I very seldom blog in English, especially when I talk about local issues in Hong Kong. Nonetheless, these are a few very heavy days for citizens of this small territory – who, sad to say, rather be stateless than identifying with a state that has no respect for the most basic civil and political rights of its people.
Since 1997, the former British colony has been reunited with China. Whenever I was traveling or working abroad, I get entertained with the question, “So have things changed since the handover?” I very often answered that our government was still on the learning curve, and with many major decisions, it had been sacrificing its autonomy by passing the ball to China. The government up north, I used to believe, had little time or energy for us.
What happened in the last few days proved that I was wrong. Fifteen years after the territory was handed back by the Brits to Communist China, we saw – in painfully obvious ways – that the autonomy of Hong Kong was being strangled in the most fundamental ways.
With the announcement that Leung Chun-ying has been elected the next Chief Executive of Hong Kong today, its seven million people now face a major threat to its autonomy as promised by ‘one country, two systems,’ which was at least in theory the guiding principle between its relationship with China until 2047.
The rape upon our already-limited democracy was not just a matter of who won the Chief Executive election. Of course, rumours pointing towards the possibility of Leung to be closeted CCP member was not most assuring to our ears. More disheartening, however, was the way in which unnamed hands had tampered with the electoral process.
First, it was understood that Beijing was directly involved in the campaigning process. The electorate for this race had only 1200 members, which was hardly enough to present the seven million strong popoulation, but easily manipulated by authority. Representatives from CCP were seen contacting all the parties or sectors within its reach to vote for Leung, the one candidate among the three who had its final blessing. Political support was consolidated from pro-Beijing groups such as the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), just a few days before the election.
Second, there were multiple attempts by hackers to attack an internet-based poll organized to involve the rest of the citizens in showing their preference among the candidates. Organized by the University of Hong Kong, the poll took place two days before the election and was not expected to have a major influence on actual election results. It nonetheless suffered from possible suppression, and organizers had to set up paper and pencil voting stations at the eleventh hour. 220,000 strong persons nonetheless participated, with more than half of the votes received being blank, indicating a preference for none of the candidates.
Third, political manipulation upon the press was also evident during the campaign. In particular, the editorial of a Chinese newspaper was reported have modified the title, words and tone of a supposedly-neutral op-ed in a way it became pro-Leung. This incident was only one of the reports here and there that the media had received calls from political brokers days before the election, trying to sway their coverage of electoral news towards a certain candidate.
The situation, therefore, leaves citizens unsettled about the coming five years under Leung. The question to be addressed, nonetheless, is how much sovereignty we Hongkongers really have over ourselves. Our basic law stipulates that our chief executive as well as legislature is to be elected through universal suffrage – some time between the handover and 2047. Fifteen years have gone by, and we still do not see ourselves coming any closer to this promise.
One possible reason why we never were able to stand on our own feet probably has to do with the fact that Hong Kong has been piggy backing onto the booming Chinese economy, for much of the time since the handover in 1997. I do not wish to go through here the details of policies such as CEPA, which strengthened the economic ties between Hong Kong and China, and provided great business opportunities to a few sectors in the highly capitalistic former colony. A possible price paid in these arrangements was probably political autonomy. With local businessmen increasingly dependent on mainland capital, Chinese influence became visible in different strands of public policy, ranging from housing, transportation, all the way to finance and even constitutional issues.
The lack of economic autonomy goes along with the delayed growth of institutions that would lay the foundation of democratic self-government. Hong Kong is still deliberating the way in which its legislature is to be elected, and to date, has yet to adopt a system where the opinion of each citizen could be equally expressed in terms of votes. The current system of functional constituencies biases towards members of certain business sectors, allowing them to be far more represented than others in the legislature. With pro-Chinese interests taking more seats in the legislature, steps towards greater autonomy easily becomes compromised.
March 25, 2012 is a day of lamentation for many Hongkongers, for we have been faced with a political future that we believe we do not deserve. Was there much that we could have done to prevent this? At this juncture I remember one Sunday in December 2005 when we took it to the streets, hoping universal suffrage to come true for the Chief Executive and Legislative Council elections in 2012. Some of us tried, but there were not enough of us. Even the pro-democracy parties had trouble figuring out what was a realistic goal that they could promise their constituencies, and thus resulted in a fracture among the camp.
Nor were they able to agree on the suitable means to be used in achieving such goals. We remember a self-proclaimed “referendum” where five legislators resigned from the council early in 2010, and used their re-election as proxy for the electorate to show their preference for universal suffrage. The movement only gained limited support from legislators and the electorate, and depreciated the overall momentum of the pro-democracy movement.
At this time, it will be difficult to say that the battle was well-fought thus far . The most damaging point thing pro-democracy voters in Hong Kong was that there was no platform in which they could come to one agreement with their representatives on a common strategy: how much can we achieve in what kind of a time frame.
With Leung’s election, Hongkongers come face to face with a crisis of faith. I am not talking about faith in the centrally-planned government, but faith in the rule of the basic law, in whether it could deliver what it promises. It is important not to stall these discussions, and more importantly we must hold the new government accountable for delivering a road map to the goal of universal suffrage, however difficult it might be.
