National Post (National Edition)
Terry Glavin on the democrats standing up to Beijing.
You would think that Albert Ho Chun-yan had seen it all before. The 64-year-old veteran of the fight for democracy in this deeply dysfunctional, nominally autonomous possession of the People’s Republic of China has been battling Beijing one way or another ever since Britain abandoned its colony to the cruel mercies of the Chinese Communist Party in 1997.
Last month’s elections once again left the pro-Beijing camp with the upper hand in Hong Kong’s absurdly gerrymandered legislative council, despite the overwhelming majority of voters having elected a range of anti-establishment candidates, but things are different this time around. The hardwon, inch-by-inch opening of democratic space is rapidly closing in on Hong Kong’s 7.3 million people.
“What we are seeing now is new,” said Ho, the former leader of Hong Kong’s Democratic Party and current chairman of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements in China. “We still have limited democracy in Hong Kong and an open society, relatively speaking. Having said that, I cannot say we do not face any risk,” he told me during a conversation this week. “China could easily order troops to come in and arrest anyone, under national security. They don’t do it yet, but they could do it.”
The mainland Chinese overlords of the special administrative region have never been so brazen in their belligerence. The prodemocracy camp has never been so riven by division and mistrust, and Hong Kongers are increasingly scoffing at the idea of a democratic future in the One Country, Two Systems constitutional framework underlying Hong Kong’s Basic Law. The arrangement was supposed to guarantee the territory’s limited freedoms until at least 2047. To a new generation of radical politicians, the experi- ment should never have been attempted in the first place, and in any case it has failed.
Last week’s swearing-in of the legislative council’s newly elected members set off a constitutional crisis after several novice lawmakers refused to pledge allegiance to Beijing, or amended their oaths to make it clear that their devotion was to Hong Kong only. “Now there is a hostility between the radicals and the conventional democrats,” Ho said. “We now face more attacks from the radicals than from the proestablishment camp. We are attacked on both fronts now. This is new, too.”
It was only by resort to an array of imaginative rhetorical theatrics that several of the new radicals managed to get past Beijing’s candidacy commissars and into the September election contest in the first place. A half-dozen candidates were disqualified last summer for having expressed separatist sympathies on social media platforms like Fa- cebook or for refusing to submit to confirmation pledges in advance agreeing that Hong Kong is an inseparable part of mainland China.
Among the “localists” who managed to clear Beijing’s candidacy hurdles and get elected to the legislative council were Youngspiration activists Sixtus Baggio Leung Chung-hang and Yau Wai-ching. Their guerrillatheatre antics at the oath swearing included referring to China by the derogatory Japanese term “Cheena” and draping themselves in “Hong Kong is not China” banners. Yau caused a further outrage by referring to the “People’s Ref **king of Chee-na.” Their oaths were disqualified. The courts have been asked to rule on whether the duo can legally hold office.
Whether separatist or not, a common cause uniting many of the new legislators is a demand for universal suffrage to replace Hong Kong’s arcane and deliberately antidemocratic electoral system, which divides the 70-mem- ber legislature between lawmakers elected by residents at large and those chosen by “functional constituencies” — the real estate industry, textiles, import and export businesses, and so on — which tend to represent the pro-Beijing establishment.
The hybrid system ends up affording a seat in the legislature for every 8,000 “functional constituency” electors, on average, while legislators elected at large — who tend to back democracy and greater autonomy from Beijing — represent about 108,000 voters each. Hong Kong’s all-powerful chief executive, meanwhile, is appointed by Beijing from candidates put forward by a 1,200-member election committee drawn mainly from big business and the Chinese government.
A survey by the Chinese University of Hong Kong in July suggests more Hong Kongers are fed up with this intractable state of affairs, with fully 40 per cent of respondents in the 15 to 24 age- range wanting a complete break with Beijing and full Hong Kong independence.
Not all of the new “localist” legislators are young firebrands elected at large from Hong Kong’s restive, teeming streets, however. Edward Yiu Chung-yim, whose right to take his seat in the legislature was put in limbo after he called for universal suffrage while swearing his oath, is a cerebral associate professor elected by the “functional constituency” representing architects, surveyors and urban planners.
An adviser to the youthful Umbrella Movement and Occupy Central pro-democracy demonstrators, whose mass civil disobedience in 2014 brought parts of Hong Kong to a standstill, the 52-yearold Yiu says a bottom-up model of participatory democracy along the lines of Spain’s populist left-wing Podemos movement would remain his philosophy, regardless of whether Hong Kong breaks free of Beijing or continues stumbling along as a dystopian quasi-democracy.
But it would be wrong to misread the political disquiet as having invited the wrath of the Chinese Communist Party’s Hong Kong compradors or Beijing’s intensified bullying — kidnapping publishers, intimidating news outlets and generally throwing the state’s weight around. That would be to get things backwards, Yiu told me. “The more interference the Chinese government imposes on Hong Kong, it drives more young people to regard themselves as Hong Kongers rather than Chinese. It is the consequence, rather than the cause.”
Hong Kong’s fate will depend a great deal on how the world’s democracies respond to Chinese President Xi Jinping as he and his billionaire insiders go about the business of securing alliances with countries like Canada, Yiu said. “The Chinese don’t even have any confidence in their own currency. That is why they are buying gold and jewelry and real estate, and converting into Canadian dollars. I would want Canadians to work with us, to show the Chinese government that our cities share the same values and allow people to have freedom. Without international support, Hong Kong would be at risk of being extinct.”
Despite his differences with Yiu, the veteran democrat Albert said the same.
The task of convincing young Hong Kongers to stick with the older generation’s vision of spreading democracy throughout China is not made easier by the eagerness of Canada’s new Liberal government to go along with Xi’s insistence that mainland China’s “different system” should be accommodated, Ho said.
“Canada should stand firm and should not subscribe to the view that there is another model, this East Asian model, or the so-called Beijing consensus, that you can sacrifice human rights in the name of the state by giving overriding priority to economic development.
“We know other countries are under a lot pressure from domestic lobbies. The Communist Party in China has a very long hand in reaching into open societies, and they manage to corrupt politicians. But we all have to find the moral fibre to stand for democracy.”
CHINA ISN’T CRACKING DOWN ON DISSIDENTS, BUT ... THE DISSIDENTS EXIST BECAUSE OF BEIJING’S CRACKDOWNS.