Search
Close this search box.

Hong Kong: Two Systems, One Dictatorship

Peter Main

Hong Kong has not seen anything like it since the British authorities crushed demonstrations in 1967. Tens of thousands of protestors, demanding nothing more than the right to freely elect the territory’s political leader, have been subjected to baton charges, tear gas and pepper spray.

If the city authorities, under Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, thought this would teach the demonstrators, led by university and school students, a lesson, they could not have been more wrong. Within hours of the first police attacks, thousands more poured into the streets to protest at the brutality and demand the release of student leaders from police custody.

That response underlines the mobilising power of such basic democratic demands – and the violent crackdown underlines the fact that those demands are a fundamental threat not only to Hong Kong’s government but to Beijing as well.

Elections

The immediate issue is the election of a new Chief Executive in 2017. According to the Basic Law, which was cooked up between Beijing and the Thatcher government, the “selection of the members of the Legislature and the Chief Executive is to be ultimately by means of universal suffrage”. More recently, it was announced that universal suffrage would apply to the 2017 election, but what that would mean in practice remained unclear.

Occupy Central

The final decision was to be taken by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress and in the public campaigning around the issue it became clear that the central question was not so much who would have the right to vote but who would have the right to stand for election. In that campaign, a distinctive voice was that of “Occupy Central”, which had its origins in the Occupy movement of 2011, and threatened an occupation of the city’s main financial district, the Central district on Hong Kong Island, if full democratic rights were not granted.

By the time the Standing Committee reached its decision, August 31, however, Occupy Central had lost whatever radical characteristics it initially had and was little more than a lobbying group led by respectable academics. When it was revealed that only candidates (and probably a maximum of three) who had been accepted by a Beijing-nominated panel would be allowed to stand, one of the principal leaders of Occupy, Benny Tai, a law professor, admitted that their campaign had failed in the short term but would continue to argue for full democracy.

This was later backed up with the call for an occupation of the Central district on a public holiday, possibly September 6 or October 1, National Day, which commemorates the 1949 revolution. The choice of a public holiday, it was made clear, was to emphasise that there was no intention to disrupt business.

More radical voices, particularly in the Hong Kong Federation of Students, HKFS, rejected this, recognising it as an acceptance of defeat. Many had gained experience of mass mobilisation in the successful campaign to prevent the imposition of a “patriotic” school curriculum two years ago. After the Standing Committee decision was announced, they called for a week of student strikes, beginning on September 22, to demand full universal suffrage, with no vetoes on candidates.

Building on the success of the strike, the students also called for a meeting with Leung. When this was refused, the activists turned to an occupation of a government office on Friday evening to highlight their demands. It was the violent police response to this that transformed the situation. As the protests grew in scale, however, so the stakes also rose.

The Hong Kong government is certainly under pressure from Beijing to clear the streets but the demonstrators also have to contend with other forces who either want to appease the central government or to use the movement for their own ends. Occupy Central initially kept its distance form the student mobilisation, insisting that its proposed token occupation was a separate action that was still planned for the following week. By Saturday, however, Benny Tai had changed his tune and declared that the occupation of Central “has now begun”.

Some students immediately saw this as an attempt to take control of the movement, as well as the credit for its effectiveness, and called for a return to the campuses. Although understandable, this would have been an error, leaving the likes of Tai to assume the leadership. Fortunately, the great bulk of the protestors held their ground.

Liberals

Next up were the professional liberal politicians, the “pan-democrats” who have played a largely ineffectual role in the pseudo-democratic Legislative Council for several decades and now wanted to associate themselves with the dynamism of the protest movement.

One of them, Alan Leong of the Civic Party, even had the audacity to deny the role of the students in leading and organising the protests, “What we have seen is spontaneous – without leadership, without prior organisation, of its own volition … a people’s movement. We simply want basic dignity. We simply want to be respected” . Why anyone would respect such a political fraud is open to question.

Another, Martin Lee made clear his illusion that the governments in both Hong Kong and Beijing can be persuaded that liberal democracy is no threat, but his reasoning verged on the bizarre.

Addressing the crowds he said, “we want to tell Chinese leaders that we support the ‘one country, two systems’ envisioned by Deng Xiaoping. Deng [believed] that if Hong Kong can keep its core values, China can catch up in 50 years’ time, but the present Chinese leaders don’t have that vision to implement Deng’s blueprint. We want the real version of ‘one country, two systems’”.

In 1989, four years after Deng devised the “one country, two systems” formula as the basis of the return of Hong Kong to Chinese rule, he made very clear his views on democratic reform, when he ordered the tanks into Tiananmen Square to crush the student-led democracy movement on the mainland.

While these politicians were right to raise the question of where the movement should go next, the students showed a much better grasp of both politics and history. Drawing on the lessons of the education struggle and last year’s dock strike, both of which gained unexpectedly wide public support, the HKFS appealed for the university and schools strike to be extended and for the trades unions to take action on Monday September 29 in support of the demands for universal suffrage.

Strikes

Although the major unions in Hong Kong are led by pro-Beijing forces, the more independent HK Confederation of Trade Unions, which led the dock strike, responded positively, “We strongly condemn the government for suppressing the freedom of speech and the freedom of assembly in Hong Kong. HKCTU calls for all workers in Hong Kong to strike tomorrow, in protest of the ruling of the National People’s Congress, as well as the brutal suppression of peaceful protest by the Hong Kong government.”

Lorry drivers and university lecturers did take strike action on September 29 and that, along with the growing numbers of demonstrators, led to the closure of many businesses. The government was forced to withdraw the riot police and its calls for an end to the demonstrations underlined its confusion at its own impotence in the face of widespread popular opposition.

Clearly, one option for Leung is to sit out the wave of demonstrations and try to organise a counter-mobilisation – focussing on the need to “maintain order” and defend Hong Kong as a centre of world trade and commerce. This was the strategy used in Taiwan recently when demonstrators occupied government buildings there.

To counter this, and the inevitable effects of days of 24 hour street demonstrations, the democracy movement needs to maintain the forward momentum that has sustained it at several decisive points already. The appeal to the working class of Hong Kong to strike in defence of the demos needs to be broadened by raising demands related to the huge inequalities of wealth in the territory.

Ultimately, it is fear of how the working class could take advantage of free, democratic elections that underlies Beijing’s refusal to make concessions. While the ruling Chinese Communist Party is prepared to tolerate different forms of capitalism, or different “systems” as it calls them, on the mainland and in Hong Kong, its leaders cannot allow any dilution of their one party dictatorship.

Localism

Recognition of that is the key to the future strategy of the democracy movement in Hong Kong. There is a danger that the movement will be influenced by the arguments that Hong Kong has to defend its “cultural identity” and “democratic heritage” by remaining quite distinct from the rest of China. Such a localist perspective would be fatal.

Of course, as a result of the balance of international forces in the past, Hong Kong does enjoy a greater degree of freedom than the great cities of Shenzhen, Dongguan, Guangzhou and others situated just over the “border”, but it cannot have a future entirely separate from them and the rest of China. Its “way of life” is actually dependent on the wealth created in those cities and, ultimately, it cannot enjoy freedoms that are denied to them.

To go forward now, the movement’s leaders need to turn their appeals to the working class of the mainland. Despite Beijing’s imposition of a complete blackout of news from Hong Kong, the border is now so porous that such appeals will be heard. Although largely unreported, in recent years, there have been major strikes in China and the working class has developed means of organising and communicating despite the best efforts of the dictatorship.

Far from celebrating its isolation from the rest of China, now is the time for Hong Kong to play a leading role in reviving the labour movement of the whole country. As in Hong Kong itself, this means linking basic democratic demands to the immediate needs of workers such as housing, improved working conditions and wages, equality for “migrant” workers from the rural provinces and extension of social insurance and welfare rights.

Nor is the future of the movement even simply a Chinese matter. Already, solidarity demonstrations have been held in cities around the world and these will grow in number if the movement is maintained. China is now a world power, an imperialist power, indeed, and the socialist and working class movements of the whole world have a fundamental interest in supporting the freedom and political independence of the Chinese working class, the biggest section of the international working class.

For a Hong Kong General Strike! Full universal suffrage immediately! Release all arrested demonstrators!

International Solidarity with Hong Kong students and workers!

Content

You should also read
Share this Article
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp
Print
Reddit
Telegram
Share this Article
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp
Print
Reddit
Telegram