China is the global champion of
fakery in consumer products. Now the idea of democracy can be added to its list
of creative fakes as Beijing continues to evade its Basic Law promise to the
Hong Kong people for direct elections of the legislature and Chief Executive by
2017, 20 years after the handover from Britain.
The National People’s Congress
(NPC) in Beijing is to rule by Sunday on how candidates for the 2017 chief
executive’s seat are to be selected and elected. Few in Hong Kong believe its
ruling, predetermined by the party inner sanctum, will be anything other than a
further distortion of the democratic process.
If the core principle in a
democracy is the free expression of the will of the people, then the expected
nomination body of pro-Beijing business groups, functional constituencies and
hand-picked collaborators will fail that test. It is designed to disqualify
popular candidates who do not subscribe to the one-party dictatorship and
police state.
In short, it will select another
leader beholden to Beijing, who will not have a popular mandate to represent
Hong Kong. Zimbabwe and North Korea also allow “universal suffrage” for their
disenfranchised citizens.
Political
intimidation
Beijing's assault on democratic
rights goes beyond elections, of course. In another step to politicizing the
Independent Commission Against Corruption, ICAC officers this week raided the
home of Jimmy Lai, publisher of Apple Daily and Next Magazine. Officers also
called on Lai's aide Mark Simon and labor leader and democratic legislator Lee
Cheuk-yan to take away files and documents.
The investigation seeks to
establish a link between a donation Lai made and Lee's s speech in January on
freedom of the press where he cited political pressure on two banks to withdraw
their advertising without mentioning Lai by name. The ICAC was responding to
complaints from pro-Beijing forces alleging bribery of legislators by Lai.
This follows the orchestrated
military-grade cyber attack in June on computers and servers of Lai's Next
Media group and the online referendum organized by the Occupy Central movement.
The timing of the ICAC raid is a warning to the Occupy Central leaders of
heavy-handed police action and dire legal consequences. Beijing apparently
believes that the kind of police-state intimidation that cows people on the
mainland should also work in Hong Kong.
Apple Daily and Next Magazine
have been uncompromising critics of the Beijing administration and its collaborators
in the HK government. The Occupy Central movement also received donations from
Lai. Occupy Central has committed to squat in the financial district if Beijing
fails to declare a free and transparent election process for the 2017 election.
Occupy Central is expected to
move into position peacefully this Sunday when the NPC verdict on the 2017 CE
election is handed down.
The ICAC investigation into Lai
could yield grounds for Occupy Central leaders to be legally framed too. We are
probably seeing a concerted effort to "prove" foreign agents and
funding are working to undermine the government – which will then lead to
renewed calls for urgent passing of the shelved Article 23 Security Bill. After
that, Hong Kong citizens can expect rapid erosion of human rights and personal
freedoms they take for granted.
New
filter of patriotism
In searching for some basis to
disqualify popular candidates, the central government has raised the peculiar
filter of “patriotism,” which is nowhere defined in the Basic Law. First it was
a vague “Love Hong Kong, Love China” slogan. Hong Kong people had no problem
with that. That has quickly mutated to “Love the Communist Party and its
socialist dictatorship.”
The majority of Hong Kong people
are offspring of parents and grandparents who fled the terror of Mao’s pogroms
of 1949 against landlords, traders and intellectuals. Subsequent waves fled the
famines caused by the Great Leap Forward of the 1950s and the chaotic
class-cleansing horrors of the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s. Memories
remain strong.
They have no appetite for
communist ideology, patriotic education, one-party dictatorship or the police
state. So where does that leave the relationship of the CCP to its Special
Administrative Region? The new leadership of Xi Jinping is ratcheting up the
tough-cop approach to domestic and international disputes from Tibet, Xinjiang
and Hong Kong to the unilateral claim on 90 percent of the South China
Sea.
The “peaceful rise” of China and
the politics of compromise are binned for an assertive new China that can say
no. It has the economic muscle to fund nuclear strike capability, float a
blue-water navy and buy its way through Asia, Africa and South America – much
as the USA has done since WWII.
Xi is busy consolidating his
power internally via targeted anti-corruption campaigns and stirring jingoism
against Japan. Hong Kong is too small a problem in the scale of his ambitions
to lose sleep over. It will be smacked down smartly.
Nominating
Committee
The Basic Law refers to a
Nominating Committee to be set up for the purpose of the 2017 election that
would follow “democratic principles to be broadly representative.” However
Beijing has since decided that the discredited “small circle” rubber-stamp
Election Committee that yielded the last three chief executives be re-badged
for the purpose.
There was hope in Hong Kong that
the five-month public consultation process would lead to a Nominating Committee
that represents the electorate. Those hopes have evaporated.
All the chief executives produced
by the Election Committee since 1997 have failed to gain the respect or trust
of the people they are supposed to represent. The current one, Leung Chun-ying,
is the least popular but the first one to be hailed as a "comrade" by
the Guangdong CCP website (before that was hastily removed) following his
selection. Leung has strenuously denied that he is a Communist Party
member.
Handed-over
or liberated?
Hong Kong society did not clamor
for a return to the mainland. The CCP represents everything they abhor. Hong
Kong was betrayed by Margaret Thatcher in 1984 for British national interests
without its people having a say. Hong Kong was “handed-over.” There was
poignant sadness and sullen gloom at the handover ceremony of July 1, 1997. The
CCP propaganda is that the compatriots of Hong Kong were “liberated from 150
years of shame.”
Now the CCP is facing a
groundswell of resistance to fake democracy being foisted on a society well
aware of its rights and the promises of the Basic Law. Hong Kong society is
ever practical – it accepts the Basic Law as a social contract so long as
Beijing honors its side of the asymmetric power relationship.
Hong Kong is in turmoil because
of bad faith, betrayal of the Basic Law and systematic infiltration of the
political process, civil service, police, academe and public bodies by cadres
and collaborators serving the diktats of the China Liaison Office (CLO) whose
director now wields more power in Hong Kong than the CE. There is a collapse of
trust between Hong Kong and Beijing.
Why
the distrust?
Hong Kong prospered when the
British colonial administration accepted mainland refugees. They gained
shelter, rule of law, efficient public services and the freedom to earn a
living without political harassment. That released the energy of the immigrants
to create new lives and a vibrant economy.
Even though Hong Kongers had no
choice in who governed them, they enjoyed First World freedoms of the press,
expression, assembly, travel, trade and wealth creation. They were secure in
the knowledge of an enabling administration that was fair, stable and mature
without a recurrent habit of ideological blood-letting.
The liberal British
administration tolerated the underground communist network of schools, trade
unions, "patriotic" triads and communist newspapers -- all run from
across the border by the Guangdong branch of the CCP. This virus in Hong Kong
society was below ground until 1997 but now it runs rampant across the full
spectrum of political, academic and media life in the territory, amply funded
by the CCP and its corporate proxies. Asia Sentinel
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