Hong Kong in the Shadow of China

Living with the Leviathan

Richard C. Bush

• Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780815728139
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A close-up look at the struggle for democracy in Hong Kong. Hong Kong in the Shadow of China is a reflection on the recent political turmoil in Hong Kong during which the Chinese government insisted on gradual movement toward electoral democracy and hundreds of thousands of protesters occupied major thoroughfares to push for full democracy now. Fueling this struggle is deep public resentment over growing inequality and how the political system—established by China and dominated by the local business community—reinforces the divide been those who have profited immensely and those who struggle for basics such as housing.Richard Bush, director of the Brookings Institution’s Center on East Asia Policy Studies, takes us inside the demonstrations and the demands of the demonstrators and then pulls back to critically explore what Hong Kong and China must do to ensure both economic competitiveness and good governance and the implications of Hong Kong developments for United States policy.

ONE

The Hong Kong Hybrid

Hong Kong was not expecting the mass protests that erupted in late September 2014. A dispute that had started out as an argument among politicians and intellectuals over the details of the electoral system, an argument that had lasted for over two decades, suddenly morphed into a mass occupation of major urban thoroughfares by average citizens. The struggle began with high drama and pictures of the Hong Kong Police firing tear gas into the crowds—pictures that were quickly texted and retweeted around the world. A peaceful standoff ensued for some two months and ended not with a bang but with a whimper. The only certainty was that nothing in Hong Kong politics would be the same.

Prior to the protests, local observers knew that some kind of trouble was looming. The Chinese government in Beijing, which has had sovereign authority over Hong Kong since 1997, had signaled back in December 2007 that the 2017 election for Hong Kong’s chief executive would be on the basis of universal suffrage for the first time. Many in the city therefore believed that full democracy was around the corner. Yet like morning mists, those hopes quickly dissipated. It started with a disagreement over whether the term “universal suffrage” would be defined narrowly or broadly. China made progressively clear that although it was now willing to have eligible voters themselves choose the next chief executive, it wished to have a say over which candidates would be on the ballot. A nominating committee, composed mainly of local supporters of the Beijing government, would set the list of candidates. The system, it seemed, would remain rigged after all. Preparations thus began for mass protests, which had become the main way for the Hong Kong public to participate in politics.

People thought they knew how that protest would unfold. Pro-democracy professors and activists, drawing on the ideas of deliberative democracy and civil disobedience, had devised the Occupy Central movement, Central being the principal business and financial center on Hong Kong Island. A stated purpose of the movement was to alert all parties concerned that Hong Kong would go off a “political reform cliff” if electoral change did not occur.¹ To sound that alert, Occupy organizers promised that if the Chinese and Hong Kong governments did not back down from their restrictive nominating committee approach and accept the idea of nominations from the public, they would mobilize several tens of thousands of protesters to take over key streets in Central. The assumption was that the Occupy protesters would follow the norms of civil disobedience and submit to arrest. That was the scenario for which the Hong Kong Police planned. Hong Kong companies whose offices were in Central made arrangements to continue operations even if the area was inaccessible for a couple of days. Individual citizens made their own preparations, but those who did not work in Central believed they would be unaffected by the protest. The Chinese government stated repeatedly that electoral arrangements had to accord with its legal parameters, that it would not be intimidated, and that Occupy Central was illegal. It was a classic game of chicken, where everyone thought they knew the rules. But then, the game changed.

Enter Hong Kong’s high school and university students. They joined with their elders in the democratic camp in opposing the screening of candidates by a nominating committee biased toward Beijing and in giving the public the broadest possible role in the nomination process. But once Beijing ruled that the nominating committee and it alone would decide whom to consider, the students decided not to follow the preordained Occupy Central script and chose instead to preempt their elders. Full of idealism, they decided themselves—and for everyone else—the timing, locales, and scope of the protest movement.² If they followed any script, it was the one that had been written in Taiwan six months before. There, a student activist group angry about a trade in services agreement that the government had negotiated with Beijing undertook a lightning occupation of the island’s legislature that lasted for twenty-three days. Even though the specific issues in Hong Kong were very different, the political tactics gave evidence of a diffusion effect from Taiwan.³

After students boycotted classes during the week of September 22, some of them moved on the evening of September 26 to take over a small area within the government complex at Tamar, in the Admiralty district. Over the next two days, through both arrests and the use of pepper spray, the police tried to disperse the crowds, which were still modest. Then, on Sunday, September 28, the police used tear gas, which was reported on both television and social media. Instead of dispersing, the crowd grew to tens of thousands, more than the police could handle. The crowds took over the main thoroughfares that ran through Admiralty parallel to Hong Kong harbor. Protesters also took over two other sites: Causeway Bay, a shopping area on Hong Kong Island frequented by tourists from the mainland of China, and Mong Kok, a district in the middle of Kowloon Peninsula, across the harbor. And Central was never occupied. Umbrellas used to protect against tear gas, pepper spray, and sudden thunderstorms provided a symbol and a name for what became known as the Umbrella Movement.

An uneasy standoff ensued. Both police and protesters generally exercised restraint. Attempts to encroach on the protesters’ tent villages were effectively resisted. The most violence occurred in Mong Kok, which is a socially mixed area with a significant presence of Triad gangsters. Some of those groups launched serious attacks on the local occupiers. In student-dominated Causeway Bay and Admiralty, peaceful coexistence prevailed as long as the police did not try to change the status quo, which they had discovered would only trigger a surge in the number of protesters. Gradually the number of “permanent” demonstrators in these three areas declined. Numbers swelled in the evenings and on weekends, when most people didn’t have to go to work or to class, but the potential for rapid mobilization remained.

Beijing responded with a hard line. It cast itself as the defender of the rule of law and the protestors as lawbreakers. If universal suffrage was to happen, it would be within the parameters that the government had laid down. Beijing had spurned proposals that would produce a genuinely competitive election within Chinese parameters.⁴ Beijing also sought to divert blame away from its own recalcitrance and onto alleged “foreign forces” that it asserted were instigating the disorder.⁵

More ominously, there was a lurking fear that sooner or later Beijing would carry out a violent crackdown, as it had done across China in the spring of 1989. Deng Xiaoping had contemplated precisely this contingency when he said, in 1987, “After 1997 we shall still allow people in Hong Kong to attack the Chinese Communist Party and China verbally, but what if they should turn their words into action, trying to convert Hong Kong into a base of opposition to the mainland under the pretext of ‘democracy’? Then we would have no choice but to intervene. First the administrative bodies in Hong Kong should intervene; mainland troops stationed there would not necessarily be used. They would be used only if there were disturbances, serious disturbances. Anyway, intervention of some sort would be necessary.”⁶ As unhappy as Beijing was about the ongoing occupation in the fall of 2014, it was prepared to follow Deng’s dictum and have the Hong Kong government take the lead. The apparent strategy was to let the movement peter out as the inconvenience it caused wore on affected citizens.

How long this patience would have lasted is anybody’s guess, because in the end, Chinese intervention was not necessary. There was an effort to end the occupation by negotiation, but it fizzled. On the evening of October 21, senior officials of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (Hong Kong SAR) government conducted a televised dialogue with the leaders of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, one of the leading protest groups, but there was no movement on the key issues because neither side had much flexibility: The Hong Kong government’s hands were tied by Beijing’s uncompromising attitude toward election arrangements. The Hong Kong Federation of Students was handicapped by the loose and leaderless character of the movement. Consequently, the first dialogue session was the last one.

In the end, it was Hong Kong’s much respected judiciary that paved the way for the end of the protests. Beginning in the latter part of October, groups of taxi drivers and minibus companies and others who believed the occupation had deprived them of their livelihood filed suits in local courts, seeking clearance of the protest areas. The plaintiffs won their cases and the Hong Kong Police were authorized to assist court bailiffs in carrying out the injunction. The first action occurred during the week of November 17 in the Mong Kok area, but not without violent clashes between police and the protesters there. Student leaders responded with improvisation, first trying to travel to Beijing to speak with Chinese leaders (they were not allowed to leave Hong Kong) and then participating in a brief hunger strike. More radical elements attempted to break into the Legislative Council Building on November 18 and stormed the government administration offices at the end of the month (the Legislative Council is the unicameral legislature of the Hong Kong SAR). But enforcement of the court order continued, and Admiralty was eventually cleared on December 10 and Causeway Bay shortly thereafter. After seventy-five days, the most dramatic event in Hong Kong’s political history had come to an end.

The Umbrella Movement may have surprised residents, the Hong Kong government, and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) government in how it occurred, but it was only the latest and most contentious episode in a three-decade struggle by proponents of a more democratic system. Moreover, the movement also manifested a number of widening cleavages in Hong Kong society: between the PRC and Hong Kong governments, and the Pan-Democratic movement; between the local, wealthy business elite and the middle class; between the young and their elders; between those who give priority to political order and economic growth and those who value open participation; between those who wish to limit the competition for political power and those who wish to remove those limits; and between those who fear populist politics and those who embrace them. This book explores these cleavages and what they mean for both Hong Kong’s future prosperity and its governance.

Becoming Hong Kong

For anyone whose impressions of Hong Kong were formed before 1989, the events of fall 2014 would come as a great shock. In the decades after World War II, the prevailing wisdom was that Hong Kong’s people had a single-minded focus—or obsession: making money and securing a decent standard of living.⁷ In the days of rapid economic growth, the general idea of popular elections for the territory’s leaders was probably far from most people’s minds—and the details even further. Even today, some Chinese officials would like to believe that the Umbrella Movement did not reflect mainstream sentiments and concerns, and that Hong Kong should go back to being an “economic city” with a solely economic reason for existing. One of the purposes of this book is to explain the transition from a focus on the economy to one on politics, and therefore a brief review of Hong Kong’s history is necessary to set the broad context.

BEFORE 1945

The name Hong Kong is an approximate phonetic rendering of the pronunciation in Cantonese or Hakka dialects of xianggang, meaning “incense (or fragrant) harbor” (represented by the characters 香港).⁸ Before 1842, the name referred to a small inlet between Aberdeen Island and the south side of the bird-shaped island now known as Hong Kong Island, and to the village of the same name, xianggangcun (香港村). At one time the village was a key export point for incense; later it was one of the first points of contact between British sailors and local fishermen.⁹

In the early nineteenth century, this speck of an island on the south coast of China at the mouth of the Pearl River was a backwater of no significance. It was a place for farming, fishing, and smuggling as early as the Song Dynasty (960–1279 AD), but it paled in significance to Guangzhou (Canton), the major metropolis up the Pearl River to the northwest.¹⁰ Guangzhou was the administrative capital for two provinces, the core of the regional economic system, and the only place designated for Western traders to trade with Chinese merchants. The ascent of Hong Kong was a consequence of the critical intersection of two trajectories. One was the projection of British power into East Asia in the first half of the nineteenth century in order to open the Chinese economy to trade with Western nations on Britain’s terms. And Britain had a reason to try: it seemed a promising market for British exports. China’s GDP in 1820, as estimated by Angus Madisson in 1990 dollars, was over US$228 billion, more than double that of India and more than the combined GDP of the world’s eight next largest economies.¹¹ The other trajectory was imperial China’s stubborn insistence that it would define the rules of trade, particularly since imports of opium from India were causing a destabilizing outflow of silver, China’s currency of exchange. China was prepared to use coercion to preserve relative autarchy; Britain was just as prepared to use force to get its way and to expose China to what we now call globalization. The Opium War of 1840–42 was the result, and the quick British victory signaled the rise of the West and the decline of China. In the process, Britain got Hong Kong as a spoil of war.

Actually, what Britain annexed from China in 1842 was only one part of today’s Hong Kong. In the first of three transfers, Britain acquired Hong Kong Island, whose northern shore looks out over one of the world’s magnificent deep harbors. The new colonial government called the island Victoria, after the reigning British monarch. The second transfer occurred in 1860, after Britain’s victory over China in the Arrow or Second Opium War, when it secured the lower Kowloon Peninsula, which was across the harbor from Victoria, and some associated islands. Hong Kong remained the name of the original Victoria Island, but also became the name of the colony as a whole. The third transfer came in 1898, after the “scramble for concessions” by various imperialist powers. Britain got both a northern extension from the Kowloon Peninsula and a number of additional islands. These new acquisitions became known as the New Territories. The first two acquisitions were secured in perpetuity (or so the British thought), but the New Territories were transferred pursuant to a ninety-nine-year lease—the lease that would trigger the process that culminated in the return of all of Hong Kong to China in 1997.

Since the 1840s, Hong Kong has been an interface between China and the international economy. In some periods it was the primary meeting point between the two. But the character of that interface has changed dramatically in the seven decades since the end of World War II. Until World War II, its duty-free trade regime and British legal system made Hong Kong an attractive business center for British and Cantonese businessmen alike.¹² Opium remained a leading commodity throughout the nineteenth century. The gradually urbanizing, commercial areas of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon experienced significant modernization, while most of the New Territories retained the agricultural and socially traditional character of rural China.¹³ The British colonial administration was staffed with competent people who had a limited mission of maintaining public health and safety and looking after British residents. There was no thought of an ambitious c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Romanization
• 1. The Hong Kong Hybrid
• 2. Negotiating Hong Kong’s Political System
• 3. Hong Kong’s Liberal Oligarchy: Civil and Political Rights
• 4. Hong Kong’s Liberal Oligarchy: Economic and Political Inequality
• 5. Debating Universal Suffrage Before Occupy: Round 1
• 6. Electoral Reform After Occupy: Round 2
• 7. Democracy and Good Governance
• 8. Hong Kong’s Economy
• 9. What Hong Kong Can Do to Improve Governance and Competitiveness
• 10. China, Hong Kong, and the Future of One Country, Two Systems
• 11. Hong Kong and Taiwan
• 12. United States Policy toward Hong Kong
• 13. Conclusion: The Future and Value of the Hong Kong Hybrid
• Notes
• Index