Suzanne Pepper

 Book Review:  Electing Hong Kong’s Chief Executive, by Simon N.M. Young and Richard Cullen, Hong Kong University Press, 2010, 254 pp. 

          Nothing better illustrates the abstract nature of Hong Kong’s political reform debate than the question of universal suffrage elections for the local head-of-government.    The Basic Law, Articles 45 and 68, stipulates that “universal suffrage” is the “ultimate aim” both for selecting the Chief Executive (CE) and for electing all members of the Legislative Council (Legco).   During the 1980s, Hong Kong’s democracy movement was born in the agitation for these two promises, which were consequently written into the Basic Law, and their realization has remained a fundamental aspiration ever since. The law was promulgated in 1990 to serve as Hong Kong’s constitution during the 1997-2047 transition to full integration within the mainland political system. 

           That those promises are now routinely invoked by everyone regardless of political affiliation is nevertheless a clue to the ever-widening gap between original expectations in the 1980s and present-day realities.   During the past yearlong debate over the government’s proposals for the next stage of political reform, to design the 2012 elections, the promises were a standard feature of every presentation along with Beijing’s recently-announced timetable:  Hong Kong can use universal suffrage to elect the CE in 2017 and Legco in 2020. 

           His promotion campaign for the government’s 2012 package of political reforms featured a “weigh anchor” theme and Chief Executive Donald Tsang enthusiastically exhorted everyone to “set sail for universal suffrage in 2017.”   Yet ironically for an executive-led system that grants Legco little real power, public attention focused overwhelmingly on the Legislative Council half of his reform package.  Nothing was said about the CE electoral arrangements for 2012 except that they are to remain essentially the same as they have been since 1997.  An Election Committee does the honors and will remain unchanged except for an increase in size from 800 to 1,200 members.  The conservative design of this committee ensures selection of the officially-endorsed candidate.

           This focus allowed everyone to overlook almost completely the universal suffrage election in 2017 that by official reckoning is supposed to pave the way for 2020.   Throughout the yearlong debate, no questions were asked, no standards or definitions proposed, and no challenges raised.  Nor was there any preliminary discussion of what a universal suffrage election for the CE might look like, even though the next CE election after 2012 will be 2017. 

          The only encouraging sign in this void is the new book by Hong Kong University Professors Simon Young and Richard Cullen, which was unfortunately published just as the debate over Donald Tsang’s reform package was ending in mid-June.  But better late than never, since Hong Kong now has a much-needed guidebook that can help everyone stay on course during the long voyage to 2017.   

              Summarizing the book’s conclusions at a Foreign Correspondents Club luncheon talk on June 21 (audio:  http://www.fcchk.org/fccweb/index.html), Prof. Young described the Election Committee arrangements in words the general public had not yet heard.  If the practice of universal suffrage was attached to those unreformed arrangements, its promise might never be realized because the public would in effect only be able to rubber-stamp officially approved candidates.  In Prof. Young’s words, such a vote would be unequal and exclusive, without choice or political parties.  The authors’ purpose is to suggest how that prospect might be averted.

LEGAL FRAMEWORK

           According to the Basic Law, Article 45, Hong Kong’s CE “shall be selected by election or through consultations held locally and be appointed by the Central People’s Government.”  But the “ultimate” future aim is the “selection of the CE by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.”

          Until then, the specific method of selection is prescribed in the Basic Law’s Annex I, which calls for an 800-member Election Committee, equally divided into four sectors with 200 members each.  It is this committee that is to be enlarged to 1,200 members, while the sectors remain unchanged.  They are:

1.)  Industry, commerce, finance;

2.)  The professions;

3.)   Labor, social services, religion;

4.)  Political representatives to include all 60 Legco members, district-level councilors, Hong Kong’s 36-member delegation to the National People’s Congress (NPC), and members of its companion honorary body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC).

THE ELECTION COMMITTEE IN PRACTICE

          Central to the contradictions between present practice and the promise of universal suffrage is this Election Committee.  Young and Cullen trace its origins and the various functions it has played since 1997.   The government’s current reform proposal, which deals only with the next 2012 election, nevertheless mentions that a future Nominating Committee for use under universal suffrage “may” be formed with reference to the existing Election Committee.*  Working on this assumption, because there is as yet nothing else to guide them, the authors suggest reforms that would allow universal suffrage to become something more than a formality.  In the process they also reveal just how biased the current Election Committee is.

         The committee’s basic design was the work of the Basic Law’s Beijing drafters.  But the specifics were left to Hong Kong and drafters there turned to the Legislative Council’s Functional Constituencies (FCs) for inspiration in fleshing out the committee’s four sectors.  Hence except for the fourth sector political representatives, who are specified in the Basic Law, the Election Committee replicates the FCs that were chief targets of pan-democrats’ wrath during the recent political reform debate (April 16 post).

          The constituencies are rearranged for Election Committee purposes into 32 subsectors with a specified number of committee members for each:

First sector: 17 subsectors, each with 11-12 members;

Second sector: 10 subsectors, each with 20 members;

Third sector: 5 subsectors, each with 40 members. 

Elections are held to fill the seats in each sector.  Altogether, there are currently a total of 16,586 corporate electors and 214,554 individuals registered as Election Committee voters. **  The current committee was  elected in late 2006 to select Donald Tsang, in March 2007.

 PROPOSALS FOR REFORM

        The authors’ address the need for reform as a series of related contradictions between current practice and the promise of Western-style or “genuine” universal suffrage elections, to use the terminology of local pan-democrats.  The contradictions concern especially matters of choice, equality, fairness, and representation.  Theoretically, choice should not be a problem.  Aspiring candidates need only obtain the signatures of one-eighth of all committee members to secure nomination.  In the three selections since 1997, however, that threshold has been difficult to reach for anyone but Beijing’s pre-announced preferred candidate. 

        During the most recent 2006-07 selection process, the newly-formed Civic Party decided to insert itself uninvited into the exercise.  But the party had to begin by actively lobbying and campaigning for candidates during the Election Committee’s subsector elections.  In this way, Alan Leong was able to scrape together from among the winners the 100 signatures needed for nomination.  But on selection day he won only 16% of the 800 members’ votes.  In contrast, the general electorate routinely rewards pan-democratic candidates with a solid majority of the direct popular vote in Legco elections.

           The size of Leong’s defeat also illustrates the extent to which the Election Committee design contradicts the principles of equality and fairness.  There may be a neatly balanced 200 members in each of four sectors, but the subsector breakdown tells a different story.  Sector One is solidly pro-business conservative and its members are elected via all the well-advertised anomalies of the FCs, such as corporate voting, corporate overlap, lack of transparency, etc.  

            As for Sector Four, except for Legco’s democratic 23-member minority this sector is also pro-establishment conservative, and gives added weight to Sector One interests since half of Legco is elected by the same FCs that elect Sector One committee members.  Additionally, the NPC and CPPCC delegations contain the same inbuilt duplications.  Sector Four’s bias results partly from Basic Law design but partly also from deliberate padding.  This last can be seen in the seats allocated to district-level representatives:  42 seats are reserved for those from suburban and rural areas where conservative interests are more prevalent and with some of those interests allowed double representation.  In contrast, only 21 seats are reserved for district representatives in town.

           Democrats are represented only in Sectors Two and Three:  among the professional, social service, and religious subsectors where Alan Leong concentrated his campaign efforts.  But even the religious subsector is “gerrymandered” in such a way as to allocate fewer Election Committee seats to pro-democracy Christians (14) than to conservative Buddhists, Confucians, etc. (26).

           Obviously, much could be done to make the Election/Nominating Committee more democratic without suggesting anything as radical as one-person-one-vote primary elections to select CE candidates.  The authors confine their recommendations to more realistic objectives, which should be achievable if enough community interest can be generated to demand them.   

          For example, the nominating threshold could be lowered.  Beijing could keep its preferences to itself at least until a roster of candidates was formed.  Committee members could be encouraged to nominate more than one candidate.  And as in Alan Leong’s case, candidates could come forward before the Election Committee is itself elected allowing members to indicate their preferences beforehand.  Afterward a whittling down nomination process could be conducted by secret ballot thereby allowing Election Committee members to make their choices in private.

           The anomalies identified in FC voting during the recent Legco reform debate could be addressed and subsector electorates also expanded.  The conservative overload could be remedied by fairer subsector divisions and membership allocations, to target especially the pervasive duplication of interests.  But another major community debate would probably be needed in order to get at the root of the conservative overload problem.

           The tycoons and conservative business interests have all along argued that because they are the creators of Hong Kong’s wealth, so they deserve a predominant share of influence over how it is spent.  Initially, in the 1980s, they used this argument to lobby against electoral reform altogether.  Hence any future universal suffrage CE election must confront the challenge to fairer more equitable cross-sector representation contained in this long-standing demand by Hong Kong’s established economic interests for continued preeminence.  

 WARNING SIGNS

         The other major challenge is Beijing.   Prof. Young noted in his talk a statement that was made too late to be mentioned in the book.   Responding to Hong Kong’s demands during the recent debate for a real-life definition of “universal suffrage,” Beijing official Qiao Xiaoyang’s statement added an unexplained note of uncertainty about future CE nominations.  Qiao said that the present arrangements for CE selection, and the future nomination of CE candidates for universal suffrage elections, “are two completely different methods and they are not comparable” (Wen Wei Po, June 8).  Perhaps the current Election Committee is not to be used as a future model after all.

         Another formal statement, made at the very start of the political reform exercise back in 2007, reasserted some basic ground rules as Beijing sought to set the record straight after Alan Leong’s unsettling candidacy.  Hong Kong was reminded that “irrespective as to how the CE is selected, including by means of universal suffrage ultimately, there can be no deviation from the constitutional requirement that a candidate winning an election must be appointed, in a substantive manner, by the Central People’s Government before assuming office.” ***   This raises the question Qiao Xiaoyang was supposed to answer but instead sidestepped:  what exactly do Beijing authorities mean when they use the term “universal suffrage.”

          As for the coming 2012 elections, retired businessman-politician Allen Lee Peng-fei offered some insights in his reflections on the recent political reform controversy.  Lee is one of Hong Kong’s most talkative and well-connected senior citizens.  During an evening discussion meeting at the Hong Kong Club on July 9, he said his Beijing friends are already head-hunting for the 2012 CE race.  But they are searching specifically, said Lee, for candidates who can be re-elected (for a second term) in 2017 when universal suffrage is due to begin.  In other words, universal suffrage is on course but the prospect of an election without choice is also very real.  Democratic reformers, as Prof. Young noted, have much work to do if that prospect is to be averted.

*  Consultation Document on the political reform package, Nov. 2009, paragraph 2.13  (http://www.cmab-cd2012.gov.hk).

**  Consultation Document , Annexes II and III  (http://www.cmab-cd2012.gov.hk).

 *** Green Paper on Constitutional Government, July 2007, paragraph 2.08.

 comments, questions:  suzpepper@gmail.com 

           The onetime standard-bearer of Hong Kong’s democracy movement including its leaders, members, and supporters, endured what must have been the most uncomfortable afternoon of their political lives during this year’s July First memorial march.  The route is well-travelled:  2.5 miles along the main thoroughfare from Victoria Park and the Causeway Bay shopping district to Hong Kong government headquarters downtown. Protestors walk this route several times a year for various causes.  But July First is a new tradition, commemorating the unexpected upsurge of public anger in 2003 when at least half-a-million people turned out in protest against the government’s proposed mainland-style national security legislation. 

           July First is the anniversary of Hong Kong’s 1997 return to Chinese rule and the legislation is mandated by Article 23 of the new Basic Law constitution, despite its promise of one-country two-systems autonomy.   In 2003, the size and temper of the crowd shocked government leaders both in Hong Kong and Beijing.  They had assumed the pre-1997 movement led by the Democratic Party was dead because it seemed unable to adapt to an unfriendly executive authority after losing the favored status enjoyed during the last heady years of democracy-building under British rule.  Taking the party’s place in 2003 was a new generation of activists from a wide variety of groups, already cynical about professional politicians but not yet about populist causes.  The legislation had to be shelved when the pro-business Liberal Party lost its nerve and, after asking Beijing’s permission, withdrew support for the government’s bill.  

             Since then, activists have vowed to march each year on July First welcoming all groups and causes willing to support the general demand for democratic institutions that will “return power to the people.”  The Democratic Party accepted its place as one of many who joined the annual trek, except that this year was different.  In 2009, marchers were united in anticipation of the coming debate on political reform and the main rallying cry was “struggle for universal suffrage.”  This year the Democratic Party was the target of everyone’s wrath for having betrayed that promise by accepting what is widely seen within the democracy movement as a sorry substitute (June 26 post).

           Throughout the entire four-hour march, in 90-degree heat with humidity to match, the party’s contingent had to endure a continuous barrage of taunts, insults, and rude gestures from bystanders and fellow marchers alike.  Because tempers were already running high, party leaders had agreed to follow at the back of the line-up to minimize disruption in case of violence but, by prior agreement among protesters, there was none. 

              Instead, young people moved into the line of march just ahead of the party’s contingent, forcing it to walk behind critical placards, banners, and much street theatre mockery depicting among other things the party’s dove/pigeon mascot having its feathers plucked in Beijing.  The (pro-Beijing) DAB may be shameless but the Democratic Party is the “lowest of the low,” read one sign; “sell-out,” proclaimed many others, plus much worse.  And following close behind bringing up the rear was the radical League of Social Democrats (LSD) with the largest loudest most critical contingent of all.  

           Finally, collection boxes reinforced the message.  These events always double as fundraisers with stalls set up by different groups and parties all along the route.   The Democratic Party’s share was down 85%:  HK$45,000 compared to $300,000 last year.  The LSD took in the most: $260,000; its Civic Party ally, $200,000, both up over 2009 (Apple Daily, July 3).  Money boxes, of course, point the way forward and so did the morning-after editorial in the conservatively democratic Hong Kong Economic Journal:  “Don’t Curse the Democratic Party; Teach It a Lesson at the Ballot Box.”   More ominous for the movement as a whole, however, turnout reflected the general sense of disappointment and defeat.  By the organizers’ estimate, marchers were down from 76,000 in 2009, to about 52,000 this year.

 THE PARTY’S MISCALCULATION

            Of all the Democratic Party’s mistakes and misfortunes since 1997, this is surely the worst because its leaders  –  and 80% of the 300+ voting members at the June 21-22 general meeting that approved acceptance of the government’s amended reform package — seemed genuinely perplexed at the outcry their decision provoked.  Defensive and unrepentant, they rejected the charge of betrayal by reminding everyone of their lifelong devotion to the cause.  It was the same flaw first noticed a decade ago:  the party’s apparent inability to think beyond the number of seats it could win at the next election, firm in the belief that what was good for the party was good for democratic development.      

            Increasingly out-of-touch with the popular movement it once led, Democrats not only refused to participate in the five-district referendum campaign but then, like the government, failed to appreciate the popular support it had generated — until too late.  By the time referendum leader Audrey Eu won an overwhelming vote of public confidence in her June 17 debate with Chief Executive Donald Tsang (June 18 post), the Democratic Party had already conceded all but one of its original negotiating positions.  Included among them were the demands, common to all pan-democrats, for some proof that Beijing meant to allow genuine universal suffrage and abolition of the Functional Constituencies. 

         In fact, the party had just renewed its pledge along with the others in a June 4 decision:  all 23 democratic legislators would veto the government’s package if those conditions were not met along with one additional modification (South China Morning Post, June 5, Ming Pao Daily, June 8).   But on the day of the debate it was reported that Democratic Party leaders had just decided they were prepared to jettison everything except the one modification:  to expand the electorate for the five new Functional Constituencies in the government’s plan.  (Ming Pao Daily, HK Economic Journal, June 17).   Instead of being nominated and chosen by the 400 District Councilors from among their own number as the government proposed, the general public would be allowed to vote on the District Councilors so nominated.   

           Hence when Beijing leaders did their U-turn the day after the debate, they were conceding only that one point.   As it happens, the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) and its allies now have majorities on all but two of the 18 District Councils. The original government proposal had been designed to benefit these majorities.   Among pan-democrats, however, only the Democratic Party has a substantial representation at this level.   Yet party members keep asking what they have sold out, seemingly oblivious to their own original demands, the popular expectations that had built up around them, and the self-serving nature of the bargain they struck.

          Even so, their about face might not have provoked so much anger  had party leaders and members responded, dare we say, more democratically.  Instead they dismissed the initial outcry as if they were already part of the ruling establishment and could scarcely care less what anyone else thought.  They did not even bother to clarify the specifics of their final negotiating position until after the June 23-25 Legislative Council motion debate (June 25 Q & A press release, Chinese only, http://www.dphk.org/?p=5894).   And only after being forced to run the four-hour gauntlet of verbal abuse on July First did the Democratic Party finally promise to issue a report on its negotiations with Beijing in order to answer the charge of undercover deals reached behind closed doors.

WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?

        Eventually it should be possible to piece together a more coherent picture of what was in Democratic Party minds when they made their decisions. The party’s 45-page report, released on July 8, is essentially a chronicle of meetings with mainland officials that have already been widely reported in the local press (Chinese only, http://www.dphk.org/?p=6034).  The moderate Alliance for Universal Suffrage is also preparing an account of its work.  The full transcript of the June 23-25 Legislative Council debate will soon be uploaded on the council website (first in Chinese and later in English translation http://www.legco.gov.hk/general/english/counmtg/yr08-12/mtg_0910.htm#100623).   Since party leaders continue to insist that they will continue to work for universal suffrage, it will be up to them to explain how they plan to do so.   

             Meanwhile, what few statements they have made suggest they were thinking about much more than the government’s political reform package.  They were thinking major political realignment and it was a calculated decision.  Democratic Party Vice-chair Emily Lau, for example, had built her 20-year political career on open defiance of Beijing.    So clear was her stand that everyone just assumed when she joined the Democratic Party in late 2008 that she would provide its middle-aged overweight leaders with a much-needed boost of political energy.   She also lived up to expectations at countless events during the past year where she always forcefully declared her determination to fight for universal suffrage guarantees. 

          After the decision to support the government’s reform package was announced, however, she did a 180-degree turn and told startled journalists:  “We are urging the public to place our trust in Beijing” (SCMP, June 21).  Later, in her Legislative Council speech on June 23, she did at least acknowledge the turnaround and accepted responsibility for supporting a reform package that contained no guarantees.  But then she went on to issue a perfunctory apology and invited all who didn’t like it to vote for someone else in the next election (Ming Pao Daily, June 24). 

            On the same day, she also made a point of greeting pro-government supporters who had been bused in and provisioned for a three-day occupation of the garden area behind the Legislative Council building while the June 23-25 debate continued.  The aim was to deprive pro-democracy protestors of access to the site where Lau welcomed the cheers and thanks of their opponents for abandoning her erstwhile supporters’ demands (Ming Pao Daily, SCMP, June 24).

         After the July First march, Democratic Party chairman Albert Ho spoke at some length as if to confirm his about-face for those who still could not believe it.  He used the stock government phrase that democracy is about more than just one-person one-vote, called for tolerance, accused his critics of dogmatism, and said he wanted no part of such illiberal democracy.  He said the party had changed its strategy and expected to lose some voters, but the aim was to expand democracy’s base of support by appealing to the silent middle-ground majority. Nor did he hesitate to acknowledge the specific advantages he hoped to gain.  He anticipated that the changed political landscape would produce dividends for his party in the coming 2011 District Council elections (Apple Daily, SCMP, July 3; HK Economic Journal, July 2, 3-4).

           In any event, his party’s money problems are now over because the new strategy will take him to a place of limitless supply.  Thumbing his nose at critics who gleefully reported the party’s meager take from its July First collection boxes, long-time legislator Lee Wing-tat announced that upon reading the reports one sympathizer wrote a check for HK$155,000 to help make up the shortfall.    Now that the pressure for Functional Constituency reform has eased, there will be plenty more big-check rewards where that first one came from.  Democrats will be able to travel comfort class along with Liberal Party members and pro-Beijing loyalists who are never seen soliciting pocket change at street corner fundraisers.

Update:  Still trying …       While Chief Executive Donald Tsang was mending fences with DAB leaders at a Sunday barbecue, Democratic Party chairman Albert Ho was the target of yet another roasting by angry constituents.  DAB leaders are unhappy about the derailing of their neat indirect election plan that would have allowed District Councilors to leapfrog into the Legislative Council without having to face its wider electorate.

          At the other end of the political spectrum, about 50 irate democrats dominated a three-hour question-and-answer session hosted by the Alliance for Universal Suffrage and the Democratic Party.  This July 11 open public forum was the first of several being planned to explain their moderate compromise.  Questioners doubted that the party had ever been sincere in its pledges to achieve the goals of universal suffrage and abolish the old Functional Constituencies.  They also doubted the sincerity of Beijing’s promise to allow universal suffrage elections in 2017 (for the Chief Executive) and 2020 (for the legislature).

           Albert Ho was the chief target but he could only repeat his disbelief at the sell-out charge, and reaffirm his commitment to the goals.  When asked how they might be achieved, he repeated the problematic logic of the main moderate plan, which concerns only the legislature.  Accordingly, the number of Legislative Council seats should be increased until those filled by some kind of a wider electorate will be in the majority.  The plan assumes that this majority will then be able, and willing, to eliminate the 30 old Functional Constituencies, which are meanwhile to remain unchanged.  But in order to achieve this goal, the size of Hong Kong’s legislature will have to be increased from the current 60 seats to 100 in 2020, and a two-thirds majority vote will be needed at every step of the way (fullest accounts: HK Economic Journal, Apple Daily, July 12).  Why a city of 7 million people will otherwise need 100 reprentatives in an executive-led system with a largely powerless legislature has yet to be discussed.

 comments, questions:  suzpepper@gmail.com

       Everyone can breathe a sigh of relief.   Chief Executive Donald Tsang may have lost his debate with leading democracy advocate Audrey Eu but he won the day by allying with her moderate Democratic Party opponents to broker a compromise that saved his political reform package from certain defeat.  Beijing, for its part, can now correctly claim that Hong Kong has accepted its protracted timetable for universal suffrage elections without any guarantees or definitions as to just what Beijing means by “universal suffrage.”  And last but not least, foreign diplomats who have been fretting for months over the potential for political instability here can now report back to their ministries that the crisis has been averted – for now.

           Two days after the June 17 debate, Beijing did a sudden about-face and approved the Democratic Party’s latest counter-proposal after repeated rejections.  An amended version of the government’s political reform package incorporating the compromise was approved by the Legislative Council in a two-part motion on June 24 and 25.  The vote was:  46 to 13 for Chief Executive (CE) election reform; 46 to 12 for the amended Legislative Council (Legco) changes.  Donald Tsang had votes to spare above the two-thirds super-majority 40 needed to guarantee passage. 

          Dissenters included Civic Party and League of Social Democrats (LSD) legislators plus one recently-resigned ex-Democratic Party member. The 13^th vote during the second round would have been cast by “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung (LSD) who was escorted from the chamber for disruptive behavior and did not return when the final division was called.

             In fact, little has been settled.  A full-blown crisis may have been averted, but the disruptive potential is limitless since the bill was passed on the basis of an 11^th-hour compromise the details and implications of which were not even debated by all members of the democratic camp much less explained to the community at large.  

THE GOVERNMENT’S PROPOSALS

               To recap:  the original reform package dealt only with the coming 2012 elections.  It proposed to increase the size of the CE Election Committee from 800 members to 1,200 and the size of Legco from 60 seats to 70, but without changing the conservative design of either body.  The council is currently composed of 30 directly-elected legislators and 30 elected by special-interest Functional Constituencies (FC).  The potential electorate of the former is 3.4 million registered voters.  The FCs are elected by only 220,000 individuals (Nov. 23/09 post).  Democratic legislators voted down a similar set of government proposals in 2005.

             The government’s package provoked controversy especially on three points.  First, there was no indication as to how the promised goal of full universal suffrage elections for both the CE and Legco was to be achieved by 2017 and 2020, respectively, in accordance with a timetable Beijing announced in December 2007. The shorthand local term for this problem is lack of a roadmap, which Audrey Eu mentioned repeatedly during her debate with Tsang.  Second, the existing 28 FCs were frozen. Not a single reform measure was proposed for their design or composition despite multiple defects that critics spelled out in great detail (April 16 post).

          Third, the 10 new Legco seats were to be divided equally between the geographic constituencies for direct election, and indirectly-elected FCs.  But the five new FCs were different from the existing FCs based on trades, occupations, and special interests.  The new FC seats would be filled by indirect election, that is, by the 400+ members of Hong Kong’s 18 District Councils.  These are advisory bodies devoted to local neighborhood amenities.

              For reasons spelled out elsewhere, these District Councils are now dominated by the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), known in private but never acknowledged in public as the Chinese Communist Party-Hong Kong branch (March 31 post).   The five new seats were effectively being handed to the DAB and its allies as a free pass into Legco without having to face the general electorate.  The precedent for such indirect CCP-dominated elections based on small constituencies at the lowermost level is the mainland People’s Congress system, although the new FCs were not promoted in those terms.

THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY COMPROMISE

         Initially, late last year when pan-democrats split into moderates and radicals (the latter term is already falling out of use here due to official attempts to demonize “progressive activists”), Democratic Party leaders and their partners were still pressing for answers on the three main points at issue.  But from the start, moderates tended to phrase their demands in contradictory terms leaving the impression that they were uncertain as to what their demands should be.  Radicals mocked them as “hula dancers,” constantly swaying one way and then another.  

           For example, moderates were adamant that “we will never compromise our principles.”  Yet some periodically said they would be satisfied with a simple statement indicating that Beijing’s intentions for “ultimate” universal suffrage were “genuine.”   Moderates seemed not to realize that Beijing could easily provide such a statement, which it eventually did, without defining what it actually meant by universal suffrage.

            This was in marked contrast to Audrey Eu’s Civic Party and its LSD ally.  The two parties launched their five-district referendum campaign on the basis of clear demands for the abolition of all FCs and the guarantee of one-person-one-vote in elections that allow equal voting rights for all.  Still, moderates did usually say they wanted to get rid of the old FCs and find ways of making the government’s plan for the new ones “more democratic.”  The Democratic Party, as the dominant member of the Universal Suffrage Alliance, also called for negotiations with official Beijing representatives and this demand materialized in May.

          Beijing nevertheless refused to budge on any of the three points except to issue a vague definition of universal suffrage that could be applied both to mainland-style Communist Party-dominated elections and their Western-style counterparts (Qiao Xiaoyang statement, Wen Wei Po, South China Morning Post, June .   The Democratic Party was nevertheless key to finding a solution since the party had nine Legislative Councilors (now reduced to eight).  Donald Tsang could always count on 36 pro-government votes and he needed only four more to produce the necessary two-thirds majority in the 60-seat council.

            Ultimately, besides the definitional problem, party leaders also abandoned demands for abolition of the old FCs and concentrated solely on election arrangements for the five new FC seats.  This was evidently undertaken without any discussion of their future evolution much less that of the electoral system as a whole.  The party’s final bottom-line bargaining position was a proposal to open up all the five new FC seats to the entire 3.4 million electorate, minus the 220,000 individuals registered to vote in the old FCs.  The 400 directly-elected District Councilors would nominate the candidates but would otherwise not be able to determine the outcome.   No other details of the agreement are available.  Specific electoral arrangements including constituency size, nominating procedures, and voting methods are yet to be decided. 

          Initially, Beijing refused to accept this Democratic Party counter-proposal, the DAB lobbied hard against it, and all 23 pan-democratic legislators joined in declaring they were set to veto the package.   On June 14, the chief publicity official at Beijing’s Liaison Office in Hong Kong put down the Democratic Party’s counter-proposal with a dismissive Chinese phrase.  He said the plan was as inappropriate as “adding feet when drawing a snake.”  It seemed to spell doom for the government’s package and this was the state of affairs as of June 17 when the Tsang-Eu debate took place.  According to reports afterward, national leaders decided the next day to approve the counter-proposal, fearing an upsurge of “radical” democratic influence in Hong Kong if the official reform plan was again vetoed.  Donald Tsang had also warned them of this likely outcome (Ming Pao Daily, South China Morning Post, June 22).   

         Chinese and Hong Kong government leaders saw a threat, similar to the angry public mood that derailed their national security legislation in July 2003, and acted to defuse the emerging crisis.   Hong Kong’s two-pronged radical/moderate strategy may have been a messy exercise in democracy movement politicking.  But the overwhelming public response to Audrey Eu’s strong demand for a universal suffrage roadmap, in combination with the Democratic Party’s insistence on a less threatening alternative, produced the unexpected Beijing turnaround.  Far from hindering that result, the effect of the much-lamented split between radicals and moderates created the conditions necessary for a successful outcome.

          The real moral of this story, however, is that it is possible to push back against Beijing and the growing pressure for mainland-style political integration.  This sequence has now occurred twice including the decision to shelve the national security legislation in July 2003.  These “victories” were tentative and partial, and both required a prodigious amount of volunteer community engagement that may be difficult to sustain over time.  But they are victories nonetheless.

IMPLICATIONS

           News of Beijing’s U-turn broke on Sunday morning, June 20.   The regular Sunday noontime City Forum broadcast from Victoria Park was reduced to a shouting match and Democratic Party chairman, Albert Ho, had to be escorted from the scene by police.  More angry protests disrupted the mid-afternoon Universal Suffrage Alliance pep rally where the speeches of some of Hong Kong’s most respected democracy movement leaders were interrupted by cries of betrayal.

            A Democratic Party general meeting nevertheless endorsed the agreement early Tuesday morning after a heated five-hour debate and the deed was done.  The meeting also vetoed the suggestion raised by party elder Martin Lee for a two-week delay before the final Legco vote to allow time for public discussion of the compromise. Two of the party’s legislators were opposed to the deal because it violates the promises they made to their constituents but the party’s internal rules forbid independent voting.  One has resigned and others including Martin Lee are now considering whether or not to do the same.

          At first glance and especially from the perspective of pan-democrats’ year-long campaign for universal suffrage, the losses are enormous.  Probably, this was the last chance for democrats to have a significant impact on the course of Hong Kong’s political evolution.  That evolution is limited by the Basic Law and a legislative design, which relegates them to permanent minority status.  Conservative business interests have been lobbying intensely for an end to the threat of FC abolition and they, too, can breathe a sigh of relief because the threat has now been effectively removed.  This means the fight for “genuine” Western-style universal suffrage elections is probably lost and the most Hong Kong can hope for is some muddling variant of the mainland system.

         The Democratic Party claimed after the compromise was announced that Donald Tsang had misrepresented  its intent at his June 21  media briefing. His office, too, issued a clarification.  The party had not given up the struggle for universal suffrage, abolition of FCs, and so on. But Tsang could hardly be blamed for the misunderstanding.  Everyone else “misunderstood” as well since it is difficult to see how the party can do more than pay lip service to the struggle and raise non-binding motions in Legco that are invariably defeated by its conservative majority.

          One-time firebrand and now Democratic Party vice-chair, Emily Lau, is again threatening resignation if democratic principles are violated.  She did this several times during the campaign and fellow democrats put faith in her reputation.  Now she is addressing fears that the specific electoral arrangements for the five new FC seats will be designed to favor the people they were meant to benefit in the first place.  But after all the back-downs and side-stepping during the past six months, she had better find something she can actually resign over, or stop threatening, or her credibility will be lost for sure. 

           Concerning those new electoral arrangements, the legislation necessary to set up the new FC elections will be an ordinary bill and pan-democrats’ 23-seat minority veto power will not apply.  So if Lau wants a fair shake for her candidates she is going to have to ask the DAB’s permission since they and their allies control 36 seats in the 60-seat chamber.  Similarly, in the new 70-seat 2012 Legco, the most pan-democrats can win will be about 28 seats (including two if they are lucky from the new District Council FCs and three from the five new directly-elected seats).

          As for the Democratic Party itself, if past voting behavior is any guide it will lose support in the coming District Council and Legco elections.  But the party has weathered such storms before and moderate conservatives may rally to its side.  More important is the damage to a reputation already tarnished by years of ineffectual temporizing and a seeming inability to think beyond the number of seats Democratic Party candidates can win in the next election.   During the year-long universal suffrage campaign, for example, the party twice fumbled major opportunities and is seen within the democratic camp to have done so for narrow self-serving reasons that disregarded larger principles. 

           First the party miscalculated and assumed the five-district referendum would actually be contested by all as in a regular election.  This would have risked losing not just the one seat the Democratic Party contributed to the campaign, but votes its supporters might give to other more dynamic democratic candidates in other districts and neglect to return in the next election.  The decision was understandable at the time but it was a miscalculation all the same and made the rationale seem even worse in retrospect since the party had also refused to help out with referendum campaigning until a few days before the election.

            Compounding one decision with another, the Democratic Party then failed to acknowledge the community-wide support the referendum campaign had generated for its critique of the reform package.  As a result, party negotiators Albert Ho and Emily Lau failed to represent those community views by building some conditions for future political evolution into their counter-proposal.  The compromise deal was also struck without any recognition of the precedent for indirect election of legislators by District Councilors that is still being set despite the participation of a territory-wide electorate. 

           Nor did the underlying rationale make the compromise deal, without any hint of a roadmap, more acceptable to other democrats.  This is because the compromise will benefit primarily the Democratic Party’s own members, whose lackluster record at the district level is known to all. Other parties are too small to maintain district level organizations and have never really tried to do so.  The Democratic Party’s  wipe-out in the last, 2007, District Councils election should therefore be seen in retrospect as a blessing in disguise.  Without it the party might not have been so insistent on opening up the small District Council constituencies, which have come to exepct the kinds of neighborhood entertainments and amenities that only the DAB can afford to provide.

POTENTIAL GAINS 

          Losses aside, the “District Councils plan” has been diluted even if its provenance was never really acknowledged by anyone.  Only a few commentators noted in passing that such indirect elections are patterned on “the mainland way,” in oblique reference to the People’s Congress system. This is based on direct elections in small constituencies beneath the county level and indirect elections above that allow CCP-domination throughout the system.  

         It was also mentioned in passing by a few officials that they actually did have a roadmap in mind.  The idea, they said, was to replace all the old FCs with new FCs meaning legislators indirectly elected by DAB-dominated District Councilors.  That idea, which was essentially an attempt to finesse an old-fashioned takeover-from-below strategy, has now been nipped in the bud by the compromise solution.   Yet incredibly, some leading moderates including both Democratic Party leaders and academics are still unaware that the mainland system is arranged in this way or that it was the precedent for a future roadmap drawn to the DAB’s specifications.  The Democratic Party’s compromise will allow more time to demand more information about such insiders’ stratagems.

        Finally, there is one larger potential gain that is tied to the one untarnished link the Democratic Party has maintained with its pre-1997 past as standard bearer for Hong Kong’s democracy movement.  Those were the days when young democratic idealists were dreaming big dreams about serving as a model for mainland political reform.  Democratic Party Chairman Albert Ho has remained a committed member of the Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China that sponsors the annual June Fourth vigil commemorating the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.  He also remains an inveterate campaigner for mainland dissidents and their civil liberties.  He and Emily Lau now head the Hong Kong-based China Human Rights Lawyers Concern Group that demonstrates regularly in support of imprisoned Chinese lawyers.

        For these reasons, Beijing officials had refused all direct contact with the Democratic Party.  The negotiations that Albert Ho demanded over Hong Kong’s political reform package marked the first break in that frozen relationship since 1989.  He has acknowledged that Beijing officials pressed the party to distance itself from the Tiananmen issue and says he told them it was non-negotiable.  Yet they did not break off the renewed contact.

            What future price the Democratic Party may be asked to pay in return for the thaw remains to be seen.  But the old dream and the possibility of continuing his dissident-support work with the tacit acceptance of mainland authorities must have weighed in the balance of calculations that led Albert Ho to settle for the flawed bargain he struck over Hong Kong’s political reform.  Hopefully the commitment will help to sharpen his negotiating skills for the next big battle to come.  This will be the national/political security legislation, set to make its reappearance probably during the 2012-2016 legislature and as he knows well, that is where the real danger lies.  But pan-democrats also know that Democratic Party members stood on the sidelines in 2003 while activist lawyers, who later formed the Civic Party, took the lead in drafting arguments and spearheading opposition to the goernment’s national security bill.

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         What a difference a decade of political reform can make.  The thought of Hong Kong’s first post-colonial Chief Executive challenging someone to debate his policies would have been dismissed as a joke had anyone suggested it.  Chris Patten, Hong Kong’s last British governor (1992-1997), introduced question time in the Legislative Council as part of his better-late-than-never push to update a political culture frozen by 150 years of autocratic colonial rule.   Not everyone appreciated the new custom of course and his post-1997 successor, businessman Tung Chee-hwa (1997-2005), was among them.   Tung could barely muster the courage for his infrequent appearances before the council much less a monthly exchange with political critics.                

            Nor could Tung’s successor, Donald Tsang, disguise his nerves when the newly formed Civic Party decided to put up a challenger in 2007, demanding to participate in what is essentially an appointment procedure.  A specially designed 800-member Election Committee, heavily weighted with conservatives, endorses Beijing’s preferred candidate for Chief Executive under Hong Kong’s post-1997 system.   Although Tsang was a career civil servant, trained in his day to avoid all extemporaneous discourse, he accepted the challenge by lawyer Alan Leong for Hong Kong’s first-ever such debate, in March 2007, before a local television audience of over two million.

         Tsang is still not known for his public speaking skills but the unexpected demand for a debate with Civic Party leader Audrey Eu was an indication of how much Hong Kong has changed.  Eu led her party into the May 16 five-district referendum campaign, which despite being declared a “failure” mobilized half-a-million voters in protest against the government’s latest political reform package. Tsang saw the debate as his last chance to neutralize the public opposition she can now claim to represent (May 17and June 7 posts). 

         The package deals only with the coming 2012 elections.  It proposes to increase the size of the Chief Executive (CE) Election Committee from 800 members to 1,200, and the size of the Legislative Council (Legco) from 60 seats to 70, but without changing the conservative design of either body. The council is currently composed of 30 directly elected legislators and 30 elected by special-interest Functional Constituencies (FCs).  Nor is there any indication as to how the promised goal of full universal suffrage elections for both the CE and Legco is to be achieved by 2017 and 2020, respectively, in accordance with Beijing’s mandated timetable (Nov. 23/09 post).

          Attempts by the moderate Alliance for Universal Suffrage and the Democratic Party to negotiate concessions from Beijing have so far yielded no result.  As of now, all 23 pan-democratic legislators have agreed to veto the proposals if they remain unchanged.  Since all constitutional changes need a “super-majority” of 40 votes in the 60-seat Legislative Council to pass, Tsang’s package seems headed for defeat although Democratic Party leaders are continuing to press for last minute concessions.  The vote is scheduled for June 23.

THE DEBATE

         Following strict rules negotiated beforehand, the June 17 debate was actually little more than a glorified 55-minute question-and-answer session.  The Civic Party wanted a live audience in some non-official setting but had to accept Tsang’s terms or nothing at all:  a conference room at government headquarters, television only, no live audience, no journalists, no English, no simultaneous translation service except for the 30 designated media representatives crowded into side rooms, and no Chinese-character

sub-texting for non-Cantonese speakers.  The stiff format included opening and closing statements, plus a total of 10 questions Tsang and Eu asked each other, and six selected at random from among those submitted in advance by the public.  The Civic Party had also solicited questions from the public for Audrey Eu to ask.

           There were no surprises since both Tsang and Eu stuck to the scripts they have been using throughout. He said even slow progress toward the goal of universal suffrage was better than no progress and blamed democrats for vetoing a similar package in 2005.  She mocked the government’s publicity efforts, one of which likened political reform to a school girl’s dancing dress.  Eu said no progress was better than taking a false step since political reform was a serious matter and once the step was taken there would be no turning back.

         Tsang seemed genuinely oblivious to the contradiction between equal and universal suffrage that democrats want and the small-circle restrictive formulas on offer.  Eu asked whether Beijing’s promise of universal suffrage elections in 2017 and 2020 was not really “written on water.”  He said of course it was not.  Then where is the roadmap to prove it, she asked.  He said he had provided one in the form of his 2012 package and went on to defend indirect elections with arguments he had learned as a colonial official in the 1980s and 1990s when electoral reforms were just beginning.

         In fact, something from all the administrations he has served could be seen in Tsang’s performance and the publicity campaign that preceded it.  But the elements of old-style British colonial, new-style reformist, and official Beijing were put together in a mix that seemed as dysfunctional as his administration has now become.  In particular, mainland-style rhetorical flourishes and sarcastic accusations do not go down well with the general public.  A snap Hong Kong University poll immediately afterward gave the debate hands down to Audrey Eu:  71% to 15% (http://hkupop.hku.hk/).*

QUESTIONS NOT ASKED

            Most fascinating to watch, however, was the art of political shadow-boxing that both participants have mastered, as has everyone here who indulges in public discourse.  Political sensitivity is only one of the reasons for this style of evasion and avoidance, common everywhere but more so here and now.  It follows that the most important points in the debate were those that should have been raised but were not.  

          Controversy has focused on the official proposals for the Legislative Council that leave the existing 28 special-interest Functional Constituencies (FCs) in tact and unreformed while adding five new FC seats to be indirectly elected by 400 District Councilors.  Yet throughout the consultation period that has been ongoing since last November, and throughout this closing debate, no one asked or tried to answer some basic questions:  Where did the “District Councils plan” originate?  Why has it been reintroduced now after being voted down in 2005?  What are the precedents for such a method of indirect election?  Who is promoting it now?  Who stands to benefit? And what does it mean for the ultimate goal of universal suffrage?

           Pan-democrats, including both moderates and radicals, poured all their intellectual energy into critiquing the old special-interest FCs without realizing that the government’s reform plan was actually laying the groundwork for their abolition by replacing them with the new FCs.   In this way, officials and pan-democrats proceeded as they usually do, like ships passing in the night.  The government at least has an excuse since Beijing mandated that the future post-2012 roadmap could not be revealed or discussed at this time.  Yet many hints were dropped along the way that pan-democrats might have picked up on and used to their advantage.  Instead, they too, in effect, accepted Beijing’s rules and worked within the framework laid down.  

          Official rhetoric also made much of the 2017 date for electing the Chief Executive by universal suffrage, a “great prize” it was said that should not be lost by rejecting the government’s proposals.  But that election was almost totally ignored.  Never discussed was the unrepresentative nature of the Election Committee design, which produces an overwhelming majority of conservative members from among Hong Kong’s political and economic establishments.   Since these questions were never addressed, neither were the partisan implications of the official reform package, or its long-term political significance, or institutional antecedents.   The general public has been left to guess, intuit, and fill in the blanks as best it can with a predictable impact on the battle for public opinion. 

PUBLIC RESPONSES

          Officials have continued to cite their own internal opinion polls claiming to show 50-60% support for the government’s reform package.   These polls are conducted under the guidance of the government’s Central Policy Unit think-tank and its director Lau Siu-kai, Chinese University professor emeritus.  Prof. Lau is famous for the conservative bent of his surveys.  These always seem to reflect his tradition-bound assumption about the public’s political apathy and the results have been used by successive administrations to justify conservative policy decisions dating back to the mid-1980s.   Independent polls reflect contradictions that might also be interpreted as apathy, but more likely reflect the nebulous nature of political discourse that derives in part from the official assumptions!

         Back in February  when the government’s official three-month consultation period on the reform package was ending, 70% of those responding to a Hong Kong University poll felt they understood little about the reforms (HKU POP release, Feb. 8:   http://hkupop.hku.hk/ ).    In early June, after countless public discussion meetings, weekend street corner forums, radio talk-shows, rallies, marches, the five-district referendum campaign, and saturation coverage in some newspapers, 65% still felt they knew little about the reforms (HKU POP release, June 14; poll conducted June 8-10).

          Of all the findings, this remains the most encouraging since it suggests that the general public understands that it does not understand and will recognize a convincing argument when it hears one.  The finding also suggests that the official attempt to introduce electoral arrangements the political implications of which are known to only a select few insiders is not going to be as easy as some evidently assumed.

         But for now, the information gap has produced large numbers of uncertain replies and inexplicable contradictory responses.  In the latest (June 8-10) HKU poll, 41% supported the CE reform proposal and 43% opposed, the latter up a full 10 percentage points since mid-April.  Yet 49% felt the proposal should be passed by Legco; 42% said veto and 9% were undecided.

           On the District Councils plan for indirectly electing legislators, opinion was tied at 43% for and against, with 14% either ambivalent or undecided.  Yet 49% felt the proposal should be passed; 41% said veto; 10% couldn’t decide.

           A Baptist University Transition Project poll, conducted between May 6 and 15, asked somewhat different questions and found even more contradictions (www.hktp.org).  Overall, the results were 42% to 41% for and against the package, respectively, with 16% undecided.   But when asked if the government’s plan was acceptable to them personally, 45% said yes, and only 33% said no; 22% were neutral.   On the statement that since the government always holds fake consultations, pan-democrats should reject the plan:  46% agreed, 34% did not, and 20% were neutral.   Yet a great majority (60%) also felt that pan-democrats should compromise to pass reform!

* The final tally from the full HKU poll reported by some papers was 76%:14%.  Another poll conducted by Lingnan University reported 67%:14%.  Ming Pao Daily, June 18, provided the fullest account of the debate.

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           Turnout rates are reported throughout Election Day evenings in Hong Kong, so optimism began to flag even before the polls closed on May 16.  Radical democrats, so-called, had dared to defy Beijing and were now paying the price, mild by comparison with the treatment of dissenters elsewhere in China but a reminder of Hong Kong’s shrinking political space nonetheless.  The immediate cost to participants was not great.  More important was the impact on a democracy movement that has sustained itself for 20 years in an increasingly hostile environment and can still look forward to little chance of success.  This election provided a sudden clear snapshot of the accumulating toll that usually goes unnoticed amid the routine altercations of day-to-day political life.

IMMEDIATE COSTS

           Five pro-democracy legislators had staged their resignation/referendum exercise as a gesture of protest against the pace and scope of political reform decreed by the central government in Beijing.  The idea was that one Legislative Councilor from each of Hong Kong’s five election districts would resign together in order to trigger  territory-wide special elections.  The ex-legislators could then campaign to regain their seats and focus public attention directly on the government’s latest package of lackluster political reform proposals.  Voters could have their say and the government would get the message (May 17 post). 

           Since most of Hong Kong’s democratic parties and activists ultimately decided not to join what initially seemed a risky adventure, its Civic Party and League of Social Democrats (LSD) leaders were dubbed “radicals” while everyone else became by definition “moderate.”  In good radical campaign-style, promoters at first let their hopes soar and began by speculating on the possibility of a 50% turnout rate, which was just within the realm of possibility.  Since 1991 when direct elections for the Legislative Council began, only two regular polls and one special election (in 1998, 2004, and 2007 respectively) registered turnout rates above 50%.   Special circumstances had provoked voters in each case but referendum promoters dared to hope their cause would be similarly rewarded. 

          One tactical mistake was not to have been more forthright in readjusting their own measure of success once friend and foe alike decided to boycott their project.  Not only did the Democratic Party with its nine legislators refuse to participate; it also refused to help with campaigning and canvassing.  The second blow was administered by Beijing.  Once officials declared the de facto referendum a de facto violation of the Basic Law, all pro-Beijing and pro-business candidates also stood down.

          At that point, with no foil for debate and no backup for support, the exercise became little more than a mock election and public information campaign.  Participants carried on as energetically as if it had been the real thing but in continuing to call for a symbolic high turnout, they set themselves up for the letdown that followed.     Somber faces and downcast poses were fitting illustrations beneath banner headlines proclaiming their disappointment with the17% turnout rate.  It was the lowest on record just as pollsters had predicted.  And there was worse to come.

          The most derisive responses naturally came from those who had never supported the exercise.  “Great defeat for the referendum,” gloated the pro-Beijing Wen Wei Po.   The central and Hong Kong governments together with the general public had united to “draw a clear line” between moderates and radicals (May 18).  Special scorn was heaped on Audrey Eu, Civic Party leader and spokesperson for the referendum campaign, who was caricatured as its evil genius.  Columnists mocked her mercilessly as a gambler, clown, self-anointed goddess of democracy, and blue-blooded elitist who had led her party into an alliance with wild-eyed LSD radicals (May 18, 21).

           The establishment-oriented South China Morning Post and its columnists echoed similar sentiments. “Blow to pan-democrats,” declared the May 17 morning after headline, and a “misconceived stunt that did nothing for democracy” (May 18).   Commentator Michael Chugani had called it a “great folly” beforehand (May 10) and a load of “bull” afterward (May 19).  Frank Ching lauded the government’s reform package as a “great feat,” dismissed the referendum as farce (May 10), and derided as “weird” pan-democrats opposition to the package (May 24).  Retired colonial official Mike Rowse was scathing in public forums and in print beforehand (Feb. 1).  Afterward, he too targeted Audrey Eu:  “top female politician gambles big and loses spectacularly” (June 1).

DYNAMICS OF DEFEAT

         Verdicts so extravagantly proclaimed are obviously targeting something more significant than a farce and the consequences of this one will take at least until the 2012 Legislative Council election to be registered in full.  But even sympathetic by-standers chided the two parties for not admitting defeat.  Their leading champion had no such reservations, however.  “Admit failure,” declared Apple Daily, “absorb the lessons” (May 19).  These were threefold. 

           First, the election was not really a referendum and many voters did not understand why legislators should resign only to seek re-election.  Such people accepted the government’s line that the exercise was a meaningless waste of public funds.   Second, the pan-democratic camp was not united and the two referendum parties did not do enough to build consensus before announcing their plans.  In the end, others did come out to campaign but their help was half-hearted.   Third, the two parties essentially ran separate campaigns and did not design an effective joint response to the establishment’s coordinated attacks against them.

A Popular Mandate

          Gains were as obvious as failures, however, and the government responded with uncharacteristic speed.  Chief Executive Donald Tsang challenged Audrey Eu to an unprecedented television debate, which she promptly accepted.  The turnout may have been a disappointing 17% but in absolute numbers that amounted to 579,000 voters who defied Beijing, the Hong Kong government, and an avalanche of ridicule to participate in the “meaningless farce.”  Of that number, a higher than usual percentage of blank ballots were cast (19,000), which signified disapproval of the exercise.  But that still left over half-a-million sympathetic voters since the fringe candidates were all democracy advocates.

           Conservative critics wondered why Donald Tsang had bestowed recognition on Audrey Eu in this way when he had denied the legitimacy of her referendum.  But he recognized what they did not.  She was no longer just the spokesperson for a failed election.  Audrey Eu could now claim to have the support of half-a-million voters.  If he could succeed in discrediting her, he would also undermine popular confidence in her cause, or so the government hopes.  The debate is scheduled for June 17.

The Democratic Party’s Dilemma

         Democratic Party chairman Albert Ho protested that it, too, should be represented in the debate but his plea was ignored, adding another to the list of embarrassments for the White Pigeon Party.  Its symbol is a white dove but conveniently for critics and cartoonists, the same Chinese word is used for both birds.  First came Beijing’s post-referendum boast that the voters had stood with the central and Hong Kong governments by drawing a clear line between moderates and radicals.

           Next, when official meetings began on May 24, the Democratic Party’s Chinese host noted pointedly that the contact was a reward for boycotting the referendum (all local papers, May 25).  The party, as leading member of the moderate Alliance for Universal Suffrage, had called for direct dialogue with Beijing to discuss demands and possibilities for compromise.  Preliminary discussions through intermediaries had begun in March and this initiative was widely applauded.  But the post-referendum implications were not, making the path between compromise and capitulation that much more difficult to maneuver.

          Much was made of the May 24 meeting because it was the first between Chinese officials and those now leading the Democratic Party since the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.  Hong Kong’s then democracy movement leaders, Martin Lee and Szeto Wah, founded the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China, which Beijing still brands as subversive.  Many other core members of this alliance went on to found the Democratic Party in the early 1990s and its current chairman, Albert Ho, remains a core alliance member.   It just hosted well over 100,000 people for its 21^st annual June Fourth candlelight vigil, the record turnout being an unspoken tribute to gravely ill alliance founder, Szeto Wah.

         After his May 24 meeting with Li Gang who is the deputy director of Beijing’s Central Liaison Office in Hong Kong, Albert Ho acknowledged that when contacts began in March Beijing had asked the party to disengage from the 1989 issue.  Ho replied that the matter was non-negotiable (SCMP, May 25).  Beijing, too, is in an awkward place caught between acknowledging what it regards as the Democratic Party’s subversive past and its moderate present.  But choices for the party are more difficult since that past is now one of the few unblemished reminders of its glory days as the standard bearer of Hong Kong’s pre-1997 democracy movement.  Members have already discussed the matter and know they can abandon 1989 only at their electoral peril.

         Meanwhile, Audrey Eu knows that much can be done with the leftovers of a failed election and has rejected feelers to join the Democratic Party’s negotiations.  The reason, she told inquiring reporters, was that the moderates seemed to be looking for excuses to accept the government’s reform package whereas she had campaigned for substantial revisions and half-a-million voters agreed with her.

 Building New Constituencies

          Adding to the Albert Ho’s headaches are the statistical profiles emerging from the referendum his party members refused to join.  The youth vote sent the strongest message.  Young people here as everywhere are not reliable voters.  But the new 1980s-generation anger that erupted suddenly in January continued on through the referendum and inspired the Tertiary 2012 backup slate of candidates fielded by college students.  Young people aged 20-29 account for 14% of Hong Kong’s population but exit polls suggested that 24% of the voters were between 18 and 30 (Apple, May 17).  And of those registered, 26% voted, compared to 19% and 13% for the two over-30 age groups (Xinbao/HK Economic Journal, May 18).  The Democratic Party is obviously showing its age with only 12.6% of its members under 30.  In contrast, the LSD claims that 55% of its membership is under 30 and 42.5% of Civic Party members are under 40 (Ming Pao Daily, Jan. 5, 2010).  

        The LSD’s emphasis on grassroots working class concerns also seems to have paid off.  The two parties together received 29% more votes (or 104,000) in 2010 that in the last, 2008, regular Legislative Council Election.   But most surprising was where those votes came from since working class voters are also not noted for their turnout rates.  Chinese University researcher Ivan Choy compares voter turnout in working class, middle class, and upper income residential areas.  He found the highest increase for the two parties to be among public housing residents.  The trend was apparent everywhere with increases of from 40% to a striking 84% in one district (Ming Pao, May 18, 20).

         The Democratic Party must now worry about how may of those 100,000 votes went to its candidates in 2008 and how many will return in 2012.  Losing votes to other parties in this way was reportedly one of the considerations underlying the decision not to participate in the referendum.  But now, for once, at least two parties succeeded in working across the factional barriers that have hampered the development of Hong Kong’s democracy movement from the start.

         And among those 100,000 votes is one brand new constituency that will have only the referendum candidates to remember.  Thanks to lobbying by pro-democracy activists, Hong Kong’s prisoners have recently won the right to vote and this was their first territory-wide election.  They rewarded the effort on their behalf by turning out in greater numbers than anyone else.  Of the 2,300 prisoners registered to vote, 43.5% availed themselves of the privilege on Election Day (Standard, May 17).

        Despite all the dire warnings beforehand, Hong Kong’s first ever referendum was held without incident on May 16.  If opponents have their way it will also be the last and only time will tell if the net impact is positive or negative.  But given the barrage laid down against it, the first achievement to note is that the exercise took place at all.  Officials in Beijing and Hong Kong did all they could, short of declaring it illegal, to discourage participation and all other pro-democracy groups refused to do so for their own reasons.  Five legislators from the League of Social Democrats and the Civic Party nevertheless persisted in their act of defiance and began by resigning together last January. 

        The idea was to precipitate five simultaneous special elections or one in each of Hong Kong’s five Legislative Council election districts.  The five legislators would then contest the elections treating them as a territory-wide de facto referendum on their demand for political reform that would guarantee genuine universal suffrage elections. They would risk losing their seats, and with them pan-democrats’ all-important one-third veto power in the council, which did not endear them to other democrats.  They would also provoke Beijing and perhaps harm chances for compromise negotiations. But the five earned their radical credentials by calculating potential benefits against risks. 

          The elections would serve as a gesture of protest against the government’s lackluster November 2009 political reform package.  They might also mobilize public opinion in a way that could be measured directly at the ballot box instead of via the government’s ever malleable public consultation methods.  And the exercise would set a precedent for allowing locally sponsored political initiatives.  Whether seats and concessions were won or lost were secondary considerations.

         Ironically, much of the risk evaporated due to effective official opposition. The two parties that might have benefited chose instead to be politically correct.  Both the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) and the pro-business Liberal Party accepted their briefing cues from Beijing and boycotted the contest rather than grant it legitimacy by participating. 

           In the end, all five legislators regained their seats against a non-competitive roster of pro-democracy fringe candidates.  Turnout on polling day was a disappointing 17%. But that translated into a 579,000-vote endorsement volunteered in defiance of all the official powers that be and many lesser obstacles as well.

            The impact remains to be seen since the vote count matches turnout for the big protest march that made July 1, 2003 a watershed date in the growth of Hong Kong’s democracy movement.  But whatever might follow, the election campaign itself illustrated a dynamic within the movement that has so far guaranteed its survival by renewing energies in the face of every setback.  The dynamic, between radicals and moderates, also shows no signs of abating despite official attempts to divide, co-opt, and marginalize that have continued non-stop since before Hong Kong’s 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty.

THE RADICAL CHALLENGE        

           Within Hong Kong’s democracy movement, two assumptions now separate radicals from moderates.   First, the latter are basically willing to give Beijing the benefit of the doubt by accepting its 2017/2020 universal suffrage timetable at face value, whereas radicals basically are not.  They respect Beijing’s decision-making authority but regard the new timetable issued by decree in December 2007 as a smokescreen for indefinite procrastination or worse.  They see potential danger in the decree whereas moderates essentially do not. 

               Second, radicals seek to revive the now almost forgotten democracy movement ideal that Hong Kong voters should be allowed to decide for themselves what kind of a political system they want.  Resignations were the only way to simulate a referendum because the authorities will not allow a direct vote on constitutional questions, which Beijing regards as its sovereign territory.

           The resignation/referendum idea has actually been a gleam in the eye of “Young Turk” democrats since the late 1990s, when they began to experience first hand the limitations of Hong Kong’s new post-1997 political order.   Some still like to fantasize about the one move that would be sure to make international headlines and force Beijing to take notice, namely, the mass resignation of all democratic legislators. 

            Unfortunately for such dreams and aspirations, pan-democrats as a whole appreciate the logic, but not enough to take a united stand in its defense against the combined weight of Beijing and pro-government forces in Hong Kong.  Especially the Democratic Party’s December 13 decisions not to allow any of its nine legislators to participate in the resignation plan, and not to participate in the re-election campaign, was a major if not unexpected blow.  The party has long since positioned itself as moderate and “middle class,” and has for the past decade been turning out Young Turk defectors as a result.

           One party’s loss is another’s gain, however, and in Hong Kong everyone goes on to fight another day.  Because they see the current reform debate as a last-chance opportunity, this time radicals decided to stand their ground.  But in the end, only the Civic Party was willing to go along with the LSD’s action plan while everyone else joined the Alliance for Universal Suffrage (May 3 post).

AN UNLIKELY COALITION

         Initiator and chief driving force behind the radical plan was the League of Social Democrats (LSD) and the star of its show is “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung.  His nickname derives from a vow not to cut his hair until Beijing reverses its verdict against China’s 1989 democracy movement.  Leung has a rap sheet for disorderly conduct going back to the 1970s, when Hong Kong’s most daring street scenes were staged by a few self-styled Trotskyists of which he was one. 

         Leung decided to contest the 2000 Legislative Council election as a perfect foil for his street-theater antics and almost won.  Four years later he did. To everyone’s surprise including his own he then managed to tone down his act enough to last out one full term and went on to win a second in 2008.   Leung has neither cut his hair nor given up his trade-mark Che Guevara T-shirt, but he has revealed himself to be Hong Kong’s most creative pro-democracy politician.  

        By 2008 he had helped organize the LSD as a party of like-minded radicals and two others won seats as well:  “Mad Dog” Raymond Wong and “Big Guy” Albert Chan.  Chan is a Democratic Party defector and so is the LSD’s new chairman, Andrew To.  The LSD identifies with working class concerns and Long Hair is also a favorite of the1980s generation protesters who burst unexpectedly upon the political scene last January (Jan 29 post).  But more than anything else, his perspectives can be traced to an upbringing unique among local democrats. 

          Leung was born into a pro-Beijing worker’s family in 1956 and was radicalized along with Hong Kong’s entire leftist community during the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution decade.  Instead of following Beijing’s lead as its line changed, however, he veered off on a dissident track in the 1970s and has remained there ever since.  That background has made him more knowledgeable than other local democrats about their pro-Beijing adversaries and the mass-based movement they lead.  He is also more forthright in challenging the DAB as a front for the still unacknowledged Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Hong Kong branch.

         All that could not contrast more sharply with the LSD’s new partner.  So unnatural was the alliance that Civic Party referendum participants insisted on a formal code of conduct to govern behavior on the campaign trail.  The party’s five legislators are all British-trained lawyers and as scandalized as everyone else at LSD legislators’ disregard for the niceties of parliamentary procedure.

         Party leader Audrey Eu nevertheless made the decision to join them and to serve as spokesperson for their joint referendum campaign.  Her protégé, Tanya Chan, and Alan Leong rounded out the five-district resignation team.  Besides an uncompromising commitment to Western-style democratic values, the Civic Party also shares with the LSD a concern about cultivating successors to carry on the cause.  Among the political parties these two have the highest proportion of young members.  Both were launched in 2006.

CONFRONTING BEIJING

            Asked how things were going mid-way through the campaign, Audrey Eu answered with a Chinese phrase:  “like sailing against the current.”  What she meant was everything that could go wrong did.  Some problems were anticipated, others just kept multiplying.   Beijing officials began by declaring the referendum a “blatant challenge” to the central government’s authority. 

            Promoters countered that the Basic Law is silent on popular initiatives and referendums and no Hong Kong law prohibits them.  To which Beijing’s answer was the same as it has been since the 1980s when concerned academics lobbied Basic Law drafters for a residual powers guarantee, meaning anything not specifically forbidden to Hong Kong should be left for Hong Kong itself to decide.  Not so, said Beijing then and now.   All powers not mentioned, especially those concerning the structure and function of government, are for Beijing to decide.  The country is governed by a single unitary CCP-led authority.  Therefore, holding a referendum without asking permission challenges Beijing’s sovereign right to rule.                

            Promoters countered that in fact this was just a series of simultaneous special elections, not a real referendum and everyone agreed that the exercise had no force in law other than to fill the vacant seats.   But the elections were advertised from start to finish as a “de facto referendum.”  They were also launched with a provocative slogan calling for a “popular uprising” (quanmin qiyi) at the ballot box.  Prominent loyalists recycled the standard arguments about populist anarchy, incitement to rebellion, subversive demands for independence, and so on.  The warnings were issued in time to abort the mission had its initiators been so inclined but they were not.

A REFERENDUM BY ANY OTHER NAME …

           Once legislators actually resigned in late January, the tide seemed to turn in their favor.   Momentum carried over from the defiant 1980s generation protest that had flared suddenly a few weeks before.  It had targeted the Legislative Council and its domination by special-interest Functional Constituencies, which dovetailed perfectly with the aims of the referendum campaign.  

           Apple Daily and its owner Jimmy Lai were leading promoters from the start, but Ming Pao Daily had warned repeatedly against the referendum plan.  By March 1, however, editors had changed their minds.  The referendum movement had “spread like wildfire,” they wrote.  Now it was moderate democrats who had “taken a great risk.”  If their strategy failed to produce results, radicalism would be vindicated and Beijing would have only itself to blame.   But that was before actual campaigning began.

           Unable to find immediate legal grounds to ban it, Beijing did the next best thing by declaring the de facto referendum a de facto violation of the Basic Law.   Both the DAB and the Liberal Party abandoned their plans to participate and the usual supply of second-string conservative “independent” candidates also failed to materialize.  Instead, all hands were mustered for a counter-campaign aimed at discouraging voter participation and discrediting the elections as an expensive “farce” that would cost taxpayers HK$150 million to administer.

        By late March official efforts were taking effect.  Leading indicators thereafter all pointed in the same direction.  The popularity ratings of ex-legislators and their parties declined; consistent majorities disapproved of their initiative; pollsters predicted a record low turnout on Election Day.   There was even a possibility that legislators might suffer the ultimate embarrassment of regaining their seats unopposed.  But by the April 8 filing deadline enough fringe candidates had come forward to allow election contests in all five districts.  A total of 26 candidates participated.

           Young people did their best to help out.  Fearing contests might not materialize in some districts, college students decided to field their own Tertiary 2012 slate of five pro-democracy candidates, registering one in each district.  This required a $50,000 (US$6,400) deposit per candidate, which students managed to collect in campus fund-raising campaigns.  Unfortunately, they had little money left and could not afford separate campaign leaflets for each candidate.  Instead, they printed up 300,000 fliers picturing all five together only to have them disqualified by election authorities for violating campaign rules.

        Whatever the fallout, radicals can say that their two most basic goals have been achieved.  Half-a-million voters defied Beijing to endorse the ballot-box adventure and a precedent has been set.  Now attention will re-focus on the Alliance for Universal Suffrage and its effort to negotiate a better reform package, with everyone aware that only four of the 23 democratic legislators are needed to secure passage.

         Midway through the “second consultation period,” Hong Kong is no closer to agreement on the government’s latest political reform proposals than when the exercise began last November.  The first consultation, between November and February, was for public debate and discussion of the government’s first draft.  This followed Beijing’s latest, December 2007, decision allowing Hong Kong to work within strict guidelines toward its long-promised goal of universal suffrage elections. But according to that decision, the time frame is distant and current electoral designs cannot be altered for the time being.  The latest proposals are therefore confined to the coming 2012 elections and do not suggest how they might lead to universal suffrage thereafter.

          The public’s views were supposed to be assessed in a summation report, to serve as the basis of a final draft, which must be submitted to the Legislative Council (Legco).  This being a constitutional reform issue, passage requires approval by two-thirds of the 60-seat assembly.   Chief Executive Donald Tsang is still planning for victory in a July vote, but as usual his officials seem to have let wishful thinking and pressures from Beijing be their guide.

             Hong Kong’s democracy movement has grown up with this process and its routines are now well established.   The government naturally did its best to ignore pro-democracy demands.  This was done by including everyone’s views in the April summary report’s appendices, while relying primarily on supportive pro-Beijing and pro-business submissions to conclude that the original proposals were just fine.  Announcing that verdict on April 14, simultaneous official statements in Hong Kong and Beijing proclaimed the proposals a “golden opportunity” and a “major step forward” in democratic development.*   The government is therefore proceeding as planned, while democrats carry on with the next phase of their campaign, now dubbed the “second consultation period.”  

TOWARD WHAT END?

         Non-participants, both local and foreign, frequently ask this question.  Why continue to haggle when Beijing’s decision is already set in stone?   Those who identify with the movement have learned to ignore the implied criticism because they know that persistence is the only means of keeping their movement alive.  Since public opinion cannot be adequately registered through the ballot box and from there via elected government, democrats do the next best thing allowed them.  Their habit is to continue “voting with our feet,” marching, protesting, and haggling right down to the wire in hopes of exerting enough pressure to win some concessions however limited — and keep hope alive.

        This never-say-die determination has marked every phase of Hong Kong’s democracy movement from what it regards as its inception in the early 1980s.  Popular fears and demands provided the incentive for British negotiators who ultimately won the promise, written into the original 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, that Hong Kong’s future legislature “shall be constituted by elections.”

         Popular pressure achieved its greatest success in 2003 over the dreaded national security bill, precipitating its failure at the 11th hour to win the necessary Legco support.  With that 2003 experience still fresh in everyone’s mind, pan-democrats have for months been preparing this second stage of the current campaign.  Their latest idea is to stop the clock and postpone the 11^th hour in order to allow more time for “negotiations.”  They are now calling for a delay in the final Legco vote until after the summer recess.

THE OLD GUARD

        All the big names have now come out against the government’s proposals.  Most notable among the older generation are retirees Martin Lee and Szeto Wah, founding fathers of the Democratic Party.  They were also founders in 1989 of Hong Kong’s support organization for democracy protestors in Tiananmen Square, which Beijing regards as subversive and which Szeto still heads. Joining them in the current universal suffrage campaign are Catholic Cardinal Joseph Zen and Anson Chan, a former ranking civil servant who took early retirement to become an active critic of the administration she once led.  Everyone is being reminded of the last-chance nature of this campaign for the founders’ generation by the sight of Szeto Wah, now attending the preparatory rallies in his wheelchair, as he battles a recently announced diagnosis of late stage lung cancer.

         Meanwhile, the successor generation has inherited a fractious movement divided for now into middle-aged moderates and their so-called radical counterparts.   Lee, Chan, and Zen are backing the radicals’ referendum campaign as the ultimate gesture of protest.  Five legislators from the Civic Party and the League of Social Democrats resigned together last January in order to trigger simultaneous special elections in each of Hong Kong’s five election districts.  The legislators are now campaigning to regain their seats in the May 16 elections, which they are calling a de facto referendum on universal suffrage.

         Szeto Wah decided against backing the radical venture because he knew the risk his party would take if it resigned any of its shrinking number of seats.  He threw his weight instead behind the Democratic Party’s effort to forge a moderate coalition aimed at lobbying for improvements in the government’s reform package.  Campaign dynamics within the new Alliance for Universal Suffrage are nevertheless revealing not just different levels of confidence and energy but, inevitably, different thresholds of tolerance for compromise as well.

A UNITED FRONT OF MODERATES

         The 13-member coalition that has formed around the Democratic Party represents mainstream thinking within the democratic camp.  Members speaking for the largest number of people are the Confederation of Trade Unions led by veteran activist Lee Cheuk-yan, the Federation of Civil Service Unions, the Social Workers General Union, and Szeto’s original power base, the Professional Teachers Union.  The coalition’s Chinese name, “Ultimate Universal Suffrage Alliance,” is nevertheless the butt of jokes from both pro-Beijing critics and those closer to home. 

         This is because “ultimate” is taken from the Basic Law’s promise about universal suffrage elections for the Chief Executive and Legco being the “ultimate aim” (Articles 45 and 68).  But after Beijing’s December 2007 decision pushing the timetable back, tentatively, for the two elections to 2017 and 2020, respectively, the promise has become something of a joke.    For their part, pro-Beijing partisans know the real objective, which they cannot publicly admit and which democrats are not yet ready to confront by demanding definitions rather than guarantees.  If they did, they would discover that Beijing means one thing by universal suffrage while they mean another.  

            Among fellow democrats, those who regard Beijing’s 2017/2020 promise as just another delaying tactic do not worry about definitions but only that too many Alliance members seem too willing to take the timetable at face value.  This impression derives from their chief demand.  They want Beijing or the Hong Kong government to pledge that “genuine” universal suffrage elections will be allowed by the “ultimate” 2017/2020 deadlines.   How naive, say friendly critics, recalling that Hong Kong’s democracy movement has been strung along by such official promises and Basic Law guarantees since the 1980s. 

          Even more unsettling were comments from Democratic Party members about the new opportunities for its “second-tier” candidates that would come with the extra Legco seats in the government’s plan.  It would add 10 seats (equally divided between directly- and indirectly-elected constituencies).  This view is seen not just as opportunistic but out-of-touch with reality.  The Democratic Party has lost too many energetic young members in several waves of past defections.  Underfunded and overworked, its remaining second-tier risk-averse candidates can barely muster enough votes to win one seat let alone several more and their prospects at the lower District Councils level are even more dismal.  District Councilors would fill, from among their number, the five new indirectly-elected Legco seats.

          Reinforcing this image of a diminished party is Emily Lau, one-time firebrand, who was in the first (1991) class of directly elected legislators and has retained her seat in every election since.  No longer able to sustain her defiant go-it-alone approach, she joined the Democratic Party as its vice-chair after the last (2008) sobering election. She now likes to call herself  “an old woman in a hurry”  and her reputation is helping moderates walk the fine line they must tread between compromise and capitulation. When rumors spread both inside and outside the party that it was edging toward surrender, Lau spoke out threatening to leave the party if its long-held principles were compromised in that way.  Notably, however, she did not actually say she would resign but only that she would not rule it out (Apple Daily, March 4, 2010). 

           Lau was also tapped to speak at the big general meeting on April 25, called in a shrewd move to review results and reassure Alliance supporters.  It had tried a two-part approach.  This entailed drafting a reform plan that was designed, like several others volunteered by sympathetic academics, to illustrate how all indirectly elected Legco seats could be abolished by 2020.**  In addition, Alliance members had explored different avenues they hoped would lead to discussions with Beijing officials.  Despite establishing intermediary contacts, this effort has so far proved fruitless.  The contacts are all saying the same thing whether in public or in private:  no discussion on foreward movement until Hong Kong accepts the government’s package.  Alliance leaders therefore announced that they will recommend rejection of the reform package if it remains as is, but that they will continue to seek a basis for negotiation.  The aim is to win concessions on details sufficient to allow acceptance of the package (Apple Daily, Ming Pao Daily, South China Morning Post, April 26). 

            The Alliance remains committed to its “ultimate” universal suffrage goal by which is meant:   one-person-one-vote direct elections for all Legco seats and the abolition of all special-interest Functional Constituency electors by 2020.  Yet some Alliance members continue to say that an official declaration of intent from the Hong Kong government would suffice, suggesting that some are considerably more moderate than others.  The same is true in the 60-seat Legislative Council where the 23 pro-democracy legislators are all that stand between Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s political reform proposals and the two-thirds majority needed to approve them.  Three of the 23 are thought to be tilting in the government’s direction.  (Next:  The Radical Challenge)

 *  The original November 2009 consultation document, the April 2010 summation report, its appendices, and other supporting documents are posted at:  www.cmab-cd2012.gov.hk.  My Nov. 23/09 post summarizes the government’s proposals.

**  The Alliance plan is at:  www.universalsuffrage.hk/?p=25&lang=en .

         The government presented its political reform report to Legislative Councilors at their weekly Wednesday meeting on April 14.  After evaluating public responses to the government’s reform proposals unveiled last November, Chief Secretary Henry Tang proclaimed the exercise a success and pledged to proceed accordingly.  He allowed for the possibility of only minimal changes to the original draft.

           The popular protest that has been building since last summer must now run its course since the entire democratic camp has naturally given Tang’s report a collective thumbs-down.  This anticipates an uncertain future for the government’s reform package, which cannot be implemented without passage by a two-thirds Legislative Council (Legco) majority. The vote will likely be held in July before the summer recess.  Functional Constituencies (FCs) are the main stumbling block and official failure to address it is the chief cause of democratic opposition.

           As mentioned in several previous posts, the latest proposals have split Hong Kong’s democracy movement, at least in terms of its response.  The terms are radical and moderate and the radicals are now saying “we told you so.”   Young Turks have been talking for years about the value of a dramatic gesture and some finally decided to give it a try.   Five legislators, one from each of Hong Kong’s five election districts, resigned together in order to trigger simultaneous special or by-elections throughout the territory.  All five, from the Civic Party and the League of Social Democrats, are now running for re-election to the seats they have just vacated.  Election Day will be May 16 and supporters are promoting it as a de facto referendum in an attempt to mobilize popular support for directly-elected local government.  Referendums are not specifically forbidden here but local authorities have always discouraged the idea and Beijing is now condemning this one as a populist challenge to its authority.

           Moderates decided to seek dialogue with Beijing instead, also a long-debated goal.  Their new Universal Suffrage Alliance, now with 13 unions and groups plus the Democratic Party, has recently finalized bottom-line demands (http://www.universalsuffrage.hk/?p=25&lang=en).   But Beijing reportedly did not like this option either because radicals and moderates alike are united around one common objective:  “abolish the Functional Constituencies.”   These strange representative bodies were designed especially for Hong Kong and while such arrangements are not unique in the annals of human political history, they are alien to most contemporary experience.

            The government’s proposals for the 2012 elections aim to retain all the existing 28 FCs in their current unreformed state and add five new ones (www.cmab-cd2012.gov.hk).   Except for a few hints, there are no official indications as to how these might be modified to achieve Beijing’s promised goal of universal suffrage legislative elections by 2020.   The long-term implications of the five new FCs remain largely hidden from public view (March 31 post).  In contrast, the old FCs have been around for 25 years and answers to the basic questions about origins, beneficiaries, and prospects for the democrats’ goal of directly-elected local government are well known.  The only real question is why the government’s proposals are totally silent on FC reform. 

 ORIGINS

           One reason the FCs are so resistant to change is that they are so deeply rooted in Hong Kong history.  The specific design and name dates back only to the mid-1980s, when elected representation was finally allowed, albeit in carefully rationed doses, but the concept is as old as British Hong Kong itself.   Colonial legislatures were always initially composed of government officials and people appointed by them to represent the main economic interests of settlers, or in Hong Kong’s case, traders.  Elected representation evolved from this original base, which in Hong Kong was provided by the chamber-of-commerce. 

         The difference between Hong Kong and all other British colonies was that Hong Kong’s Legislative Council (Legco) did not progress much beyond the founding-fathers stage until decades after all Britain’s other colonies had moved on to win their independence.  For over a century, legislative appointees were all wealthy established members of the economic elite.  This practice did not begin to change until the 1970s, when a few people from different backgrounds were included.  Only after the British learned for certain that they would be leaving come 1997 did political reform begin in earnest. 

           Nine FCs based on occupational interests were created for the first Legco election in 1985.  Of the 12 FC legislators who took their seats that year, five represented the chambers-of-commerce, manufacturing associations, and the banking sector; three represented trade unions and social services; four were elected by professional bodies (education, legal, medical, engineering).  The 1985 council had 56 members:  22 were appointed by the governor; 10 were government officials; 12 were indirectly elected by local boards and councils; and 12 came via the new FCs.

          The first direct one-person-one-vote elections, for a minority of Legco seats, did not occur until 1991.  But because political reforms began so late, Beijing naturally saw them as a British ploy to retain influence after 1997 and demanded a say in how they could proceed.  Beijing’s restrictive formulas were written into Hong Kong’s transitional Basic Law constitution, promulgated in 1990, and it is these formulas that local democrats are struggling to liberalize.  At present half of Legco’s 60 members are elected by FCs.  Pro-democracy candidates regularly win 60% of the vote for the other half, that is, the 30 seats filled by direct election in the five geographic constituencies.  FC candidates are a very different story.

WHO DO THEY REPRESENT?

          The easiest way to explain FCs is simply to list them (with the number of seats they represent in parentheses).  All except the final seven routinely elect conservatives or pro-Beijing loyalists.  Currently, pan-democrats hold only four FC seats (education, legal, health care providers, social workers).

Federation of Hong Kong Industries (1)

Chinese Manufacturers Association (1)

HK General Chamber of Commerce (1)

Chinese General Chamber of Commerce (1)

Finance, banking (1)

Finance, services (1)

Textiles/garments (1)

Wholesale/retail (1)

Import/export (1)

Insurance (1)

Agriculture/fisheries (1)

Real estate/construction (1)

Architecture/surveying (1)

Engineering (1)

Transport (1)

Tourism (1)

Catering (1)

Sports/culture/publications (1)

Labor (3)

Rural Council (1)

District Councils (1)

Education (1)

Legal (1)

Accountancy (1)

Medical doctors (1)

Health care providers (1)

Social workers (1)

Information technology (1)

HOW ARE THEY ELECTED?

          The 30 FC representatives are elected by a total of 229,861 voters including 213,777 individuals and 16,084 corporate bodies.  This contrasts with 3.4 million registered voters for the 30 directly-elected seats.  

          Critics like to invoke comparisons with the “rotten boroughs” that figured as favorite targets during Britain’s own, 19^th century, struggle for universal suffrage.  Hong Kong’s equivalent is the practice of uncontested FC elections, whereby the powerbrokers decide among themselves beforehand who should represent them.   In the last, 2008, Legco election, 14 seats were uncontested including the three labor seats and those reserved for industry, banking, financial services, real estate, culture, and catering. 

         Eight of those uncontested seats are from among the 10 FCs that have only corporate voting and account for 12 legislators.  This means that individuals working within those sectors do not vote; only management bodies do.  For example, the financial services representative was convicted of fraud a few years ago and did jail time, but his constituents like him so much that they celebrated his return and have since twice re-elected him to represent them.  He owes his seat to 578 corporate entities including stock exchange brokerage firms and the Gold and Silver Exchange Society.

            In some cases, a single captain of industry or commerce with a controlling interest in many separate companies can control more than one corporate vote.  The rules forbid any one individual from casting more than one corporate FC vote, and more than one individual vote in FCs that allow them.  But this means that some 1,800 individuals actually have three votes:  one in a geographic constituency, one corporate vote in a FC, and one individual vote in another FC (South China Morning Post, Nov. 16, 2009). 

             It also means that the owners of multiple companies can select whoever they like to cast the votes allocated to their various enterprises.  Yet these are allowed to register as individual corporate electors in different constituencies regardless of ownership.  Mega-tycoon Li Ka-shing reportedly controls at least 20 corporate votes in several different FCs.  No one knows for sure.  The full election register is open for public viewing at Hong Kong’s Registration and Electoral Office, but information is limited by strictly enforced rules that forbid the use of all reproductive devices including even pencil and paper, under threat of criminal prosecution.

            Ten constituencies allow only individuals to vote.  Democrats do best in these contests.  Others allow voting by a mix of corporate bodies and individuals.  Of the seven FCs where democratic candidates have won, all but Information Technology allow only individuals to vote. 

HOW DO THEY FUNCTION?

         First and foremost, FCs serve as a fail-safe mechanism deliberately designed when the Basic Law was being drafted to check and balance the populist instincts of directly-elected legislators.   The idea is hardly new, but Britain’s colonial legislatures could ultimately appeal to the British Parliament for redress and reform precedents.  Hong Kong’s Basic Law is locked in place and maintained by a hard-line government that regards all popular initiatives as a threat to the communist-led mainland political system.   Drafters of that law, all Beijing appointed and overwhelmingly conservative, considered a dual chamber system.  The upper house could then be used by its FC-type members to check their lower-house democratically-elected counterparts.  Ultimately, it was decided to build the two-chamber concept into a single chamber.  The result is Legco’s split-voting system.

        Government bills and measures need only receive a simple majority of all legislators to pass.  But any amendment or motion moved from the floor by Legco members themselves must receive majority support from both FC and directly-elected legislators, counted separately.   For example, a motion by Civic Party leader Audrey Eu urging public participation in the coming referendum was defeated after failing to win majorities from both groups.  Her motion received the necessary support from directly-elected legislators:  11 to 7; but was opposed by FC legislators: 18 to 4.   A majority of all legislators present may actually vote for a motion but it can still fail without majorities in each of the two groups.

         Despite many calls for the abolition of Legco’s simulated two-house arrangement, Beijing’s decisions continue to stipulate that it must remain unchanged. Still, split voting is the lesser problem.  More important are the rules that strictly limit Legco members from initiating anything but non-binding motions and some amendments to government bills.  This is another key feature of Hong Kong’s “executive-led” system, as spelled out in Article 74 of the Basic Law.

           The Catholic Monitors, a religious group with secular interests, report annually on legislators’ performance.  Those from the FCs invariably chalk up the worst records whether in terms of motions and amendments tabled, speeches given, questions asked, or votes recorded (www.afcnow.hk/; Ming Pao Daily News, Oct. 5, 2009; South China Morning Post, July 10, 2009).  Timothy Fok, who has been representing sports and culture since 1998, has the worst all-time record.  Fok is a son of the late tycoon Henry Fok who was noted for his mainland and Hong Kong investments, philanthropies, and cross-border political influence.  When asked, legislator Fok says attendance is too simple a standard to judge him by since he is constantly on the go looking after the interests of his constituents.  He is right, of course, given Legco’s limited powers and his role as high profile promoter-in-chief for Hong Kong’s leisure-time business interests.

OBSTACLE OR HELPMATE?

          The question nevertheless remains:  why are official proposals silent on FC reform?  How can the Hong Kong government continue to preside over so anachronistic an arrangement without offering a single suggestion for its improvement?  The only excuse, written into the official Consultation Document, is that FCs are “too complicated” and “would not be easy” to change because it would “involve the interests of many different sectors and individuals.”   Actually, the FCs would be easy to change.  Activists and academics have been preparing their arguments and recommendations for the past two years in anticipation of what they see as this last opportunity for their political generation to affect reform. 

             The most obvious and common target is corporate voting.  The government could begin by opening up its corporate election register to the light of day, allowing the public to see who controls how many corporate votes, and disallowing separate registration by more than one company within a conglomerate.  There have been many related suggestions.  And to the ambitious democratic designs for gradually phasing out FCs altogether (March 15 post), has been added a similar plan from the Universal Suffrage Alliance of moderate politicians and activists.

         Yet the government is ignoring all these designs and proposals even in the face of growing public anger over the cozy relationship between government and big business.  As a result, say protesters, passage of minimum wage and fair competition laws have been blocked for years.  In their unrestrained zeal to mazimize profits, minimum common sense standards for the construction and sale of residential housing are not being met by property developers, and are not enforced.  Public concerns over the cost of the high-speed railway were ignored until they exploded in the January post-80s generation protest, and so on.

          In fact, there can be only one reason for the government’s silence and that reason is related to the still not officially acknowledged long-term plans for the “new” FCs.  The government evidently does anticipate abolishing the old FCs, but not until it can replace them with an equally “safe” block of votes in Legco.  The old FCs are thus being allowed to remain in place as a protective cover until the alternative has been safely established.

         As indicated by recent hints and suggestions, between now and 2020 the government’s plan is to increase the number of legislators indirectly elected by the District Councils, which are dominated by pro-Beijing politicians and their allies (March 15 and 31 posts).  FC councilors would gradually be replaced by these indirectly elected legislators.  And as indicated further, in its just released summation report, the government aims to forge ahead with its own District Councils plan that ignores the main democratic demands for more competitive electoral arrangements at the district level than those now tailor-made for conservative candidates.     

             In this way, all other roads are being blocked.  The old FCs will carry on as usual while traffic is gradually re-routed onto a new mainline expressway.  As for this project, it should be known not as the District Councils plan but as a People’s Congress model, leading to full integration within the Beijing-led political system.

Note:  This post picks up where the last (March 15) left off, but was written for two Hong Kong pro-democracy websites: http://www.AFCnow.hk and http://www.reformhk.hk/archives1.htm.  The local perspective highlights the tone of bureaucratic obfuscation surrounding the debate and suggests why the public has not responded more enthusiastically.

           Are pan-democrats losing the battle for public opinion?  If the polls conducted so far on the government’s 2012 political reform proposals are any indication, the answer is not necessarily “yes,” but it soon will be unless the public can be provided with a clearer picture of what the proposals mean for Hong Kong’s political future.  Hong Kong University pollsters conducted three surveys asking how much people knew about the government’s reform proposals.  At the start of the official three-month consultation period last November, 68% of those responding said they knew little about them.  By early February shortly before the public consultation ended, respondents saying they understood little had risen to 70%   (HKU POP release on political reform, Feb. 8, 2010:  http: //hkupop.hku.hk/ ).

           Those respondents should not be blamed for failing to pay attention.  Instead, they should be congratulated since they were clearheaded enough to understand and honest enough to admit that they did not know what the political reform proposals entailed.  In fact, the respondents were saying something important about the lack of transparency in the government’s official presentation, and also about the failure of pan-democrats to fill in the blanks.

          The most important blanks that need filling in are those surrounding what are now being called the “new Functional Constituencies” or the “District Councils plan.”  According to the government’s political reform proposals, five new Functional Constituency (FC) seats will be added in the Legislative Council (Legco) to balance the five new seats directly elected by geographical constituency voters. Beijing has instructed that 2012 reforms must maintain the current half-half balance between directly and indirectly elected legislators.  But government officials and promoters have never adequately explained the origins of this District Councils plan, first seen in the government’s hastily prepared reform package of 2005 (all local newspapers, Dec. 1, 2005).  Pan-democratic legislators rejected the 2005 package but did not discuss the larger significance of the District Councils plan.  Where did it come from?  Whose idea was it in the first place?  What are the precedents?  Who is promoting it now?  Who stands to benefit?  And what does it mean for the ultimate goal of universal suffrage? 

ORIGINS

         The immediate origin of the current proposal can be traced to the government’s Green Paper on Constitutional Development issued in July 2007.  This paper formally began the present political reform exercise in accordance with the new five-step procedure mandated by Beijing’s Basic Law “Interpretation” of April 2004.  The Green Paper presented three options whereby Legco could achieve the ultimate aim of universal suffrage elections as promised by the Basic Law.  These were:  (1) direct election of all Legco members by one-person-one-vote universal suffrage; (2) retaining the existing half-half balance with 30 directly elected and 30 FC legislators; or (3) allowing all 30 FC seats to be filled through indirect election by the members of Hong Kong’s 18 District Councils.  According to the Green Paper, “all Legco seats will then be district-based seats returned through direct or indirect elections” (paragraph 4.14).  This third option received no publicity in 2007 and the Green Paper cited only one submission in its Appendix recommending this option. 

         The option actually resurrects an arrangement designed by the colonial government in 1985 when for the first time ever elections, albeit this indirect variety, were introduced for a minority of Legco members.  Until then the legislature was wholly appointed.  Direct elections, again for a minority of legislators, did not occur until 1991.  Circumstances today, however, are very different.

PURPOSE

         The 2007 Green Paper seemed to have included the District Councils option only as an afterthought.  But of course it was not.  Throughout the just-concluded consultation period for the 2012 reforms, official promoters steadfastly maintained that the government “did not have the authority” to reveal the direction their proposals might take beyond 2012.  While they may not have the authority, officials evidently do have a tentative roadmap in mind and it naturally entails the District Councils plan.

           Only after the consultation exercise ended, did Executive Councilor Anthony Cheung Bing-leung mention in passing (South China Morning Post, Feb. 19, 2010) that the government was planning to propose expanding the District Councils option for use in replacing the FCs, just as the Green Paper had indicated.  During the consultation period, pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) supporters also referred in passing to such a future course if the experiment for five new Legislative Councilors indirectly elected by District Councilors proves successful.

PRECEDENTS

         Nor does the lack of transparency end there.  Equally important are the omissions when citing precedents to legitimize indirect elections.  The Green Paper noted only that in international practice or “overseas jurisdictions,” universal suffrage one-person-one-vote systems “can take the form of direct or indirect election” (paragraph 2.24).  At public consultation forums, supporters of the government’s 2012 proposals liked to cite various examples in Europe where Western democratic systems combine both direct and indirect elections.  When speakers were reminded that Hong Kong is part of China not Europe, they had no answer.

          Another favorite precedent was that old whipping boy, the United States’ presidential Electoral College, which was responsible for electing George W. Bush in 2000, even though Al Gore won more popular votes.  When speakers were cautioned not to compare apples and oranges, again they did not respond.  But for anyone familiar with the U.S. electoral system, the comparison seemed forced at best. 

         In that system, presidential candidates are first chosen in all 50 states through statewide primaries where everyone who wants to can either vote directly or make their preference known directly for the candidate of their choice.  The nationwide direct popular vote follows.  Only then does the Electoral College, made up of electors designated by voters specifically for the purpose, make a final decision.  This can override the popular vote but rarely does.  The Electoral College is also widely recognized as an anachronistic holdover from a less democratic past that reformers have tried repeatedly to abolish precisely because it undermines the legitimacy of the popular vote.    By contrast, each Hong Kong District Councilor is elected to oversee neighborhood amenities by a few thousand voters from small fragmented constituencies, which do not even adequately represent the population within each of the 18 District Council catchment areas.

 THE ONLY PRECEDENT THAT MATTERS

           When asked specifically why they never cited Chinese precedents, democrats and government supporters alike could not see the relevance.  Politicians and commentators who are aware of the mainland precedent that will be set by introducing the District Councils plan hesitate to say so  openly for fear of heightening tensions further.  In fact, for Hong Kong now, there is only one precedent that matters, namely, China’s People’s Congress system, which is the government structure through which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) exercises its leadership.

          Article 3 of the Chinese Constitution specifics that the:  “National People’s Congress and the local people’s congresses at various levels are constituted through elections.”  Articles 59 and 97 spell out the arrangements for these elections.  National deputies and those to the people’s congresses of provinces and large cities are all elected indirectly by the congresses at the next lower level; deputies to congresses of counties, small cities, city districts, and townships “are elected directly by their constituencies.”Article 34 grants all Chinese citizens over the age of 18 the right to vote and to contest these elections.

        The Hong Kong public knows and fears the mainland system of CCP-led dictatorship but has little knowledge about these electoral mechanisms and governing institutions through which that dictatorship is exercised nationwide.  Even some leading members of Hong Kong democrats’ Universal Suffrage Alliance do not know that the small grassroots constituencies at the base of China’s People’s Congress pyramid directly elect local congresses and village committees on a one-person-one-vote basis.  That CCP branches and leaders vet candidates and dominate the system from top to bottom is known or at least assumed.  That 2.3 million Chinese citizens have been directly elected to over 600,000 village committees since 1988 (China Daily, March 2, 2010) is not known.  Nor is its significance appreciated as the precedent for Hong Kong’s new District Councils plan.

 WHO BENEFITS?

           Clearly, the DAB with its 12,000+ membership and many district-level satellite groups would be the main beneficiary of the government’s District Councils plan.  Recently, some democratic politicians have begun openly referring to the DAB as “the communist party” and they debate among themselves the wisdom of “outing” Hong Kong’s underground CCP branch.  But its presence is an open secret as are its presumed leading members who overlap with those of the DAB.  The latter is, in any case, modeled on the CCP as a mass-based hierarchical organization that is invariably loyal to Beijing’s policy decisions.

         Unfortunately for pan-democrats, they cannot compete with the DAB at the District Council level where democratic strength has always been weakest.  Even in the 1980s, when the District Councils were called District Boards, democratic activists found themselves at a disadvantage.  Constituencies were not drawn district-wide but broken up into 400 small segments with each board member elected by only a few thousand voters form his/her immediate neighborhood.  The boards were also concerned only with neighborhood amenities and a division-of-labor developed:  conservatives dominated the District Councils while democrats set their sights higher at the Legislative Council level.

           No one seems to have appreciated the political potential of this arrangement until the DAB realized how easily it could be exploited by simply building on the existing traditional street associations, charities, and neighborhood recreational facilities.  Today these activities are supported by a dense array of well-funded conservative organizations and full-time paid DAB staffers in every district that under-funded and over-worked democrats cannot hope to match.

          Precise figures are difficult to calculate given the large number of independents, who are rarely independent of partisan inclinations.  But in the last (2007) District Councils election, the DAB alone won more seats (115) than all the main democratic parties combined (93) (South China Morning Post, Nov. 20, 2007).   Especially important in that election was the DAB’s strategy of coordinating its candidate lists and campaign platforms with like-minded groups that did not acknowledge their political affiliation while campaigning.  They all, that is, the DAB and their allies, concentrated exclusively on livelihood issues leaving constituents unaware that they might be voting for the building blocks of a mainland-style people’s congress system.

WHAT IS UNIVERSAL SUFFRAGE?

           It follows that the main question everyone should be asking is:  what does Beijing mean by universal suffrage?    As indicated by Beijing’s latest (December 2007) decision on the matter, 2020 is the earliest date that Hong Kong can have a universal suffrage election for Legco.  Everyone agrees that one-country-two-systems is a temporary arrangement designed to ease Hong Kong’s transition to full integration within China’s political system by 2047.   In 2020, therefore, Hong Kong will be just about half way “home.” 

          If the District Councils plan proceeds as the government hopes, half of Legco will then be indirectly elected by District Councilors and Hong Kong will be on course to merge with the mainland People’s Congress system.  Hong Kong will also have a form of “universal suffrage,” based like the mainland system today on a foundation of one-person-one-vote at the grassroots level.  But if China is still governed under the same one-party system, and if the DAB is still organized in its present form, then the imposition of one-party CCP rule in Hong Kong will also be well on its way to realization by 2020. 

        If Hong Kong is satisfied with that prospect, then so be it.  But if Hong Kong does not want to take such a risk with its future, then answers to all these questions should be provided now, while there is still time to chart another course.  The first step is to recognize the potential dangers of the District Councils option as currently proposed and explain them clearly to the public.   Then, if their constituents agree, pan-democrats should refuse to accept the District Councils plan without substantial modification.  But above all, the public should not be led blindly into a system the political implications of which have been explained to only a select few “insiders.”  The District Councils plan is actually a “People’s Congress plan” and should be known for what it is.

         The government issued its latest set of political reform proposals last November and launched a three-month public consultation period that ended February 19^th.  Officially, the reforms are intended to further Hong Kong’s quest for the holy grail of directly-elected local government (Nov. 23/09 post).  In reality, they seem like an exercise in political involution, designed to produce more circles of convoluted electoral activity without any change in the undemocratic executive-led system.  Conservatives plus the main pro-Beijing political party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), quickly endorsed the proposals.  Their Alliance for Constitutional Development sponsored a petition bearing 1.6 million signatures collected on street corners all over town.[i]    The pan-democratic camp uniformly opposes the government’s reform package but not uniformly to the same degree in terms of response.   This has divided into radical and moderate.   

          Radicals are represented by the most street-savvy of Hong Kong’s democratic parties, the League of Social Democrats (LSD), plus the lawyer-led Civic Party.  In late January, five Legislative Councilors from these two parties, or one legislator from each of Hong Kong’s five legislative election districts, resigned their seats in order to trigger territory-wide special elections that are being promoted as a de facto referendum on political reform.  The by-elections, as they are called here, are scheduled for May 16^th.  These legislators say they will not endorse the government reform package without a roadmap, meaning some indication as to how the goal of genuine universal suffrage elections is to be achieved, which officials have so far refused to provide.  The resignation/referendum exercise is intended as a gesture of protest, to focus public attention on the difference between what the government is offering and what democrats have always wanted.

          Ironically, that leaves the older Democratic Party (DP) as chief power broker because it is the largest of the original 11 political groups making up the new Universal Suffrage Alliance.  This alignment is being called the moderate force within the democratic camp because none of its members wanted to take the risk of joining the resignation/referendum protest campaign.  Until this division over tactics occurred, however, the DP contained some of Hong Kong’s most radical pan-democrats since DP leaders have been the mainstay of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patriotic Democratic Movement in China.  That alliance sponsors Hong Kong’s annual candlelight vigil commemorating the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square and continues to demand an end to one-party rule in China.  Beijing regards this demand as a call for independence (from Chinese Communist Party rule) and therefore subject to the charge of treason.  As a result, these leaders have had their “home-return” travel permits canceled, meaning they cannot cross the border for travel inland.   

           DP leaders also say they will not endorse the reform proposals without a roadmap:  the Hong Kong government and Beijing authorities must give believable assurances that genuine one-person-one-vote direct elections are the aim by indicating specifically how that aim can be achieved.[ii]  Although some members of the Universal Suffrage Alliance seem more ready than others to compromise, in reality the main difference between radicals and moderates is disagreement over the resignation/referendum protest tactic.

          The split is nevertheless leading to some classic old-fashioned Chinese-style (also known as Machiavellian) stratagems.  These naturally make for more interesting reading than the tedious details that distinguish various reform counter-proposals tabled by members of the public during the consultation period.  But the strategizing has only just begun in earnest and should continue at least until May 16^th.    Meanwhile, the consultation exercise and counter-proposals it generated indicate the extent of public participation and the likely limits of public patience beyond which Beijing’s sought-after “harmonious” consensus will be difficult to achieve.

THE CONSULTATION EXERCISE

           Hong Kongers have grown jaded over the years and are not enthusiastic participants in official consultations.  The colonial government developed them into a formalistic art that is now used routinely for all kinds of public policy initiatives and the two officially-hosted open public forums followed accordingly.  But Hong Kong’s long-running movement for universal suffrage elections is such a hot button issue that all politically active groups and several universities rose to the occasion by sponsoring their own public forums, petitions, opinion surveys, press conferences, and a multitude of other activities.  The United States-funded National Democratic Institute co-sponsored a few of the open forums.  Otherwise all were local civil society initiatives.

           Due to various restrictions on the political use of television, it is the least effective medium for influencing public opinion, leaving that task to radio talk shows, the internet, online video programs, and social networking.   Newspapers nevertheless remain the chief source of political news, information, opinion, and advertising.  The main pro-democracy Chinese-language papers are Apple Daily [Pingguo ribao], Ming Pao Daily News [Mingbao], and Hsin Pao [Xinbao] known in English as the Hong Kong Economic Journal.  Opposing all pan-democratic politicking on this issue are the main pro-Beijing papers:  Wen Wei Po [Wenhui bao], Ta Kung Pao [Dagong bao], and China Daily.

          The government’s Department of Constitutional and Mainland Affairs is now assessing the information gathered and will in due course publish collated statistics as well as a summary of the written submissions mailed in by the public, reportedly numbering 40,000. [iii]  Due to past experience, however, this is the most vulnerable stage of the process in terms of generating public cynicism.  It is also one reason why an up-or-down vote in a popular referendum freely and fairly conducted has long been a favored option among democrats –  if only five of their legislators did not have to resign in order to precipitate it.  

THE PROPOSALS

        To recap the government’s proposals:  they were drafted in accordance with Beijing’s latest decision issued on Dec. 29, 2007.  Universal suffrage elections cannot be introduced for the Chief Executive (CE) until 2017 and the Legislative Council (Legco) until 2020, at the earliest.  But incremental adjustments toward that end can be made in elections along the way.  The government’s current proposals concern only the next CE and Legco terms; elections for both will occur in 2012. 

          Currently, the CE is elected by an 800-member committee that is itself created by electors from four sectors, drawn to favor conservative business and pro-Beijing interests.  The government proposes to increase the size of this committee from 800 to 1,200 members while retaining its existing design.   For Legco, the government proposes an increase from 60 to 70 seats, with the addition of five seats to be filled by direct universal suffrage elections in the five geographic constituencies.  The other five new seats would be filled by indirect election with members of Hong Kong’s 18 District Councils serving as electors.  This would preserve the 50/50 balance in Legco between directly and indirectly elected members as mandated by Beijing’s December 2007 decision.  No changes are proposed for the existing occupation-based Functional Constituencies (FCs), which replicate the CE Election Committee and are also designed to favor conservative interests.  They elect 29 legislators; one is already indirectly chosen by District Councilors from among their own ranks. [iv]      

          Key to pan-democratic opposition is the lack of a roadmap beyond 2012 and the government has failed to explain this lapse.  Officials say only that they lack authority to do so but without explanation except to cite Beijing’s December 2007 decision.  Since that decision does permit incremental changes in anticipation of the 2017/2020 timetable, democrats remain skeptical about the sincerity of the universal suffrage promise itself.  Contributing to this skepticism is the demand of some high-profile conservatives to retain the FCs permanently. 

         Because they relate to constitutional reform, the government’s proposals cannot be implemented until approved by two-thirds of Legco’s 60 members, of whom 23 are democrats.  But since democrats represent 60% of the popular vote (for the 30 directly-elected seats), the battle for public opinion is as important as the legislative vote count in order to ensure smooth passage from law into practice.

 OPINION POLLS        

             Despite the hectic rounds of activity among pan-democrats, however, impressions drawn from the exercise so far do not bode particularly well for their cause.  The Hong Kong government’s most constant resource dating back to colonial times has been the assumption of public apathy and ignorance about politics, electoral systems, and government institutions.  That tradition is still being exploited for whatever advantage it can bring, as suggested by the results of preliminary polling. 

          Hong Kong University pollsters conducted three surveys asking how much people knew about the government’s reform proposals.  In late November when the consultation began, 68% said they knew little; by early February shortly before it ended, the number was 70%.  Given that response, the support/opposition questions probably signify little.  But support for the Chief Executive electoral reform proposals fell slightly (from 43% to 41%); opposition remained steady (31%).  Support for the Legco proposals fell slightly more (from 43% to 39%; opposition rose (from 28% to 32%).[v]  

          A similar Chinese University poll conducted in late December found support for the government’s proposals at 50.8%; opposition, 30.6%; undecided, 18.6%. [vi]  According to the pro-Beijing One-Country, Two-System Research Institute poll in late February, 56.3% supported the government’s proposals with 30.9% opposed and 12.7% undecided.[vii]

PETITIONS AND COUNTER-PROPOSALS

        Hong Kong professionals and university academics had traditionally been conservative but a new generation is establishing itself.  These younger university professors along with lawyers, school teachers, social workers, and journalists are now providing intellectual backup for the pan-democratic camp — except on the resignation/referendum tactic.  This has met with strong disapproval among academics especially.  Foreign diplomats are also said to be uniformly against the idea, which should interest Beijing since officials there routinely blame foreign consulates here for aiding and abetting Hong Kong democrats. 

       Incidentally, the consultation exercise has been a boon for the Chinese-language press or at least its advertising revenues.  Business supporters of the FCs can easily afford full-page spreads for their statements and petitions and the two referendum parties also evidently have substantial advertising budgets.   Among the more modest layouts were two self-financed pro-democracy petitions representing more and less moderate stands.  

         “A Word from Intellectuals on Hong Kong’s Future” contained 126 names and was sponsored by a dozen university academics including Chinese University political scientist MA Ngok who is lead researcher for the moderate Universal Suffrage Alliance.  They say they “are tired of the endless political wrangling” and find the government’s reform package incapable of providing a solution.  Toward that end their demands are: 

(1) the central authorities in Beijing should explain that by 2017 the threshold for nominations within the CE Election Committee will be no higher than it is now (one-eighth of 800 members);  (2) Beijing should explain that in 2020 universal suffrage will mean equal voting rights for everyone and no FCs;   (3) under the proposal for indirect elections by District Councilors, the current practice whereby 20% of the 500 total are government appointees should be phased out and DC elections should be made more democratic to allow all parties balanced representation at that level.[viii]

         The Professional Commons group, closely associated with the radicalized Civic Party, issued a stronger statement.  Its 150 signatories called on Chief Executive Donald Tsang to withdraw the proposals and re-issue a new package designed to achieve “genuine universal suffrage with total abolition of the FCs.” [ix]   A group of pominent pro-democracy lawyers sponsored a full page proclaiming the FCs to be incompatible with universal suffrage.[x] 

          Academics have also tried their hand at designing alternative proposals and some of these ideas may contribute to final solutions should the authorities agree to negotiate.  All these ideas suggest ways of redrawing and ultimately dismantling the FCs, which are seen as the main stumbling block to universal suffrage.  In fact, it is Beijing that stands as the primary obstacle; the FCs are secondary.  But some adjustments might be introduced in deference to the widespread perception that the current electoral arrangement gives unfair advantage to conservative business interests.

       Based on his findings in that respect, Michael DeGolyer, who heads the survey research Transition Project at Baptist University, suggests broadening the composition of various FCs to include occupations not now represented.  Eventually all occupations would be included thereby negating the need for FCs.[xi]  Researchers led by Simon Young at Hong Kong University’s Center for Comparative and Public Law (CCPL) recommend the gradual merger and rearrangement of existing FCs in a way that will ultimately reduce the influence of those most resistant to giving up their electoral advantage.  This would, by 2020, leave the remaining diehards with insufficient Legco votes to block their own abolition.[xii]

        These plans pay little attention to the government’s new proposal to allow the indirect election of five legislators by District Councilors.  University of Science and Technology professor, SING Ming, notes the inability of democratic candidates to compete equally and fairly in District Council elections due to their small constituencies and the generous conservative budgets that are being used to fund grassroots social services.  He therefore recommends using the five territory-wide Legco election districts for the purpose of filling the five new seats and allowing universal suffrage for candidates who would presumably be nominated by District Councilors.  This is part of his larger design that would, between now and 2020, combine the existing FCs into four sectors with suffrage gradually expanding in each sector until all were elected on a one-person-one-vote basis. [xiii]

WHAT NEXT?

          Academics and other sympathetic onlookers are denouncing the two-party referendum as a distraction from the serious business of negotiating an end to Hong Kong’s political reform deadlock.  Some are even raising fears about a “tragedy” in the making with melodramatic visions of gangland politics and populism run riot.  The resignation/referendum parties have contributed their share to rising tensions with an initial advertizing blitz that called on Hong Kongers to “rise up” and struggle against small-circle elections, a phrase immediately interpreted by Beijing as incitement to rebellion. 

         Atmospherics aside, however, there is much work yet to be done as indicated by the HKU poll that found 70% of its respondents claiming not to understand the issues discussed during the consultation period.   Those respondents were actually saying something important and the referendum electioneering campaign will provide another opportunity to answer their questions.  Hopefully that opportunity will not be wasted because there is still little understanding here about the political implications of different kinds of electoral systems or the institutions of government that go with them.

            The public knows and fears the mainland system of Chinese Communist Party (CCP)-led dictatorship but has little knowledge about the mechanisms and institutions whereby that dictatorship is exercised nationwide.  Even some leading members of the democrats’ Universal Suffrage Alliance do not know that the small grassroots constituencies at the base of China’s People’s Congress pyramid directly elect local congresses and village committees on a one-person-one-vote basis.  Higher level congresses are indirectly elected with CCP leaders at each level vetting candidates throughout.

       The similarity with Hong Kong’s small District Council constituencies where only a few thousand voters elect each councilor is obvious.  Yet not only is the practice of indirect election from the District Councils to Legco being promoted in the government’s reform proposals.  The pro-Beijing DAB, which replicates the CCP as a mass-based hierarchically organized party and now together with its allies has majorities on all but two of Hong Kong’s 18 District Councils, is advocating use of the “District Council model” as the roadmap to universal suffrage. Except for a few inadvertent slip-ups, however, this idea remained hidden from public view throughout the consultation exercise.  Only after the exercise ended did one government official mention in passing that the government was indeed planning to propose expanding the District Council model for use in replacing the FCs.[xiv]

         Politicians and commentators who are aware of the mainland precedent that will be set by introducing the District Council model nevertheless hesitate to identify it as such for fear of heightening tensions further.  Hence the larger political implications (of integration with the mainland People’s Congress system) are being ignored.  Those few who discuss the model at all focus only on the unfair advantage it gives to “a certain party,” the public forum euphemism for the DAB and its many satellite groups.

          Meanwhile, government officials and conservative promoters speak earnestly about all the international jurisdictions that combine universal suffrage with indirect elections, often even citing the example of the U.S. presidential Electoral College.  Yet not a single commentator has mentioned the only precedent that matters, namely, China’s People’s Congress system.  Article 3 of the Chinese Constitution specifies that the:  “National People’s Congress and the local people’s congresses at various levels are constituted through democratic elections.”  Articles 59 and 97 spell out the arrangements for these elections.  National deputies and those to the people’s congresses of provinces and large cities are all elected indirectly by the congresses at the next lower level; deputies to congresses of counties, small cities, city districts, and townships “are elected directly by their constituencies.”

         The respondents in HKU’s poll should be congratulated since they were clearheaded enough to understand and honest enough to admit that they did not know what the political reform proposals entailed.

[ii] DP chairman, Albert Ho Chun-yan, Letter to Hong Kong, Feb. 21, 2010, http://programme.rthk.org.hk/channel/radio/programme.php?name=/lettertohongkong ; and DP vice-chair, Emily Lau Wai-hing, Apple Daily, March 4, 2010; also, Ming Pao Daily News, Jan. 25, 2010, and editorial, Jan. 27, 2010.

[iii] Wen Wei Po, Feb. 20, 2010.

 [iv] The government’s consultation document proposals and Beijing’s Dec. 2007 decision are at:   www.cmab-cd2012.gov.hk .   For a summary, see my Nov. 23/09 post.        

 [v]  HKU POP site release on political reform, Feb. 8, 2010:   http://hkupop.hku.hk/ 

 [vi]  Ming Pao Daily News, Jan. 8, 2010.

 [vii]  Wen Wei Po, Feb. 23, 2010.

 [viii]  Hsin Pao (Hong Kong Economic Journal), Dec. 17, 2009.

 [ix]  Ming Pao Daily News, Jan. 21, 2010. 

 [x]  Hsin Pao (Hong Kong Economic Journal), Dec. 16, 2009.

 [xi]  “Scenarios and Options for Reform,” presented at the Constitutional Reform Participatory Workshop, Baptist University, Sept. 5, 2009 (http://www.hktp.org).

 [xii]  CCPL Press Release, “Breaking the Deadlock in Political Reform,” Jan. 26, 2010, originally presented ata HKU forum, Jan. 9, 2010; also, South China Morning Post, Jan. 9, 2010.

[xiii] Presented at a Hong Kong Polytechnic University forum, Nov. 28, 2009; also, Ming Pao Daily News,  Feb. 4 and 10, 2010. 

[xiv]   Executive Councilor Anthony Cheung Bing-leung in South China Morning Post, Feb. 19, 2010.  There were other less direct hints, for ex., Ming Pao Daily News, editorial, Nov. 20, 2009.