On a recent morning, Agnes Chow (周庭), 17, and another teenage activist rode a van through the streets of Hong Kong, urging people through a loudspeaker to vote in an informal referendum for a more democratic way to pick the territory’s top leader, but the vote, which has been condemned as illegal by the Chinese government, was about much more than Hong Kong’s leadership, she said.
“I think the younger generation feels the future of Hong Kong falls on its shoulders,” said Chow, who was only six months old when Britain returned Hong Kong to China. “The inequality of the society is one of the reasons people have come out to vote. The social issues are tied in because without a democratic system, there is no pressure on the government to change.”
A surge of discontent is washing over the territory of 7.2 million people, which has long taken pride in its status as an enclave of free enterprise, free speech and independent courts abutting the Chinese mainland. The immediate conflict is about how to elect Hong Kong’s leader, the chief executive, but the underlying resentment voiced by many is that the territory’s political-business machine is rigged against them.
In interviews, a cross section of society — from lawyers, bankers and former senior public servants to high-school students — said that since Hong Kong, a former British colony, returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, an elite beholden to the Chinese Communist Party has increasingly dominated the economy and opportunity, as well as politics.
“We want a fair, open and equal election,” said Simon Yau, 50, an employee of a marketing firm, who voted in the referendum. “The government has sided with corporations, the rich.”
Signs of dissatisfaction are cropping up everywhere. The referendum, undertaken by a grass-roots movement called Occupy Central With Love and Peace and a university-affiliated polling group, aimed to collect 100,000 votes. By early on Saturday, nine days into a 10-day ballot period, it had collected more than 750,000 votes. University and high-school students have been among the most ardent supporters, staffing polling booths and street stalls, and coaxing parents and siblings to cast ballots.
On Friday last week, hundreds of lawyers, many clad in black, marched from the High Court in silent protest against a new policy paper from Beijing that they said threatened the independence of Hong Kong judges and court officials by demanding loyalty to China. The marchers, including eight former chiefs of the Hong Kong Bar Association, say the policy could undermine judicial independence.
If the territory fails to adopt a robustly democratic method for electing the chief executive, the Occupy group has threatened to hold sit-ins and engage in civil disobedience in the territory’s financial heart, Central. Today, the anniversary of Hong Kong’s return to China, groups opposed to mainland government policies plan to stage an annual rally, providing the next important gauge of the public mood.
Polls indicate discontent has been building. A telephone survey by the Hong Kong Transition Project, conducted in December last year, found dissatisfaction with the way the Chinese government is handling Hong Kong at its highest level in a decade, with 52 percent of Hong Kong residents saying they are dissatisfied. Alienation runs highest among the young, with 82 percent of people aged 21 to 29 saying they are dissatisfied, and 65 percent of people in that age bracket saying they are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied with life in the territory.
“They are more sensitive to this great division of wealth,” said Joseph Wong Wing-ping (王永平), a former senior public servant in Hong Kong, who has been critical of what he calls the territory’s leaders’ submissiveness to Beijing. “The society is changing, and you have more and more of this discontented, active, sometimes assertive, civil society led by the younger generation.”
Unlike the Occupy Wall Street movement that began in New York in 2011, Hong Kong’s Occupy Central is not a revolt against the capitalist financial system, and its leaders include well-paid lawyers, academics and financial investors, but especially among the students and young activists who have been its most ardent supporters, the political demands carry an edge of economic frustration.
Hong Kong has thrived economically since the end of British rule under an arrangement known as “one country, two systems,” which allows it to retain freedoms not permitted on the mainland. Today, the skyline bristles with bright new skyscrapers and many public facilities, including the subway, are marvels of efficiency, but the territory’s income inequality has risen since China resumed sovereignty, after climbing steeply in the previous decade, and middle-class residents increasingly link concerns about high home prices and living costs to grievances about the political system.
Fueling a sense of unfairness, the Chinese Communist Party elite and their associates play an increasingly prominent role in the territory’s business establishment. Six of the 10 biggest companies on the Hong Kong Stock Market’s Hang Seng index are Chinese state-owned companies, with chief executives who are appointed by the party.
Mainlanders with party ties also hold many influential positions in the territory’s banking industry. JPMorgan Chase’s former vice chairman for Asia investment banking, Fang Fang (方方), a member of a political advisory body to China’s government, was arrested in Hong Kong this year after being the subject of a US corruption investigation. The descendants of many Communist leaders, including grandsons of the former Chinese leaders Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), have worked in Hong Kong investment companies.
Critics say Chinese patronage politics has warped the economy, shutting out qualified people and skewing wealth distribution.
“It’s not a fair playing field here,” said Bill Tsang (曾振超), 51, a retired stock market executive who has helped recruit people in the financial sector to support Occupy Central. “Hong Kong nowadays becomes corrupt and becomes not performance-driven, but relationship-driven.”
Anxieties over Hong Kong’s future have coalesced around the issue of the chief executive, who is selected by a 1,200-member committee dominated by party loyalists. The Chinese government has promised to allow the popular election of the chief executive starting in 2017, but it has indicated it would retain control of choosing candidates to weed out those not loyal to Beijing.
The Occupy referendum gives voters a choice of three methods, each allowing candidates to secure a nomination by collecting the signatures of at least 1 percent of voters, about 35,000 names.
Beijing and its supporters accuse Occupy Central of being a Trojan horse for subversion.
“We mustn’t have wild thoughts and delusions,” Christopher Cheung Wah-fung, a businessman and member of Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, who supports Chinese government policies, said in an interview.
China has given Hong Kong many economic benefits, he said.
“The only thing is that you must not use Hong Kong as an anti-Communist base and affect domestic politics,” he said.
The territory’s government is expected to introduce its electoral overhaul plans later this year, with guidance from Beijing. China has said it rejects the proposals for nomination by public petition, which would allow potential candidates to bypass a nominating committee dominated by Beijing loyalists.
The push for democratic electoral change has won support from people such as Wong, who were once pillars of the establishment, but now say China’s encroachments are curtailing the freedoms that have made Hong Kong Asia’s biggest financial center.
Another supporter is Anson Chan (陳方安生), 74, Hong Kong’s former chief secretary, the second-highest post in government, who has become increasingly critical of the Hong Kong government and Beijing, warning about what she sees as an erosion of the autonomy that China promised to respect.
“I am personally extremely disappointed and in many ways very pained to see what is happening to Hong Kong barely 17 years after the handover,” Chan said in an interview this month.
The youth of Hong Kong, who have grown up under Chinese tutelage, have little compunction about opposing policies they abhor. Young protesters defeated a “patriotic education” curriculum proposed by the government in 2012 that critics said sought to instill CCP dogma.
Alex Chow Yong Kang (周永康), 23, secretary-general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, said he had grown up assuming he would follow his father into business, but he was jolted as a high-school student in 2008 when he attended a candlelight vigil for those killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing.
Securing a broad democratic franchise for Hong Kong, he said, is the only way to challenge the merging of party influence and elite business interests.
“I am a citizen of this country; why do I not have the right to a voice?” he asked. “Why do I not have the right to nominate someone, or even to kick someone out — not to speak of the communists, even the Hong Kong government?”
Chow said his mother worried that he might be arrested if the Occupy movement carried out its threatened sit-in.
“‘Don’t stand too close to the front. Don’t go to jail,’ she told me,” he said. “Sometimes we have to fight for our beliefs. There’s no alternative in Hong Kong.”
Additional reporting by Alan Wong
Recently, China launched another diplomatic offensive against Taiwan, improperly linking its “one China principle” with UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 to constrain Taiwan’s diplomatic space. After Taiwan’s presidential election on Jan. 13, China persuaded Nauru to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan. Nauru cited Resolution 2758 in its declaration of the diplomatic break. Subsequently, during the WHO Executive Board meeting that month, Beijing rallied countries including Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Belarus, Egypt, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Laos, Russia, Syria and Pakistan to reiterate the “one China principle” in their statements, and assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” to hinder Taiwan’s
Can US dialogue and cooperation with the communist dictatorship in Beijing help avert a Taiwan Strait crisis? Or is US President Joe Biden playing into Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) hands? With America preoccupied with the wars in Europe and the Middle East, Biden is seeking better relations with Xi’s regime. The goal is to responsibly manage US-China competition and prevent unintended conflict, thereby hoping to create greater space for the two countries to work together in areas where their interests align. The existing wars have already stretched US military resources thin, and the last thing Biden wants is yet another war.
As Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu’s party won by a landslide in Sunday’s parliamentary election, it is a good time to take another look at recent developments in the Maldivian foreign policy. While Muizzu has been promoting his “Maldives First” policy, the agenda seems to have lost sight of a number of factors. Contemporary Maldivian policy serves as a stark illustration of how a blend of missteps in public posturing, populist agendas and inattentive leadership can lead to diplomatic setbacks and damage a country’s long-term foreign policy priorities. Over the past few months, Maldivian foreign policy has entangled itself in playing
A group of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers led by the party’s legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (?) are to visit Beijing for four days this week, but some have questioned the timing and purpose of the visit, which demonstrates the KMT caucus’ increasing arrogance. Fu on Wednesday last week confirmed that following an invitation by Beijing, he would lead a group of lawmakers to China from Thursday to Sunday to discuss tourism and agricultural exports, but he refused to say whether they would meet with Chinese officials. That the visit is taking place during the legislative session and in the aftermath