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Within hours of the Chinese government making it clear that the people of Hong Kong will not have a free choice when they vote to elect the territory’s next chief executive, Hong Kong police had made their first arrests of demonstrators protesting against that decision. It is safe to predict that these will be the first of many, and that they presage a long period in which Hong Kong’s institutions will increasingly lack legitimacy in the eyes of a substantial proportion of citizens. Demonstrating an unhappy combination of timidity and stupidity, Beijing has fashioned a rod to beat its own back.
It has set itself on a path that will lead to confrontations between the Hong Kong security forces and large numbers of dismayed and angry people, particularly the middle class and the young. Even if these are suppressed, a resentful acquiescence is the best that can be expected to follow. It has also almost certainly undermined the territory’s economic future, since traders and investors abhor instability and uncertainty. It has sent exactly the wrong signal to Taiwan, where “one country, two systems”, the model Deng Xiaoping devised to ease Hong Kong back into the fold, remains the starting point for discussion of eventual reunification. That model now looks like a very unreliable guide to the future.
Beijing has also thumbed its nose at Britain, because what it has done contradicts the spirit, if not the letter, of the undertakings given in 1997 at the time of the handover of Hong Kong. In addition, the Chinese authorities have made the brazen demand that the British parliament abandon an inquiry into political developments in Hong Kong by the Commons foreign affairs committee. This inquiry, Beijing says, is a “highly inappropriate act which constitutes interference in China’s internal affairs”. We could reasonably reply that China has broken the promises it made.
But reasonableness is not a concept Beijing easily grasps. The people of Hong Kong are orderly and sensible folk. It is far-fetched to imagine they would vote for a candidate who proposed to defy Beijing. One who would stick up for Hong Kong’s interests and traditions, yes. But one who would jeopardise them by flying in the face of the reality of where the city is and how it makes its living, no.
It seems China cannot tolerate even the slightest risk. Beijing may be worried that other Chinese cities would see democratic freedoms in Hong Kong as a precedent, but that is a bridge it is going to have to cross sooner or later, anyway. There is perhaps a way in which the situation can be half rescued. Let the stacked selection committee re-stack itself to allow through a genuinely independent candidate for 2017. We strongly urge that on Beijing and hope this time it will not be seen as “highly inappropriate”.
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