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Hong Kong harbour and Victoria Peak ca. 1855 CHINESE SCHOOL, 19TH CENTURY Christie's 2011
From Australia's Quadrant Magazine, June 1:
Peter Rowe is a former senior Australian diplomat whose postings included Beijing and Seoul.
The Chinese Communist Party has no peer when it comes to strategic thinking, even if the thinking is wrong or repellent. Anyone else, anywhere else, would have thought that if the Hong Kong chief executive couldn’t cope, the sensible thing to do would be to replace her with someone who could. But no. The party’s answer is to replace its representative in the territory, someone most people wouldn’t have known existed. It’s the right answer, too, for that’s where the real power lies. The new man, Luo Huining, is one who unlike his predecessor isn’t encumbered with any experience of Hong Kong matters. Luo is a party loyalist long familiar with imposing party discipline and organisation in troublesome regions.
It’s an honest answer, too. Chief executive Carrie Lam can continue to twist ineffectively in the breeze, a fit demonstration of the powerlessness of old colonial mechanisms, while the new order gets on with the real task. And the real task is not to address mass protests or their causes, as one might think. Rather, the party’s new representative has announced that his task will be the further integration of Hong Kong into the surrounding provinces of China, especially Guangdong. That means the people of Hong Kong can just get used to the fact that Beijing is not going to take any notice of their demands for democracy and openness; they can start getting used to the inevitability of being more like the rest of China.
Luo has also asserted the right of Beijing to supervise affairs in Hong Kong. The territory’s autonomy is beginning to resemble the autonomy the party promised Tibet when it took over there.
But why not do the obvious thing and replace the chief executive with someone who could do the job? Since the party’s takeover of Hong Kong, that has proved hard to do. The first appointee, Tung Chee-hwa, a shipping mogul, found his business skills didn’t equip him for the heat of politics and stepped down early. He had the unenviable task of following the popular Chris Patten, Britain’s last governor. The difference showed. Patten had been in control, with full support from London. His political skills, affable personality, and importantly his willingness to take on the CCP and not flinch, endeared him to Hong Kongers. The euphoria of the peaceful and seamless handover of Hong Kong to a one-party dictatorship helped Tung for a while, but gradually it became obvious that he had to contend with the party looking over his shoulder, vetoing anything that might reassure the locals but detract from full party control. Unlike Patten, he was not his own master. Donald Tsang, the next candidate, ended up on corruption charges. Leung Chun-ying, next, survived his term in sullen do-nothing isolation, letting the contradictions of his impossible position mount, a time bomb for his successor, Carrie Lam.
In the wake of the thirtieth anniversary last year of the Tiananmen massacre, it may be worth looking at the differences with developments today and why so far Hong Kong has escaped a similar bloodletting. Party leaders seemed to appreciate how catastrophic the consequences would be of a violent crackdown. Damage to Hong Kong from the US-China trade stand-off would pale before further US and international sanctions, including the repeal of special-treatment laws for the territory by the US Congress, and the flight of business and investment. It would also toughen up Taiwan’s resistance to the mainland’s blandishments, and increase Western support for its continued defiance of Beijing’s plans for its future.
None of that, of course, would stop party leaders if they feared Hong Kong was shearing off from mainland control. But it’s not and it won’t. This is not Catalonia or Scotland. In the meantime, with the coronavirus lockdown, the party has time to consolidate. National Security Day in China, April 16, prompted Luo Huining to launch a campaign of struggle, language associated with the purges of the Cultural Revolution. The announcement was well timed, with people housebound. He also foreshadowed the introduction of harsh security legislation, long wanted by Beijing but met with strong resistance in Hong Kong in the years after 1997. For China’s leaders, on the back foot over the coronavirus, every crisis is an opportunity. Growing popular cynicism and resentment are a result party leaders can live with.
Importantly, the nature and cause of the protests are different from the protests leading up to the Tiananmen massacre. In China, if protesters succeed in getting onto the streets for any length of time, it will be because of serious leadership disagreement. Popular unrest is constant, and keeping it in check is a full-time job. Monitoring at the street and building level by low-level party functionaries helps to keep down activity. Intimidation by the security apparatus will come into play for more complicated cases, as we saw with the unsuspecting Dr Li Wenliang, innocently discussing in a chatroom the upsurge in cases involving a curious new virus last November in Wuhan. He was apolitical and easy to intimidate. But in more persistent cases, like human-rights lawyers and over-enthusiastic #MeToo advocates, individuals will just disappear.
Only during a catastrophic split in the leadership, when the party leadership loses direction and cohesion, does the population find an opportunity to express its anger. This was the case in the Cultural Revolution, when Mao found his comrades sidelining him from decision-making after the disastrous 1958 Great Leap Forward. His prestige was enough to bring the frustrated young out on the streets, and too great for his comrades to defy.
Deng Xiaoping similarly had to resort to mass protest in 1979 with the so-called Democracy Wall, when he found his conservative comrades in the party frustrating his efforts to loosen party control of the economy. He won that time, at which point he cynically closed the wall down and jailed the ringleaders.
The 1989 unrest had similar origins. Deng and his liberal lieutenants were meeting resistance from their hardline politburo opponents, as they tried to extend successful agricultural reform further into the industrial sector and to loosen central planning. With control of the propaganda organs, Deng had been letting discussion of political reform rip at the universities and in the media. Democracy groups sprang up in universities, while state television aired controversial programs lamenting China’s backwardness and lack of democratic development. The mood was febrile.
The resulting protests met no resistance because one of Deng’s allies, secret police chief Qiao Shi, held off. He had a reputation as a procrastinator. If he cracked down on the protesters when Deng was behind them, he’d be in trouble. If he didn’t, he’d face the anger of Deng’s conservative opponents. The safest option was to sit on his hands for a time.
He sat on them too long. So did Deng. He had let his lieutenant, the party general-secretary, Zhao Ziyang, have his way on the streets too long. But his opponents finally prevailed, as the chaos mounted. The story goes that in one of their last meetings, Deng asked Zhao to outline how they could prevail. What assets could they muster? Zhao pointed out the window at the million protesters in the square, and at the copycat protests all round the country. I have the people, he said. Then you have nothing, was Deng’s response. It was the end. Deng had lost and he knew it. It was time to save what he could.
The first made-for-television bloodbath followed, as the army mopped up the protesters. The protesters had learnt again that they were not agents of change but just hapless pawns in a titanic leadership struggle. Some 2500 perished that morning, according to the local Red Cross in an uncensored moment. Three years of reform stagnation and repression followed. Talk of political reform has been taboo ever since.
Circumstances in Hong Kong are different. The protesters are not responding to a gap that has opened up in the regime. But brought up with the assumptions of freedom, democracy and an independent judiciary, they fear these eroding. The promise of free election of the chief executive turned out to be a futile exercise in endorsing a party-approved slate. The legislative elections are rigged against anyone critical of the Communist Party or its policies. Chinese security agents now enter the territory with impunity and whisk off critics of the regime. Hong Kong’s constitutional guarantees of due process look empty. Foreign journalists who are too outspoken find their visas withdrawn, or are denied entry to this once free port.
But social controls aren’t so tight yet that any manifestation of backsliding on the government’s part won’t propel people onto the streets. The hapless Hong Kong government, deprived of any residual legitimacy by Beijing’s heavy-handedness, is now a pathetic echo of the will of the party centre. Aware how impatient her party masters are of criticism, the chief executive daren’t be an advocate for Hong Kong’s interests. Rather, she has become a mouthpiece for the party in the territory. She could never tell Xi Jinping in her staged appearances with him every year that only wholesale democratic reform and non-interference could restore popular confidence.
Meanwhile, confidence in the resilience and durability of the current order will drop a notch. Present at a meeting in 1993 between Australia’s Governor-General Bill Hayden and Chris Patten, I remember Patten’s comment as he farewelled us. Hayden would be able to witness Hong Kong’s future when he visited the sleepy Portuguese colony of Macau the next day. Xi Jinping, on the other hand, sees this docile outpost as a successful example of the vacuous one-country-two-systems policy. He praised it in lavish terms on a recent visit.
Nothing like this current unrest occurred under colonial rule. Even without popular participation in the government, British concepts of justice and free speech, improving health and education, and laissez-faire economic growth, gave all a stake in the system. Those underlying principles above all things explain why Hong Kong holds such a special place in the affections of all those who have experienced both sides of the Hong Kong–China border.
The expatriate today in China’s big cities would be hard put to imagine what it was like for the few foreigners marooned there in the 1960s and 1970s. It was like COVID-19 lockdown but without the internet or online shopping. There were no sports facilities, no cinemas, no shops you’d want to visit, no music, no bars, no coffee shops, indeed no coffee. The Chinese restaurants were good and cheap, but they closed by 8.30 at night. A few restaurants serving eccentric imitations of Western food had survived the Cultural Revolution, like the Pakistani restaurant. Once Indian, but renamed after China’s border fight with India in 1962, it curiously served decent caviar at cheap prices, a remnant from old trade agreements with China’s enemy at the time, the Soviet Union.
Other than that, you could walk in the parks in summer or autumn—dusty and grassless, because grass had been declared a bourgeois indulgence; or you could skate on the lake at the Summer Palace in winter; or picnic among the ruins of the Ming tombs. That was it for entertainment. The Cultural Revolution still engulfed the country, forbidding harmless fun and enjoyment.
So it was always a treat to escape to Hong Kong, to have a proper drink in a proper bar, visit a bookshop with books you’d want to read, get a professional haircut, eat Western food, perhaps play a round of golf, catch up on the latest Hollywood blockbuster, watch cricket or rugby, shop for toiletries and medicines, and buy luxuries to take back, like strawberries or Australian lamb chops.
But it was a trek getting in and out. China had few communication links with the outside world, if you didn’t want to fly to Tirana, Ulanbator or Islamabad. Since Hong Kong was illegitimately occupied by Britain, China’s authorities forbade formal communication links. So getting into China was about as inconvenient as they could make it. A two-hour plane trip today took a day. The traveller had to rise at dawn to be at Hung Hom station in time for the 7.30 train to the border town of Lo Wu. There travellers would disembark, walk across an ancient timber bridge into the mainland and catch the slow train from sleepy Shenzhen to Canton. From there a plane to Beijing, arriving about 9.30 at night.........MUCH MORE
Back in November 2019's "Hong Kong’s Demise" we noted:
It appears that one of Beijing's options is to let Hong Kong die on the vine and wither away as a business center, with Shenzhen, Shanghai and even Hainan island assuming some of the various roles that Hong Kong has played over the years.
And if HK is no longer an entrepôt and the gateway to China it faces the possibility of becoming a colonial backwater but one that is so overbuilt it ends up as an urban hellscape....
