It is more than 17 years since Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, oversaw a rain-soaked transfer of power to China, and the former colony became a special administrative region of the people's republic.
That special status confers on Hong Kong a system of representation that engages with only the few. CY Leung, the current chief executive of Hong Kong, was chosen by a selection committee of 1,200, although a recent reform will permit all citizens to participate in the 2017 election.
Under this proposal, all candidates must first receive more than 50 per cent support from the nominating committee. Additionally, all candidates must profess to “love China” – a stipulation meaningless except that it gives Beijing and local power elites the opportunity to reject the wrong kind of candidate. This is exactly what supporters of Hong Kong’s democratic movement feared most.
The Hong Kong power elite will continue to enjoy the high degree of autonomy promised by the basic law, because they can be trusted to be loyal to Beijing. In return, their candidates for chief executive will be put before the Hong Kong public for endorsement by vote. Hong Kong will become a “tycoonocracy”, maintained through a process of managed democracy.
Opponents say these moves will make Hong Kong just like any other Chinese city. This is plainly untrue. Senior officials in China are not selected by cabals of local power holders, but by the organisation department of the Communist Party, and they never have to face an electorate. From the point of view of mainland officials, Hong Kong does enjoy an autonomy unparalleled elsewhere in China.
Take the case of Hu Chunhua, party secretary of Guangdong Province, just across the Hong Kong border and known as “little Hu” for his devotion to the interests of former president Hu Jintao.
Little Hu was rewarded for his loyalty by being given control of Guangdong, a wealthy province he could run as a fiefdom while demonstrating the sort of achievements that get ambitious cadres appointed to senior positions in central government.
Instead, he’s been forced to stand back in humiliation as agents of CDIC – the Communist party’s internal police – have rampaged around his province in search of corrupt officials.
His freedom of economic action has been curtailed by the centralisation of policy in top-level committees. He seems to enjoy little of the trust that Beijing extends to Hong Kong.
The same process is currently operating across China. Debate over whether president Xi Jinping is the new Mao or the new Deng obscures the fact that under his rule a massive recentralisation of power is going on. Even as the power elites of Hong Kong are being rewarded, their equivalents across China see their powers sucked up to the centre, their rewards diminished and their responsibilities increased.
This is not a process that can be expected to continue without resistance of some sort. Mr Xi himself has described a battle between what he described as the armies of corruption and anti-corruption. China’s plan for Hong Kong may snuff out the prospects of real democracy, but it also creates a potentially appealing model for purge-weary opponents of the president to mobilise around at a time when he has placed the party under considerable internal stress.
That is, if the proposals go ahead as planned. Democratic lawmakers in Hong Kong’s legislative council have declared their intention to block the measure. If they do, says the administration, then no public vote at all will take place in 2017. It’s a neat trap: will the democrats dare vote against giving the public a vote? If they do, what will happen to their vote?
Yet it’s worth remembering at this point that the Soviet Union was not brought down by popular, pro-democratic protest, but collapsed because Soviet Communist Party members and officials were sick of it. They saw greater rewards for themselves in a process that involved extending the franchise while making it meaningless. It’s ironic, given the CPC’s constant warnings to its members not to go down the same path, that Beijing has installed in Hong Kong something similar to the system Russia replaced Communism with.
Jamie Kenny is a UK-based journalist and writer specialising in China
