Over the past few months a popular refrain from those disillusioned about the future of Hong Kong has been making the rounds on social media, newspaper articles, and among friends and family: Hong Kong is dying.
Yesterday that sense of despair, long just a fug of grumbling frustration hovering in the background, burst to the fore. Masses of student protesters fled as the streets of Hong Kong Island, typically filled with luxury cars and men and women in smart suits, choked in noxious clouds of tear gas. Riot police were pictured pointing rifles at civilians (no actual shots were fired, thankfully). My Facebook and Twitter feeds erupted with shocked outrage and condemnations of police brutality. Some posted pictures showing students bruised from the clashes.
What’s going on in Hong Kong, you ask? Don’t Hong Kong people already enjoy much more freedoms than their fellow Chinese across the border in mainland China?
A bit of brief background. A constitution agreed upon between the British and Chinese side before the city’s handover in 1997 guaranteed rights to Hong Kong – freedom of expression, a legal system based on Britain’s, a high degree of self-autonomy – that makes it a Special Administrative Region in China. “Hong Kong people to govern Hong Kong,” as Deng Xiaoping put it. The constitution also says that the city should eventually elect its leader by “democratic procedures”.
In the 17 years since the handover, progress to reach that goal has been dismal. Despite growing demands for reform, Hong Kong’s leaders since 1997 were all selected by a few hundred people and appointed by Beijing. This was supposed to change by 2017, the year when Beijing said Hong Kongers could, for the very first time in its history, get “universal suffrage” and directly vote for their city’s leader.
It was a pretty ambiguous and qualified promise – many questions were raised about how exactly the elections will play out — but a promise nonetheless. That was why Hong Kongers cried foul in August, when Beijing laid down its conditions. A pro-Beijing committee of 1,200 people, representing a tiny proportion of the public, will select a maximum of three nominees before voters get to choose which one becomes leader. Various proposals for more representative nomination, such as by the city’s 60 elected lawmakers, were rejected. It will be “one person, one vote”, but not democracy by most standards.
What’s interesting about recent developments is that it is students, not politicians, who have led the rebellion. Politicians had threatened, but ultimately failed, to launch Occupy Central, the civil disobedience movement aimed at pressuring Beijing to rethink its hard stance on Hong Kong. In any case, Hong Kong’s public has long lost their faith in politicians – a sentiment that is largely the result of a dysfunctioning political system that leaves the Democrats forever in the opposition. Impatient at the stalemate, student leaders called a week of “strikes” from school to make a statement. Students also led the past few days’ sit-ins. Many in the crowd targeted by tear gas on Sunday were teenagers just 17 or 18 years old.
It’s important here to note that many feel the students do not represent the “average” Hong Konger. Locals have been deeply divided about the idea of civil disobedience, and many say the kids belong to the classroom, not the streets. Some call the students troublemakers and say they have no right disrupting the lives of ordinary, hardworking citizens. Others deride their naivety and allege they are simply pawns manipulated by conniving politicians. Many middle-aged, middle-class people (that is, my parents’ generation) side with businesses, which staunchly back social stability over unrest. Hong Kong cannot risk rocking the boat and angering Beijing, they say. Better be pragmatic and tread carefully.
Yet it’s hard to deny two things. The first is that many with a conservative stance have now been moved to support the students after the violent clashes. The second is that it is hard to find a Hong Konger who, however apolitical and pragmatic, can say they are satisfied with how their city is run. In truth, the vague ideal of “democracy” will never move so many people to rebel. Hong Kongers have harbored anger and frustration over a number of socio-economic issues for some time. Skyrocketing property prices deny many a home. A too-cozy relationship between the super-rich and governing officials (the Economist put Hong Kong ahead of Russia in a recently published “crony capitalism index”) is blamed for widespread inequality. An ever-growing influx of mainland Chinese tourists and new immigrants, most bringing a very different culture and lifestyle, left locals outraged because many feel their tiny city – its schools, hospitals, shopping malls, even Disneyland – is now overrun by outsiders. The government, led by a deeply unpopular leader who was selected by a few hundred elites, is widely derided as useless in representing its people. With no solution in sight, opinions were getting increasingly polarized, the tone more pessimistic. “Hong Kong is dying,” many lamented, months before the debate over political reform took an alarming turn this weekend.
At the heart of all this is a belief that “One Country, Two Systems”, the motto coined by Deng, is doomed. Almost two decades after the handover, mainland China and Hong Kong are closer together than ever before on an economic and official level. But the difference in culture and political beliefs seems to be going in the other extreme. Grassroots political movements in the city are stronger than ever. The annual Tiananmen Square vigil, the only one in Chinese territory and the largest in the world, gets more support every year. Hong Kong has clearly not been integrated into the Communist Party’s political doctrine. Instead, it is crying out in defense of its “core values”, the rights that define Hong Kong and differentiate it from any other Chinese city: The right to peaceful protest, transparent and fair institutions allowing people to criticize officials without fear of reprisal, open debate of what kind of government it should have, and genuine participation in civil society.
That, really, is what Hong Kong wants – not independence, or anything close to that. But there is no doubt that anti-Communist sentiments and desires for more representative government in Hong Kong seriously threaten Beijing, which have reportedly censored social media to stop mainlanders from getting wind of the unrest. It would be highly interesting to see what happens come Oct.1, the start of the annual national day celebrations known as “Golden Week”, when hordes of mainland tourists descend on Hong Kong.
Like others I will be closely watching the news with great trepidation to see which way the cards fall. I’m not sure what the protests can achieve, and I don’t feel particularly optimistic about Hong Kong having genuinely democratic party politics any time soon. What I do know for certain is that the current model is government is unworkable and social tensions will not go away as long as calls for reform are ignored. Hong Kong isn’t prepared to go back to its apolitical, capitalism-first past. I am truly gladdened that the city’s young people have something they believe in and are courageous enough to stand up for what they want. That can’t be a bad thing for Hong Kong.