The tacit approval by the HK government of counter-protestor thugs is hardly surprising. It puts some fear into the protestors, and it gives the government clean hands to say "Okay, okay just look at the mess this has caused. Just go home and we'll schedule a meeting to talk about this."
The pro-Beijing talking points (
Victor Gao must have been on half a dozen broadcasts I heard) have been mostly focusing on the paramount importance of rule of law, and how "yes, they have a right to protest. but they must obey the rule of law and protest in a legal manner!"
Which isn't as ridiculous as it sounds, and strikes me as a very Chinese response. And we really can't point fingers and laugh when we introduced "First Amendment Zones" for protests here in the West.
I'm really not sure where I come down in this whole mess. On the one hand, C.Y. Leung has done, by most accounts, a good job running Hong Kong the last couple of years, and he was (sort of*) democratically elected. However, he's seen as having uncomfortably strong ties to Beijing and being something of a (if you'll forgive the ironic metaphor) "Manchurian Candidate" for the mainland. And his daughter could give Paris Hilton a run for her money in the "vapid rich bitch" department.
The real crux of the protest comes down to the fact that the Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (commonly just referred to as Chief Executive, or CE) isn't elected by the total electorate, but rather by a 1200-member Election Committee who are elected by the general public and designed such as to have members allocated from various economic and functional "constituencies" rather than geographic constituencies. So, for instance, there are 40 seats allocated to religious organizations, 40 to social welfare organizations, 554 to labor unions, 20 for medical professionals, 20 for higher education, etc. The proportion (and even total number) changes every five years.
It's actually a fascinating model of a parliamentary system, and it makes sense when geography isn't that big of a factor (HK being 7.2 million people crammed into an area smaller than New York City or London). There are still some geographical constituencies as well, but the predominant representation is functional. In some ways, it's taking special interests and embedding them as part of the governmental structure rather than just leaving it to lobbying.
But...the problem is that this was really only supposed to be a stopgap solution, and that part of the handover agreement between Britain and China was that HK would be allowed (indeed, encouraged) to move toward direct, universal suffrage. The problem is that the legal position of HK within the PRC means that it has to ask Beijing nicely for the permission to change its own laws, and the response from Beijing has typically been (not surprisingly), "let us study the issue for a few more years and not be hasty".
This isn't necessarily the broken promise it seems on the surface. Chinese leaders (with the exception of Mao) have ALWAYS been terrified of rapid change, because it usually ends with Bad Things
TM. Like millions dead because somebody didn't quite understand Christianity and used it to raise a rebel army. Or millions dead because collectivization and land reform failed. Or millions dead because you said "Gee, these egghead intellectuals are really pissing me off. I wish someone would fix that," and then your quasi-religious cultists go off and kill and "re-educate" your best and brightest.
Beijing likes using HK (and the Shenzhen region just across the water) as laboratories for economic reform, and they've had good successes there. I think they could be open to using them as a lab for political reform but it's far harder to stop the contagion -- if you will -- for political rather than economic changes.
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Topic: RedKing's East Asian Politics Megathread (Read 85008 times)