Posted: May 8, 2015
The “three R’s” advice came from Apple Daily’s Jimmy Lai Chee-ying midway through last year’s Umbrella/Occupy street blockades. The advice went unheeded, of course, and he sat it out with protesters until December when police finally hauled away the last remaining holdouts.
All things considered, he was right. It would have been better for their cause had demonstrators followed Lai’s advice when he gave it and staged an orderly forward-looking strategic retreat. Sympathetic observers generally agreed that the street sit-ins were an effective means of protest at first but then went on for too long, pursued unrealistic goals that could not be achieved by the means adopted, and allowed adversaries to gloat over the “failure” of Hong Kong’s longest most dedicated campaign for democratic elections.
Beijing has yet to budge on any part of its restrictive August 31 (8.31) decision that precipitated the street occupations and Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying probably never even thought once about resigning as protesters demanded. Even worse, say the concerned observers, Hong Kong’s democracy movement is now fragmenting again into all the disparate pieces that came together suddenly last year on September 28 when the street sit-ins began. In fact, there are even more disparate pieces now than before.
Downcast and discouraged everyone surely is but the pessimism is premature. Hong Kong’s democracy movement might be receding back into another period of irrelevance … as has happened many times before. This current phase is only the latest local agitation in a long sequence of abortive political reform efforts that extend back to the British colony’s earliest days.
Or the movement might inadvertently be doing just what Jimmy Lai suggested … since the disarray is not random. The new line-ups are being driven by fears about premature compromise and capitulation and no one is willing to bet the fears are unfounded. Hence the disarray is also being driven in anticipation of the need for a renewed pushback against mounting pressures to accept Beijing’s design for Hong Kong’s political future.
The movement is splitting and Beijing is trying … with some success … every means possible to exploit the divisions. Yet without them the movement would be even more likely to dissipate. It might still … but if anything comes of this struggle beyond what Beijing has so far been willing to offer, then much credit must go to the energy of the younger generation that is doing what it can to hold Hong Kong’s aging pro-democracy veterans to their pledges.
REGROUPING: SEPARATE WAYS FOR A COMMON CAUSE
Earlier this year Yvonne Leung Lai-kwok responded to questions during an informal gathering of sympathetic observers. Leung was last year’s University of Hong Kong student body president. She was also one of the student leaders who stepped into the void last September when Professor Benny Tai’s Occupy Central idea took off without him.
The older generation stood aside then and let students take the lead because they had come forward right after Beijing announced its 8.31 decision … when Benny Tai was blindsided by Beijing’s intransigence and seemed uncertain about going through with his carefully rehearsed street occupation protest. It had actually been planned to last only a few days. The police had also rehearsed their removal tactics, so the whole exorcise was supposed to have been short-lived. One reason it wasn’t was that the students were not alone.
They took the initiative at the head of a much larger grouping that had already been planning to follow Benny Tai’s lead. This is the Civil Human Rights Front that organizes the annual July First protest marches, a new tradition that began in 2003. All kinds of single-issue concern groups unite on that day around their one common cause as champions of Hong Kong’s civil liberties. It is also a march were political parties and elected politicians take a back seat. They join but never in the lead. This custom has developed in deference to ever-present suspicions and accusations about politicians exploiting idealistic goals for opportunistic purposes.
The politicians were criticized by some last year for not playing a more direct leadership role in the occupy movement. The reasons derive from this endemic suspicious tradition and not necessarily from lack of courage.
Yvonne Leung retold the story about how the all-city student leaders realized after a month or so that it was time to de-occupy. But like Jimmy Lai, the students could not convince everyone else that it was time to go and, also like Jimmy Lai, they couldn’t just walk away … a leaders’ retreat while the ground troops stayed behind on the street to face police clearing squads alone.
Those divisions are now reasserting themselves with some students and some others deciding to go their separate ways. The basic division remains, between “radicals” and “moderates,” for want of better words to describe them. Only this is not just a division between young and old or students and non-students, although it is both. But it’s also appearing among the students themselves as well as between and within different political groups and parties, more like a rebellion from below … between leaders and the rank-and-file … than anything else.
Most dramatic is the disarray within the all-city Hong Kong Federation of Students that played the lead role in Umbrella/Occupy. With over half a century of controversial history to its credit (the British thought it was a hotbed of pro-China pro-communist radicalism in the 1970s), the HKFS until recently represented students at all eight government-funded tertiary institutions here. Students at several universities have just held referendums to decide whether to go it alone or remain within the federation.
So far, four universities have voted to disaffiliate: the University of Hong Kong was first to go followed by Polytechnic University, Baptist, and City university. The latter voted on May 7. The Chinese University’s referendum had to be aborted after supporters fumbled the preparatory signature campaign. They say they’ll try again next semester. Of those voting, only one, Lingnan University, has remained within the federation (Ming Pao Daily, May 4).
Students say they have many grievances stemming from the 79-day Occupy protest, lesser complaints like lack of adequate consultation and disagreements over tactics. Leaders are “undemocratic” … being only indirectly elected by the various student bodies … didn’t pay enough attention to the views of everyone else, and so on. But the more basic underlying reason seems to be the moderation of HKFS leaders themselves.
They were allegedly too intent on trying to win official concessions and too fixated on their starring role in the unprecedented student debate with officials (Oct. 27, 2014 post). There were also no follow-up plans for what to do next after the debate, and student leaders were too inclined to listen to the professional politicians. These were helping out behind the scenes, with logistics and office space in the Legislative Council building just adjacent to the main Harcourt Road tent-city encampment.
Of greater importance to the democracy movement as a whole, however, are two additional decisions that have just been made. On April 27, the remaining members of the HKFS … in deference to the new climate of dissent … decided that the federation will not be among the sponsors of this year’s annual June Fourth memorial vigil in Victoria Park.
The event commemorates Beijing’s 1989 crackdown on its own 1980s democracy movement and the HKFS has been among the sponsors every year since. Attendance has continued to grow, bolstered by increasing numbers of cross-border travelers and mainland students who want to see for themselves how Hong Kongers exercise their right to remember the past in a way that is not allowed anywhere else in China.
Last year was the first when the growing mood of antagonism among local activists toward mainland influence had a noticeable impact on June Fourth commemorations. Dissenters held their own rally across town with several thousand attending … police said 3,000, sponsors said 7,000 (June 6, 2014 post). The basic theme was meant as a direct challenge to the mainstream Victoria Park event. It has always mourned the demise of the 1980s mainland democracy movement along with the violence in Tiananmen Square on June Fourth and has retained “down with one-party dictatorship” as a (more-or-less) constant slogan.
This year attendance at the counter-current rallies will be higher because the HKFS will be joining them rather than the Victoria Park vigil. We need not concern ourselves with democratizing the mainland and patriotic unification themes, say the dissidents. Protecting Hong Kong from the encroaching influence of mainland political ways and means should be our first priority. Ironically, Beijing might now see more to its liking among the Victoria Park crowd than the autonomy-first outliers who are vilified daily in the pro-mainland media as traitorous seekers of independence (Ming Pao Daily, Apr. 28, May 2).
Finally, as if all that was not enough, the youngsters have just dealt another blow to the old guard. Young Joshua Wong Chi-fung, a freshman college student, was the hero of the 2011-12 anti-patriotic education protest and is now much more besides. He has just led his old middle-school student group, Scholarism, out of the informal coalition that was preparing to campaign for veteran Democratic Party legislator Albert Ho Chun-yan who is planning to resign his Legislative Council seat. Ho’s idea is to use the subsequent by-election as a protest referendum against the Hong Kong government’s electoral reform bill based on Beijing’s 8.31 decision.
In a statement released on April 28, Scholarism said it had decided not to participate in the referendum campaign, which has been growing into an extension of last year’s Umbrella/Occupy movement. The reason: Scholarism wanted to distance itself from the professional Legislative Council politicians some of whom now seem to be losing their nerve and wavering in their determination to veto the government’s electoral reform bill. The group decided to pull out in order to free itself from the constraints they anticipated within the by-election campaign. Key to the decision was a commitment they would have had to make about holding in abeyance all disagreements with the democratic camp.
The support coalition had initially included five political parties, plus Scholarism, and the HKFS. The latter’s participation is now also in doubt as is Albert Ho’s resignation project itself since it was counting on the students to provide a major source of enthusiasm and energy (SCMP, April 29).
CLOSING THE GAP
So the retreat and regrouping have now been accomplished. All that remains of Jimmy Lai’s “three R’s” advisory is the third act: return … the most difficult stage of all. The question is how to return and how best to use what little time remains in this long running debate.
The government’s reform bill will be voted up or down within the next two months, before the Legislative Council’s summer recess. Consequently, attention is now focused on the simple up or down choices that must soon be made, on the public’s opinion about those choices, and its impact on the 27 pro-democracy legislators’ vow to veto.
The government’s saturation-style promotion campaign has moved into high gear and seems to be registering some success. Pan-democrats are on the defensive as they take up their street-corner positions with fliers and stump speeches. And listening to their talking points, it seems clear why they are not “closing the sale” with a winning argument.
A poll was commissioned by TVB in late April, soon after the Hong Kong government released its final version of the 2017 electoral reform plan based on Beijing’s restrictive 8.31 decision (April 17, 24 posts). Close to 51% of the 1,000+ people polled said “pocket it.” The results: 50.9 % said pass the bill; 37.9 % said veto it; 11 % were undecided (Ming Pao, Apr. 28).
But when the respondents in the same poll were asked whether they actually liked the government’s proposal, 35.5 % said they did not; 35.3 % said they did; and 25.1 % were undecided.* Seems like about 15% of those respondents would like some good reasons not to pass the bill but hadn’t yet heard them.
A similar number of those waiting-to-be-convinced seemed to lurk within the first results of the three universities’ tracking poll that began in late April. This poll is being conducted by three universities with reliable polling reputations: the University of Hong Kong, Chinese University, and Polytechnic … with results announced every Tuesday. The first two announcements on April 28 and May 5, were virtually identical. The latter showed 47.6% in favor of passing the bill; 36.4% said veto. **
Unfortunately for democracy movement campaigners, their closing summations seem weaker than their openers. Yet pro-democracy legislators know what their constituents can do to them if they backtrack now. The Democratic Party’s experience after Albert Ho’s sudden compromise decision in 2010 over a minor Legislative Council electoral reform bill remains uppermost in everyone’s mind. As a result of that 2010 decision, many of its members quit the Democratic Party, voters punished its candidates in the 2012 Legislative Council elections, and Albert Ho later said the abuse he received all along the route of the July 1, 2010 protest march transformed it into the “worst experience” of his entire life.
With that experience in mind, pan-dem arguments now seem directed primarily at their own constituents in an effort to try and reassure them that last-minute deals will not be done. But to do that, campaigners are invoking arguments that are not likely to get very far with people on the margin who don’t yet understand why the bill should not be accepted … even though they don’t like it. The government’s line that “we know it’s not perfect, but it’s the best we could do under the circumstances and think how wonderful it will be to vote for your own Chief Executive, etc., etc. … ” seems to be working.
In contrast, pan-dem legislators are invoking the hallowed argument about voting their conscience regardless of the opinion polls. Alternatively, pan-dem legislators are adopting a legalistic argument: since the Basic Law requires a two-thirds majority vote in Legco to pass the electoral reform bill, then a one-third public opinion poll rating will be sufficient to justify their veto.
The explanations that might have followed from the initial catchy “pocket it forever” 【戴一世】retort to the government’s “pocket it first” 【戴住先】slogan are not being expanded and emphasized for the benefit of the general public ..and the general public seems to be responding to the government’s mantra about how pan-dems are planning to deprive voters of their right to unviersal suffrage (TVB poll). Those explanations should be emphasizing Beijing’s insistence that 8.31 is as far as it has to go in meeting its Basic Law constitutional obligation for universal suffrage Hong Kong elections.
Such arguments should be asking why Beijing refuses to provide any other definitions for future, post-2017, elections beyond the vague Basic Law phraseology that “if there is a need,” further reforms mgiht be allowed.
The barristers have just returned from their biennial visit to Beijing where they seem to have inquired only about what “if there is a need” might mean … and received the standard Basic Law phraseology in reply (Wen Wei Po, South China Morning Post, Apr. 29). Apparently they did not ask whether Beijing would ever allow a free-choice Chief Executive election here. If they have just fatalistically accepted that the latter is impossible, as some are now suggesting, then why isn’t the public being let in on that secret?
Such explanations should also be spelling out in detail how easy it will be for Beijing to engineer a candidate line-up that will give current Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying a clear popular mandate. There can only be three candidates. If he is one and Regina Ip is the second, who might qualify to give pan-dems a “chance,” as loyalists are saying.
And such arguments should be pointing out that local “universal suffrage” elections are common all over China today … all with the same inbuilt communist party control mechanisms that are present in Beijing’s 8.31 decision for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive election in 2017.
Voters there are endorsing and giving credibility to the party’s candidates … local people with leadership skills deemed “safe” by party election managers. The local election reforms that helped inspire China’s 1980s democracy movement have been transformed since 1989 into a means of rejuvenating and strengthening the local party organization after the dsiruptions that followed the abolition of the Maoist era commune system.
If that is the future Beijing is planning for Hong Kong, then maybe Hong Kong voters would like to know before they advise their legislators to “pocket it first” and worry about the consequences later.
** http://hkupop.hku.hk/english/
Hi, just discovered your blog a few weeks ago, and I’m still very much in awe of the analysis that you do on these issues.
You say that pan-democrats have much more direct lines of attack they could take in combating the proposed electoral reform, such as emphasizing that 8.31 is pretty much the end of the road as far as Beijing is concerned, as you said.
*Why* aren’t they making these arguments, then? I know arguments to that effect are making the rounds in activist circles but it does seem that the pan-democrats are not clearly presenting their case to the public, instead falling back on vague notions of ‘conscience’ and ‘2/3rds majority’. I don’t see how ‘needing to appeal to the base’, as you pointed out earlier, necessarily prevents any of that stuff from being said.
Thanks again for the analysis!
Can’t answer your question. Spent alot of time this past week arguing those very points and got nowhere … so I decided to write them up and hope for the best.
A few weeks ago someome answered the question about why pan-dems are not elaborating their case to sharper effect by making that point about “fatalistic” acceptance of reality … people accept that HK is moving toward a l-country, 1-system future, so making arguments based on 2-systems autonomy is futile … which of course begs the question as to why everyone is making so much noise and wasting so much time agitating for “genuine” unviersal suffrage … no explanation yet for the contradiction but I’ll keep trying …
My take is that there’s a mix of counter-factual thinking going on, with regard to the reform plan: one counter-factual (“it could be better”) says the reform plan is worse than real universal suffrage (i.e., with civic nomination); the other (“it could be worse”) says the reform plan is better than nothing (i.e., the current situation). In theory, everyone could pretty much dislike the reform plan and people could wind up on different sides of the issue depending on which counter-factual they’re thinking.
Then add to that two other factors: one is that the reform plan is viewed as the “inevitable” outcome. If that’s the case, there’s no reason to think about what can’t occur—one might as well think “Well, it could be worse.” At the start of the student protests, Surya Deva, an associate professor at the School of Law of City University of Hong Kong, said the protesters faced four internal challenges: “fear, futility, factionalism, and fatigue.” It seems like now futility is the most powerful—it’s futile to fight against what’s viewed as inevitable. The other is a kind of a logical fallacy based on equivocation—it’s difficult to argue against a “universal suffrage” plan where everyone gets to vote. (That ties in with the idea that the reform plan is better than nothing.)
If I were the students or the pan-Dems, I’d be striking at those ideas. I’d be framing the reform package as “Iranian-style” or “North Korea-style” elections—everyone gets what that means—and let the pro-reform side try to argue its way out of it. And no one’s really articulated some sort of road map where a vote against the reform plan in LegCo ultimately leads to real universal suffrage, maybe because no one thinks that such an outcome is really possible. That again plays into “the reform plan is better than nothing” because, well, nothing is the only other visible option (never mind that nothing might, in fact, be better than the reform plan). Interestingly enough, again, Surya Deva said something back in October that no one really picked up on: ““There is no legal issue here…The chief executive is legally allowed to ask the NPC to reconsider, and the NPC is constitutionally allowed to change, or even void, its decision.” If I were the students, I would have hammered that point again and again, at the debate and afterwards. Even now, the pro-democratic side could be saying it again and again. It vitiates completely the “inevitability” argument and puts the pro-reform side entirely on the defensive.
Pan-dems have picked up on the point, asking the NPC to reconsider … constantly, in fact, and the official response is so far just as constant: no way …
My concern in looking for sharper arguments is not to convince Beijing with them, but to convince that margin of “undecideds” in Hong Kong, and those who do not like 8.31 but are waiting to be convinced that it should be vetoed.
My assumption is that if public opinion here swings behind the veto, that will be the ONLY thing that might convince Beijing to reconsider. Legal arguments are fine but public opinion is a prior condition. Beijing knows and respects the “law of the mass movement” … remember the old line: “as long as it is a genuine movement of the broad mass of the people” … that’s the way to right wrongs, correct mistakes, and get things done …
Also, if the veto holds, this will carry on into the 2016 Legco election … if pan-dem candidates can only get their act together and stop trying to win votes off each other instead of their real opponents, pan-dems might just make enough waves, via the electoral process, to show Beijing that it is possible to have a genuine competitive election and remain part of the Republic … without a declaration of “independence” … all at the same time!
Oh, I didn’t know the pan-Dems did that. But I was actually thinking along the lines of having the Hong Kong Executive make a formal request, not that it’s likely it would have. (The students at the debate made a big deal about having the government issue another follow-up consultation report but they could have asked—or demanded—that the Executive make that request. I have the impression that Yvonne Leung certainly would have done that, if she had thought of it.) My feeling is that the Hong Kong government, as non-responsive as it is, can be shamed to a surprising degree—it wants to appear that it’s adhering to some standards of civil society, which involves, at a minimum, acting on behalf of its citizens.
You might be right. I wasn’t thinking along “mass movement” lines—I was thinking a bit differently (but not necessarily contradictorily): (1) the veto takes place (the pan-Dems vote their conscience or whatever) and the “promise” of universal suffrage still hangs in the air and (2) perhaps CY, behind closed doors, starts advocating for a change to get the whole issue over with. (We’d never really know about the second.) Beijing knows it’s important, to appear to be holding to its agreements re the Joint Declaration, so it reconsiders the 8.31 decision. So I was giving less weight to public opinion and more to the “standoff” that would result from the veto holding. (In the comment above I was giving arguments that I think would convince the public but I didn’t think they matter as much because the pan-Dems could vote “their conscience” or on the basis of the one-third, even if the public is not convinced; ultimately, I think what matters is the actual veto, if it occurs, and what happens after that, which is a bit different than what you’re assuming.)
I feel like I’m in an extreme minority but I never assumed that Beijing cares all that much about whether Hong Kong gets an actual real democratic vote or not—it obviously prefers the reform plan it is pushing and, if it can avoid having a genuine competitive election in Hong Kong it will (because its frame of reference, if any about elections, is “managed” ones)—which so far it has succeeded in doing—but it’s not all that afraid of Hong Kong voting in wild-eyed secessionists or democratic “contagion” spreading to the Mainland. Why? Because even Taiwan, which is far more “independent,” won’t dare declare independence (and they have a parties whose platforms center on independence). And not one of the 1.4 billion Mainlanders thinks that what happens in Hong Kong goes on the Mainland—they know the score. My guess is that if Hong Kong made enough “noise,” on the one hand, and Beijing saw it was losing international prestige, on the other, it would “modify” its 8.31 decision to give Hong Kong what it wants. But that’s just my own (perhaps very naive) view.
To clarify my point in the first comment a bit more: it’s not so much that the NPC be asked to reconsider; it’s that the Executive be placed in a position where it is forced to make the request so or not. That’s what I meant by shaming the government. At the student/government debate, Carrie Lam’s whole stance was “Well, the NPC has decided and we have to live with that”—which plays into the futility theme—and students’ response, then and after, could have been what Deva said: “So what? The NPC can change its decision; you, the Chief Executive, can ask it to do so, and we want you to do that.” The position of the students was that the Executive was not representing the interests of the citizenry—the students could have easily made that argument. (Alex Chow and Lester Shum’s quixotic attempt to go to Beijing was bad move, not because it failed, but because they were taking on something that they should have been forcing the Executive to do.)
Again, I’m not disagreeing about the “Mass Movement” idea; I’m just thinking along different lines which involve, possibly, getting the Hong Kong Executive to take some approach (e.g., say to Beijing at the Bauhinia Villa in Shenzhen, “This reform package isn’t going to fly”) other than what’s been going on. It’s not like the Executive hasn’t changed course before (see Article 23 and MNE). Obviously, a “Mass Movement” would help but I’m not so sure that it’s the only thing that would work—possibly some combination of (1) a veto by the pan-Dems of the current reform bill, (2) a need to pass some “universal suffrage” law, and (3) shaming the Executive—which would involve some political resistance on the part of the public—so that it acts behind the scenes, ever so slightly, on behalf of the populace, might work.