The central government has given no ground, and the pro-democrats swear they will not either
By J.C. | HONG KONG
PRO-DEMOCRACY activists announced the start of a “new era of civil disobedience” on the night of August 31st, after China’s top legislature laid down restrictive guidelines on the kind of elections that are allowed in Hong Kong, a semi-autonomous territory. Officials in Beijing had promised to allow the election of Hong Kong’s next leader, in 2017, through universal suffrage. With the announcement China has clarified that there is a catch, and it's a big one: the government sees itself as being under no obligation to allow open nominations for the election’s candidates. Before the announcement, Chen Zuoer, one of the officials who helped negotiate Hong Kong's handover to mainland China back in 1997, had warned that "blood will be shed" if pro-democracy activists refuse to back down.
In a show of defiance, an alliance of activists who support fully open elections held a rally on Sunday night to declare that they would launch waves of protests, culminating in the occupation of the city’s main financial district. Their movement has been many months in the making; they call it “Occupy Central with Love and Peace”. It was first proposed nearly two years ago by Benny Tai, an associate law professor at the University of Hong Kong, in anticipation of a disappointing official interpretation of “universal suffrage”—just like the one that the central government has now given them.
Police arrested at least 22 people during protests that began on Sunday night and carried on into Monday morning. The student-union president at the Chinese University of Hong Kong has announced a strike; students there will have a rally of their own on September 4th around a replica of the “Goddess of Democracy” statue that became famous for its appearance in Tiananmen Square in 1989. Other universities are expected to announce strikes of their own in the next few days.
Many of the participants at Sunday’s rally despair at convincing the bureaucrats in Beijing to change their position—but they feel they need to put up a fight anyway. “Normal protests are no longer useful,” in the words of Agnes Chow Ting, a student protester. She led a failed attempt after the rally to “ambush” a delegation of officials from the central government.
Such actions may attract international attention but they are indeed unlikely to sway decision-makers in Beijing. Li Fei, a deputy secretary-general of the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, told local politicians on September 1st that the committee believes Hong Kong’s police will be capable of handling any disturbance that might be caused by “a small group of people seeking to undermine Hong Kong", as he characterises the Occupy movement.
Hong Kong's current chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, was picked for the role in 2012 by a 1,200-member “election committee”. A reliable majority of that committee were Hong Kongers who will ever be glad to demonstrate loyalty to their counterparts in Beijing.
The new reform package, which was endorsed unanimously by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, is supposed to give meaning to the commitment to universal suffrage, which was guaranteed to Hong Kongers at the time of its handover to China. It turns out to be suffrage only of the crudest sort: allowing each adult citizen of Hong Kong a vote in the general election for the next chief executive, but not necessarily much of a choice. A committee with a make-up much like the so-called election committee is to be used to screen the candidates standing for the 2017 election. Each nominee must obtain more than half the votes of the rechristened “nomination committee” before being able to stand. This should make it impossible for any candidate who did not meet the approval of the Standing Committee to make it to the popular vote—never mind winning.
With leaflets and posters, the local government has been urging residents to seize the chance to embrace this form of universal suffrage in 2017. According to some prominent legal scholars in mainland China, a “less perfect” version of democracy is better than none at all. Universal suffrage is written into the city’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, but there is no set timeline for its delivery. If its meaning cannot be agreed upon in time for the 2017 election, the next elections will be run according to the existing framework, wherein a closed committee chooses the chief executive all by itself, and appointed interest groups elect half the legislature.
The central government’s reform package requires the approval of two-thirds of Hong Kong’s local legislature before it can be implemented. A kink in the plan is that more than a third of the current assembly supports at least some of the demands of the pro-democracy protesters. Beijing’s officials will need to persuade at least five of those lawmakers to approve the package. The trouble for them is that 25 of those 27 members of the legislature have already signed an agreement to veto the proposal. “The veto is almost a certainty. We cannot accept fake democracy,” says Claudia Mo, a legislator with the Civic Party. “But after that there is no possibility of change and we can only soldier on.”
A sense of gloom has settled over the city. Democrats, moderates and pro-establishment figures alike predict that universal suffrage—in whatever guise—will be delayed. With that, they can expect political stagnation for the foreseeable future. It is not an indefinite future however. The Sino-British declaration of 1984, signed between Margaret Thatcher and Zhao Ziyang, was clearer in guaranteeing Hong Kong its state of semi-autonomy. That is supposed to last a period of 50 years, ending in 2047.
