Last week’s post on the coming political reform debate highlighted a growing tendency on all sides here to acknowledge reality.  Until recently everyone has kept to the official narrative that proved so successful in guiding Hong Kong’s smooth transition from colonial rule. The narrative’s “one-country, two-systems” motto meant Hong Kong accepted Chinese sovereignty but enjoyed enough autonomy from the central government in Beijing to continue living essentially as before, with all the accustomed rights and freedoms remaining intact.  The change follows Beijing’s new candor about its direct hand in Hong Kong governance and Hong Kong’s growing sense that autonomy is fading. 

         The renewed activism evidently derives from this perception but whatever the cause politicians and commentators seem suddenly reinvigorated in their defense of “Hong Kong values,” another of those allusive terms that allow Hong Kongers to distinguish themselves from their mainland compatriots without actually saying so.  Besides the new appetite for confrontation with the powers that be over political reform and the intrusion of bureaucratic mainland ways, another example of this rising energy level is the wave of protest that blew up suddenly over the rough treatment received by Hong Kong journalists on assignment in Urumqi.   But in this latest case, the flare-up sparked a surprising response all across the local political spectrum where agreement on mainland-related matters is rare.

CROWD CONTROL IN URUMQI      

           Hong Kong journalists now routinely cover mainland events and, like many in the international press corps, have had their share of run-ins with the authorities.  But the incident on September 4 was different in that the three TV reporters were treated to a first-hand lesson in grassroots Chinese law enforcement.  They were forced to the ground, handcuffed, beaten, kicked, and then detained by police.  Foreign correspondents are handled more gently, but such treatment is otherwise routine whether or not Chinese suspects are armed and resisting, and whether or not they are potentially political.   In response to angry questions from Hong Kong, insult was then added to injury when the Xinjiang Information Office director came out in person to accuse the three of inciting a disturbance by gesturing to the crowd.  A few days later, five other Hong Kong TV and radio reporters were also roughed up and briefly detained by police on grounds their actions, too, were provocative.

          The journalists were in Urumqi to cover fresh protests there over the government’s failure to control a novel form of street violence involving hypodermic needle attacks on unsuspecting passersby.  Urumqi is the capital of China’s far-western Xinjiang province, which has lately been the scene of serious ethnic unrest between the Muslim Uighur inhabitants and Han Chinese migrants.  The latter have long been resented but needles are a new variation on switchblade knives, which have always been the Uighur weapon of choice for street crime and revenge attacks. 

HONG KONG’S RESPONSE

         In Hong Kong, however, the incident aggravated a very different but equally serious source of tension with the central government and one that local political leaders could not ignore.   In an unusual sequence, both pan-democrats and pro-Beijing politicians converged on the central government’s liaison office to register their concern and demand a probe of the Urumqi accusations.  The two camps made their representations separately, of course.  Democrats were not invited in and had to lodge their protest at the gate.  But the liaison office took note of all and stepped completely out of character by sending fruit-basket peace offerings to the newsrooms of the three reporters who had received the worst treatment. 

          Several senior pro-Beijing figures then issued strong statements focusing especially on the charge of incitement.  Among the opinion leaders was Miriam Lau, head of the pro-business Beijing-friendly Liberal Party who expressed her indignation as forcefully as any democrat. Controversial loyalist Leung Chun-ying, who featured in last week’s (Sept. 16) post, said the police should not resort to excessive force.  Others wrote to Beijing demanding “concrete proof” for the charge of incitement.

           Equally noteworthy was an editorial comment in the Ta Kung Pao, Hong Kong’s second most important pro-Beijing newspaper.   The September 11 editorial also focused on the issue of incitement and urged clarification of the unsubstantiated charge.  Probably the Xinjiang authorities do not understand why the accusation has caused such an uproar, noted the editorial, which went on to explain.  “As people in Hong Kong see it, clashes with those responsible for keeping order are difficult to avoid when journalists go out interviewing, but that’s no big deal ….”  Certainly it is not the same thing as incitement, “a charge that absolutely cannot be casually accepted by knowledgeable circles in Hong Kong.”

        Local protests included another liaison office demonstration organized by the Hong Kong Journalists Association on September 13, when some 700 people gathered to tie red ribbons on the gate and chant slogans for press freedom.  It was the largest political protest by local media workers, who usually cover such events but do not participate, since they joined Hong Kong’s big watershed march against proposed national security legislation on July 1, 2003.  Agitation culminated in a press freedom petition denouncing the harassment of Hong Kong journalists in China and demanding vindication for those accused in the Urumqi incident.  The petition together with the names of over 1,300 local journalists, journalism techers, and students, appeared in four local newspapers on the eve of National Day, September 30.

LESSONS LEARNED

         One reader in far-away Arkansas wrote to the South China Morning Post (Sept. 17) expressing surprise at all the fuss.  He advised Hong Kong journalists, in effect, to forget about it because nothing political ever changes in China.  In fact, China is changing and so is Hong Kong and the case involves a value that commands more widespread support here than political reform itself.  The incident also occurred at a crucial moment in Hong Kong’s evolving relationship with China.

         For more than a decade after the 1989 Tiananmen protest movement, Hong Kong’s democracy activists clung to the idealistic hope that they could help inspire political change in China.  They also liked to argue that Hong Kong’s democratic values could never be secure until they had been established in China as well.  The hope and the logic have not changed.  But in recent years, as political pressures began building from the opposite direction, local perspectives gradually adjusted to focus on the threat posed by mainland ways encroaching within Hong Kong itself.  The new appetite for confrontation is part of this defensive pushback.

       To everyone’s surprise, however, the Urumqi incident produced a rare real-life case of convergence.  Partisans who have been working to propagate mainland ways in Hong Kong came forward to lecture their mainland compatriots on behalf of Hong Kong’s most cherished political freedom.  At the heart of this matter is the national security legislation, shelved in 2003, which Hong Kong is still mandated to pass in accordance with Article 23 of its Basic Law constitution.  The Basic Law governs Hong Kong’s 50-year (1997-2047) transition as a Special Administrative Region (SAR) from colonial to full mainland rule.  Incitement is among the acts criminalized by such legislation. Hong Kong’s neighbor, Macau, is in similar SAR transitional circumstances and did its duty by passing its law earlier this year (See Feb. 17 Letter).   

          Meanwhile, press reports here regularly chronicle the experiences of people detained by mainland law enforcement authorities on charges of subverting state power, seditious incitement, and so on. The reports suggest that the Xinjiang police were simply following their own rules of procedure with the casual charge of incitement used as a crowd control measure in tense situations.  Had the three journalists been locals, they might well have been prosecuted and sentenced to prison terms since the crime is deliberately vague as stated in law, evidently by design to allow variable interpretations in practice as local authorities see fit.

          One of the key demands, deriving from Hong Kong democrats’ 2003 campaign against the draft Article 23 legislation, entailed de-linking its national security and political security provisions and clearly defining the nature of both.  Since the new Macau law failed to contain any such reassuring modifications and since that “sword of Damocles,” as it is often called, still hangs in the balance, the issue remains as sensitive for Hong Kong today as it was in 2003. 

         That pro-Beijing community leaders identified the source of the uproar so quickly and sympathized with the “Hong Kong values” side of the argument are nevertheless hopeful signs.  Hong Kong may have made little perceptible progress in its original goal of serving as a demonstration model for mainland political reform.  But Hong Kong and Beijing values are clearly converging in Hong Kong itself and that is a prerequisite for preserving its rights and freedoms between now and 2047, and into the future beyond.

         Of course, Hong Kong democrats cannot resist the temptation to score political points whenever opportunities arise and this case offered too many to ignore.  Despite Beijing’s straight-faced denials, everyone knows that Hong Kong public opinion counts and is measured in ways that simulate elected government even though Hong Kong does not have one.  Hence Executive Councilor Leung Chun-ying is well aware that being one of Hong Kong’s least popular politicians will not help his chances when the time comes for Beijing to approve Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive.

         Miriam Lau’s public protestations may have seemed a touch too effusive because she is trying to rebuild the fortunes of a party that lost all its directly-elected seats in the last Legislative Council poll.   And journalists who work for pro-Beijing publications would be the first to benefit from a possible easing of mainland rules.  These publications spend more time covering mainland events than anyone else and are rewarded for their efforts with the lowest circulation figures in town.  But democrats can be forgiven for scoring political points while they can since no one is willing to predict how long this rare confluence of public opinion and political interest will last.

          “We’ve been talking about democracy since the Qing Dynasty,” said one exasperated participant in the Hong Kong equivalent of a town hall meeting.  Debate and discussion has continued throughout the summer but this early September workshop in effect marked the start of a new chapter in Hong Kong’s long-running political reform saga.  The speaker was right.  Proposals for elected representation in local government date from the earliest years of Hong Kong’s colonial existence in the 1840s.  For reasons of their own strategic self-interest, the British did not allow such representation until the 1980s when their interests changed.   Thereafter the sovereign-in-waiting also found cause to object. 

         Beijing’s basic reasons were and remain twofold.  Theoretically, elected   government signifies that sovereignty resides in the people.  For Beijing, sovereignty belongs to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which represents the people.  Practically, Beijing maintains that Western-style representative democracy and mainland-style democratic centralism are two different things; that the former is not appropriate for China; and that Western-style democrats are working to overthrow CCP rule by using Hong Kong as a subversive base toward that end. These considerations have blocked implementation of Beijing’s formal Basic Law promise to allow “gradual and orderly progress” toward universal suffrage elections.[i]  But Hong Kong democrats refuse to give up and Beijing refuses to give in.  The latest delaying tactics came in the December 2007 decree that postponed the possibility of such elections for the Chief Executive (CE) and Legislative Council (Legco) until 2017 and 2020, respectively.  A small window of opportunity nevertheless remained open for incremental preparatory adjustments in the electoral system between now and then.  Hence this latest chapter in the struggle for popularly elected local government is about incremental adjustments for the next CE and Legco elections, both of which happen to fall in 2012. The early September meeting was held to encourage public discussion of possible options.

       Readers interested in the tedious details will doubtless find more than enough in blogs to come.  A few recommendations have already been put forward by interested groups and individuals.  After much procrastination, the government’s own proposals are scheduled for release by year’s end.  Already apparent, however, are two new trends not seen in Hong Kong’s political reform movement since the return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.  One is a growing appetite for direct confrontation with the Hong Kong and Chinese governments.  The other is a revival of the pre-1997 demand to call the local CCP branch out from “underground.”  Such developments may seem unremarkable but in Hong Kong’s constrained political space both are significant steps forward.

       It would be an exaggeration to say that public discourse here has finally evolved into a straightforward statement of ideas usually shared only among like-minded friends and colleagues.  In public, no one is yet willing to declare that the official “one-country, two-systems” slogan is a euphemism for transition to mainland-style one-party rule by 2047.  Nor is anyone yet willing to demand in so many words that local CCP members declare themselves.  But politicians and commentators are inching ever closer on both counts in Hong Kong’s own peculiar version of political shadow-boxing.

CONFRONTING THE POWERS THAT BE

         After complying with all the legal conditions and time frames for political reform, everyone realized they were getting the run-around when Beijing issued its December 2007 ultimatum delaying things until 2017/2020.  That impression has been reinforced by conservative and pro-Beijing opinion leaders who immediately began lobbying for retention of the least representative indirectly-elected features of the present Legco electoral system even after universal suffrage has been achieved.  The unspoken reality here is that such an arrangement would dovetail with the mainland system, which is based on universal suffrage albeit at the basic grassroots level only. The council is currently composed of 60 members:  30 directly elected with pan-democratic parties prevailing; and 30 based on indirectly-elected functional consistencies (FCs) weighted in favor of conservative business and financial interests.   There are currently some 3.4 million voters registered to participate in direction elections and only about 230,000 in the FCs, which supporters want to retain indefinitely.

       The pan-democratic parties therefore calculate they have little to lose and are exploring some confrontational pressure tactics that until now have been avoided for fear of their disruptive consequences.  Most striking was last week’s announcement that the Civic Party, led by well-behaved lawyers, had decided to endorse the action plan proposed by the Legaue of Social Democrats, currently Hong Kong’s most radical and rambunctious political group.  Accordingly, one democratic legislator would resign in each of Hong Kong’s five electoral districts thereby triggering simultaneous territory-wide by-elections as a gesture of protest.  This action would follow if the government’s official proposals later this year contain no meaningful signs of progress toward the ultimate end of “genuine universal suffrage” elections. 

           The lawyers have even gone further and are advocating that all 23 democratic legislators resign in 2011 if by then there is still no official demonstration of serious intent to move forward.  Pan-democrats are generally agreed that the FCs must go and nominations for CE candidates must not be officially controlled.  The action plan is not without risk and all pan-democrats may not endorse the entire package.  But it has already served notice to the government before its proposals are announced that there will be real political consequences, beyond just another routine protest march, if the impasse is allowed to continue.

COAXING THE PARTY OUT OF THE CLOSET

       The new pressure on local CCP members to declare themselves is more subtle but equally significant.  Democrats were intimidated into silence on the issue before 1997 when maintaining calm during the sensitive handover period was a major concern. So they focused instead on safeguarding Hong Kong’s existing rights, freedoms, and “way of life,” in accordance with the Basic Law’s 50-year guarantees.  Current concerns can be traced to the alarm registered among pan-democrats last spring when they discovered the article by mainland researcher Cao Erbao who matter-of-factly acknowledged Beijing’s participation in Hong Kong governance.[ii]   His contribution was followed by that of another mainland researcher, Professor Cheng Jie, who also wrote that Beijing is now taking an active role in Hong Kong affairs.[iii]   Then the CCP’s United Front Work Department director, Du Qinglin, arrived to much fanfare and more intimations of a direct party presence.[iv]    With Hong Kong’s 50 years of guaranteed autonomy evidently under threat, the old question has revived.  Maybe it is now time, say democrats still mostly among themselves, for local CCP members to step up and be counted along with everyone else.

         Civic Party member and South China Morning Post contributor Stephen Vines reflected this rising sentiment when he commented on the “dangerous lack of transparency” surrounding Hong Kong’s CCP branch.   Vines is one of the few non-Chinese members of a local political party.  “The suspicion lingers,” he wrote, “that there is some deliberate design attached to the installation of leading members in prominent roles in Hong Kong” without acknowledging their party affiliation.   Either that or they are afraid of the CCP’s still prevailing negative reputation among the general public (SCMP, Sept. 4).

         The existence of a local CCP branch has never been openly acknowledged except by one of its leaders after he fled to the United States. [v]  Xu Jiatun headed the New China News Agency (NCNA) in the 1980s, fell afoul of his Beijing superiors during the 1989 Tiananmen protest movement, and defected soon afterward.  The NCNA was China’s official representative in colonial Hong Kong and doubled as leader of the local pro-Beijing community while also serving as cover for the local CCP branch.  Xu revealed in his memoirs that the branch had some 6,000 members in Hong Kong and Macau when he took up his post in 1983. [vi]

         Leaders of the patriotic community, as it liked to call itself in colonial days, founded a pro-Beijing political party in the early 1990s.  The Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB) operates openly like all other political groups, but it is assumed that its leaders are also concurrently members of the local CCP branch.  Exactly who is and who is not a member nevertheless remains Hong Kong’s best-kept secret. Whenever the prime suspects are asked they neither confirm nor deny, which is interpreted as a confirmation.  So it is with a sense of no little bravado that heretofore discreet commentators recently began fingering Leung Chun-ying as a party member.  His prompt denial was taken as an indication that he probably is not.  But the damage has been done by calling attention to a political stance so unfailingly loyal that he might as well be.  Leung is a member of the CE’s Executive Council or cabinet and is thoroughly disliked by pan-democrats not because of his wealth or connections, but because he has always disparaged democratic government. He has also reputedly been a long-standing entrant on Beijing’s shortlist of favorites for the CE post and has recently undertaken a high-profile image-rehabilitation effort, presumably anticipating the next CE selection in 2012.  Only this time around his adversaries made a daring preemptive strike by leveling the most damaging of charges against him.  The Chinese-language Ming Pao Daily News even commissioned its own opinion poll to reveal Leung the least popular of the three current main contenders (Sept. 7).

       The case against Home Affairs Secretary Tsang Tak-sing is equally daring but more carefully crafted.  Unlike Leung, Tsang’s career profile makes him one of the prime party suspects and he made headlines two years ago when he became the first career loyalist appointed to a leading position in the Hong Kong government.  Among other things, Home Affairs oversees the 18 District Councils where the DAB has registered its greatest strength.  But activists are not challenging any of this.  Instead they are accusing him of acting in the style of mainland officials for pressuring the YWCA into removing one of its social workers from a rural district where he had allegedly disrupted local “harmony.”  Tsang has been summoned to attend a Legco meeting for overstepping the bounds of his authority, and the heretofore moderate Ming Pao Daily News again rose to the occasion with a rousing denunciation of mainland “river crabs” invading Hong Kong (Sept. 4).  River crab in Chinese is a pun on the word for harmony, recently popularized in mainland dissident circles to protest Beijing’s official insistence on social harmony in lieu of free political expression.

          Suddenly Hong Kong’s perception of its political relationship with the mainland seems to have changed, probably because Beijing’s pretentions about Hong Kong’s autonomy are also changing.  The widely discussed interventions by Cao Erbao, Cheng Jie, and Du Qinglin all indicated that Beijing is now interpreting the Basic Law’s promises very differently than was initially understood.  In response, Hong Kongers are beginning to realize that they will either have to push back as best they can to preserve what they value most about their existing way of life, or submit to the rising pressures for integration with the mainland political system.   If recent events are any indication, the first alternative is far more likely than the second.

[ii]  Letter from Hong Kong, June 1, 2009.

[iii]  hkjournal.org, July 2009.

[iv]  Letter from Hong Kong, Aug. 12, 2009.

[v] According to the old organization rules, branches in “white” territories where the party is still struggling for power should remain “underground.”  Hong Kong’s status is ambiguous in this respect and the territory is in any case regarded by Beijing as not yet “politically subdued” (See Cheng Jie quote in Letter from Hong Kong, Aug. 12, 2009).

[vi]   Xu Jiatun, Xianggang huiyilu [Hong Kong Memoirs], (Taibei:  Lianho bao, 1993), vol. 1, pp. 66-79.  The NCNA’s local political leadership functions have been inherited by the central government’s HongKong liaison office (Zhonglianban).