundred thousand people. The radical activism of Wong and his comrades announced the arrival of the younger generation as a formidable new force in Hong Kong’s politics.
As the dust settled after the 2012 elections, anxiety and frustration grew in Hong Kong over the lack of progress towards real democracy. Would Beijing renege on its promises again? Early in 2013, taking inspiration from the Occupy movement, Benny Tai Yui-ting, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong, floated the idea of ‘Occupy Central’ as a way to speed up democratisation. He was joined by Chan Kin-man, a sociology professor, and Reverend Chu Yiu-ming. Since 2005, pro-democracy activists had organised mock referendums to demonstrate that the Hong Kong public was ready for participatory politics. They believed that the ‘gradual and orderly progress’ towards universal suffrage was being delayed on the basis of the phrase in the Basic Law that said amendments would be made ‘in light of the actual situation’ in Hong Kong.
Occupy Central tried similar tactics in June 2014. In previous years, Beijing had attacked such efforts for their lack of credibility or – when the legislators collectively resigned in order to trigger an election – for wasting taxpayers’ money. In 2014, however, Beijing turned up the aggression. The State Council in Beijing issued a white paper explicitly stating that in China’s institutional design for Hong Kong the ‘two systems’ must be subordinated to the ‘one country’, and that the CE must both ‘love the country’ and ‘love Hong Kong’. The method of electing both the CE and the legislature must safeguard ‘the security and interest of the state’ against foreign interference. On the last day of August 2014, the NPCSC published its decision – known as the ‘8.31’ decision – on the election of the 2016 legislature and 2017 CE. Technically, Beijing agreed to allow ‘one person, one vote’ in the CE election. But in reality it had shifted the focus to the issue of who should be allowed to stand. There would be no more than two or three candidates, and the bar for nomination would be very high. Candidates would be chosen by a committee sure to be pro-Beijing and pro-business.
Both the white paper and the 8.31 decision were decisive in the emergence of the Umbrella Movement in late September 2014. Together, the two documents signified, first, that Beijing had once again broken its promise to bring universal suffrage to Hong Kong. Second, that by granting a narrowly defined ‘universal suffrage’ while imposing severe limits on the selection of candidates, Beijing was closing the door to further electoral reforms. And third, that Beijing had surreptitiously changed the criteria for evaluating the ‘actual situation’ in Hong Kong. By emphasising ‘one country’ over ‘two systems’, the two documents interpret Hong Kong’s ‘actual situation’ as a matter not of how ready Hong Kong’s people are to act as politically capable citizens, or how willing they are to participate in public life, but how ready they are to follow Beijing’s orders. From now on, there would be no rules or principles to follow, no process of argument or reason to rely on. Instead, there would be the game of trying to interpret the signs made by Beijing officials. This is the new understanding that is at the root of today’s protests. In 2014, however, many were not yet fully aware of this new normal.
The Umbrella Movement was started by students like Wong. The Occupy Central trio soon joined, and their 79-day action lasted until mid-December 2014, when police removed the last protesters one by one. The occupation cost the protesters dear. One of the leading organisations behind the movement, Hong Kong’s city-wide college student union, was plagued by disputes over tactics and strategy, and saw public support dwindle. Several student union branches withdrew their membership. Young ‘radicals’ started talking of the Umbrella Movement as a ‘failure’. This may be too harsh a verdict. In the face of pressure from Beijing, several new organisations emerged, led by young people advocating self-determination or outright independence for Hong Kong. These groups launched a campaign aimed at ‘reclaiming’ (guangfu) local places. Young people who’d been involved in the Umbrella Movement began to connect social welfare issues and disputes over development projects to overall political reform. (...)
Lessons have been learned from previous protests. The authorities always try to destroy a movement by identifying its leaders. The current protests have no leadership and are highly decentralised. Social media is the main vehicle of mass mobilisation. This time round, there have been no internal splits. Yet the solidarity is not rooted in political discipline: even when brothers climb a mountain together, each has to make his own effort. One action may be followed straightaway by another, or by a few days’ rest. Bruce Lee’s saying becomes a golden rule: ‘Water can flow or it can crush. Be water my friend.’
by Chaohua Wang, LRB | Read more:
[ed. See also: How the state runs business in China (The Guardian).]
[ed. See also: How the state runs business in China (The Guardian).]
