Democracy can wait: Stability is paramount for Beijing
By Joseph Kahn
Thursday, June 21, 2007
BEIJING: In the years before Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997, many people in the city and around the world wondered if the Chinese Communist Party leaders in Beijing had a secret agenda to change the British colony after they took control.
Ten years later, it seems clear that their agenda, never particularly secret, was to make sure it would not change much at all.
Hong Kong was and remains capitalist. It was and remains open to the outside world. It was and is still governed by nonideological administrators who promise that genuine democracy will come sometime in the future but does not suit conditions in Hong Kong at the moment.
The bottom line for Chinese leaders since the British agreed in 1984 to hand their colony back to Beijing was not conformity but stability. The Beijing promise to maintain the Hong Kong "way of life" has proved ironclad. Its promises to allow the territory to evolve steadily into a full-blossomed democracy, on the other hand, have proved far less reliable.
Beijing has defied critics - and they were numerous - who predicted that a one-party state could not effectively incorporate a dynamic, laissez-faire economy, with its independent commercial courts and monetary authorities. But it has yet to show that it will tolerate a significantly more dynamic political system or that it will allow local leaders to answer more directly to the Hong Kong people than to masters in Beijing.
"Chinese leaders valued Hong Kong as a stable, rich, economically driven city that likes doing business with the mainland," said Wu Guoguang, a onetime adviser to the Beijing government who is a political scientist at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia. "The one thing they worried about was change, particularly rapid change, that could undermine their control."
In a sense, the biggest challenge for China in managing Hong Kong still lies ahead. It committed itself in the Basic Law, the miniconstitution that governs Hong Kong as a special administrative region of China, to the "ultimate aim" of allowing the territory’s leader, called the chief executive, to be selected by universal suffrage.
But the Basic Law sets no timetable for that transition, and Beijing has emphasized repeatedly that the process must be gradual. The Hong Kong pro-democratic camp had hoped that procedures would be put in place in time to elect a chief executive by popular mandate this year. Instead, Chief Executive Donald Tsang won a five-year term in March by garnering support from an "election committee," of 800 Hong Kong residents representing commercial interests and the Communist Party-controlled national Parliament.
The focus has now shifted to the 2012 election. Beijing shows few signs of allowing an unfettered democratic election then, either. Some mainland experts predict Chinese leaders will take no more than incremental steps, like increasing the number of people or broadening the manner of selection for members of the election committee.
Even if the leadership permits a popular vote for the chief executive, the nomination process for candidates seems likely to remain tightly controlled to ensure that any local leader will not defy Beijing.
"Democratic development is still on the starting blocks," said David Zweig, a politics expert at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. "It comes down to the details of what will prove acceptable to Beijing, though they will be under pressure to show at least gradual progress."
Beijing has faced daunting challenges over the first decade since the handover. But it did show that it could adjust its policies sufficiently to keep Hong Kong stable and, with some notable exceptions, quiescent.
The territory went through a severe economic slump after the Asian currency crisis in 1997 and the popping of the technology-driven stock market bubble in 2000, with unemployment reaching record levels and property prices plummeting. Beijing’s hand-picked chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, also grew deeply unpopular, especially after he put pressure on the local legislature to pass Beijing-backed anti-subversion legislation that some in Hong Kong saw as an infringement of civil liberties promised them under the Basic Law.
The situation grew tense in the summer of 2003, when half a million people, angered by the security bill and the refusal of China to consider broader democratic changes before the 2007 election, participated in the largest political demonstration in Hong Kong’s history.
Alarmed, Beijing sent multiple investigation teams to Hong Kong to study what went wrong. Chinese experts briefed on the results said the leadership learned several lessons: First, it had to do more to ensure steady growth in the Hong Kong economy. Second, it had to replace Tung. Third, it had to begin talking to a wider array of people in Hong Kong than it was accustomed to doing in the first years after it resumed sovereignty.
"Basically, you can say that the leadership overhauled its whole approach to Hong Kong," said one mainland expert who asked not to be identified when discussing elite politics. "They did not change their basic principles, but they realized that the execution had been poor."
In short order, Beijing dumped Tung in favor of Tsang, his deputy, and encouraged the flow of mainland tourists to help stimulate the economy. Beijing officials and experts also opened a dialogue with the Hong Kong democratic camp, which had found itself largely excluded from the political process after 1997. More unnerving to some protesters, mainland officials and Hong Kong sympathizers began portraying the harshest critics of Beijing as unpatriotic lackeys of the West.
That mix of carrots and sticks defused the crisis, and perhaps reaffirmed the effectiveness of an approach China has long taken on the mainland. That is, emphasize economic development, isolate political trouble-makers and never compromise on one-party rule.
"Focusing on the economy is a successful strategy," said Wu of the University of Victoria. "Hong Kong people are basically economic animals and China has become a major economic power. As long as that continues, it is unlikely that China will lose control."
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