On Tuesday, Hong Kong’s wealthiest businessman, Li Ka-shing, said he was “very disappointed” over the Hong Kong government’s failure to enact its reform package for the 2017 election of the chief executive, the city’s top political official. When asked who was responsible for what is now widely called a fiasco, Li ducked the question. “Everyone in Hong Kong is discussing this,” he said.
He’s right. Just about everybody in Hong Kong is talking about the events that unfolded last Thursday in Legco, as the city’s Legislative Council is known. The legislators, after a 20-month drama, finally voted on China’s proposal to “reform” the procedures for the election of the chief executive.
Last August, the National People’s Congress in Beijing issued its proposed procedures for the chief executive contest. China’s rubber-stamp legislature agreed to universal suffrage but insisted on nominating procedures so restrictive that only Beijing’s hand-picked candidates could compete in the election. The Hong Kong government then submitted Beijing’s plan to Legco.
Everyone was taken by surprise by what happened on the floor of the Hong Kong legislature at the end of last week. The pro-Beijing legislator Jeffrey Lam Kin-fung, within one minute of the scheduled vote on the government’s proposal, asked for a 15-minute delay to allow rural strongman Lau Wong-fat to make it to the chamber to cast his ballot. Legco President Jasper Tsang Yok-sing, also a “pro-establishment” or “pro-Beijing” politician, denied the procedural request.
With less than 30 seconds to the vote, Beijing’s camp decided to break the quorum. Lam and 30 others, therefore, walked out of the chamber, but in the confusion nine of his bloc stayed behind. The “pan-democratic” legislators also remained, and with the nine others constituted a quorum. A vote was taken, and the final tally on the government’s package was eight in favor and 28 against.
In a technical sense, the failed walkout did not matter. The government’s proposal was never going to get the necessary two-thirds majority because the democrats had just enough votes to block what they rightly called “fake” or “North Korean–style” democracy.
Yet in a political sense, the incident has ramifications that will certainly be felt for years. Beijing’s strategy all along was to blame the democrats for preventing passage of the reform package and then defeat them at the polls, taking away their “critical minority” in Legco. Now, China cannot hold them responsible, at least credibly, because its own allies were not on the floor to vote. And due to the stunning development, it is the pro-establishment forces that might lose seats in upcoming contests.
Since the debacle, two pro-Beijing figures—Lam, widely blamed for the failed walkout, and the divisive Regina Ip Suk-yee, chairwoman of the New People’s Party and prospective candidate for chief executive—have actually cried in public. The establishment forces are in disarray, and Beijing has been described as “angry.”
Yet the fallout could be even more significant if China moves to Plan B. “The pro-establishment elites come from different interest groups and are disunited,” said Lau Siu-kai, former head of the Hong Kong government’s think tank, the Central Policy Unit, on Saturday. “I am afraid the only force that can coordinate them is not from Hong Kong but from the central government.”
Lau, who publicly called the pro-Beijing forces “incompetent,” suggested there would be the loss of even more autonomy in the city that the People’s Republic absorbed in 1997. “The principle of ‘Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong’ will be compromised,” the Beijing-connected figure noted in comments to the South China Morning Post.
A sure recipe for more political turbulence is direct rule or the appearance of such—from Beijing. Already, people in Hong Kong are beginning to talk about independence from China, and a growing segment of the population does not see itself as “Chinese.” As a result of the new self-identity, democracy in China is no longer of importance to “localists,” who believe the focus of their struggle should be their home, Hong Kong.
And developments are already turning ugly. The Hong Kong government in the middle of this month arrested ten people for planning to detonate explosives. Those charged are alleged to have ties with radical political groups, but many suspect the arrests are part of a Beijing-inspired plot to discredit the democracy movement.
China just suffered a setback in Hong Kong last week, and Chinese officials, by ruling the city more tightly, are about to make matters worse for the people of Hong Kong—and for themselves.