On June 18, when the Hong Kong Legislative Council released its decision on the territory’s election reform package proposal, the results came in eight in favor and 28 opposed, due to poor communication between the council’s pro-Beijing members, many of whom walked out before the vote.
In any nation’s legislative body, if a party whip issues a high-level order to party members, there are always likely to be some who vote against the party line. Circumstances like this have played out in Taiwan many times. Yet in Hong Kong, the pro-Beijing camp’s clear majority suddenly vanished.
Such extensive opposition to the party line reflects the problem that Beijing has in directly controlling legislators’ votes. Given that even Taiwanese politicians are increasingly influenced by China, a similar scenario could possibly play out in Taipei.
In most parliamentary democracies — with the exception of nations in Europe operating proportional representation systems, a formula that does not favor the formation of one big party, tending toward many smaller parties occupying the same part of the political spectrum — one side of the political spectrum usually has one, maybe two, parties.
If legislators affiliated with a given part of the political spectrum are divided between several parties as a result of the peculiarities of a proportional representation system, there often exists a coordination mechanism by which the similar parties can ensure they agree on major issues to avoid losing votes due to a failure to coordinate.
Even if the internal workings of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy camp might seem like those of kindergarten children, at least it has lunchbox meetings — informal gatherings that help coordinate the viewpoints of groups within the same part of the political spectrum.
However, among Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing parties, there is no organization that fosters coordination resembling lunchbox meetings. In fact, it is the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region that plays the role of an overlord and coordinates how the pro-Beijing parties vote.
However, the parties do not band together because of national identity or a common ideology, but rather get together out of shared interests. Parties composed mostly of businesspeople pander to the China Liaison Office to facilitate business in China with help from institutions such as the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference and the Chinese National People’s Congress.
Groups, such as the Beijing-approved Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions and Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, in recent years, have had an influx of members who court the China Liaison Office to improve business prospects and obtain Chinese government contracts.
However, the office is not interested in coordinating the parties to ensure that they vote a certain way or gain the support of the public. After all, within Hong Kong’s rather odd political system, these parties are pretty much guaranteed to have a majority of seats in the council. The office allocates resources depending on whether a party panders to its senior officials — or does as it says — as a means to control them, and it has divided the parties into several factions that are directly under its control, but which have no coordination between them to speak of.
Those who understand Chinese Communist Party (CCP) politics know that obedience is often a byword for incompetence, and the veto of this month’s electoral reform package was a perfect example.
Those obedient to China walked out of the legislative chamber without thinking for themselves, yet the ones who do not do Beijing’s bidding did not need to be told that the system is flawed.
The result was that the eight legislators who remained had the common sense to vote to protect their own political prospects, while the 33 who walked out were derided as sell-outs by Hong Kongers and internationally.
In Taiwan, being politically active generally means spending large sums of money.
The question is: With Taiwanese businesses in China becoming increasingly pro-Beijing, are Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) politicians, who have lost the ability to address issues rationally, likely to split into smaller factions — further eroding their ability to think for themselves — in an attempt to gain the support of the financiers behind these businesses, which are essentially Beijing’s political representatives in Taiwan?
Individual Taiwanese businesses might also become obedient to the Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits, the Chinese representative office in Taiwan.
Now that the KMT has one presidential hopeful — Deputy Legislative Speaker Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) — the pan-blue camp might become a group of politicians solely sharing common interests. When Beijing, or a representative of Beijing, is directing a group of politicians purely in it for their own interests, there is no telling what could occur next.
Martin Oei is a political commentator based in Hong Kong.
Translated by Zane Kheir
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