Protests could reap political change
 
Philip Bowring IHT
Friday, July 4, 2003
Hong Kong
 
HONG KONG Out of crisis comes opportunity. Even before they started, the massive demonstrations here against the proposed security laws on July 1 had visiting Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao scurrying back across the border to neighboring Shenzhen. By the time half a million had marched in protest at the regime which China installed six years earlier on the “joyous” occasion of the handover, the public-relations savvy Wen should have realized that something has to give.
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The anger of Hong Kong people was aimed primarily at an incompetent and sleazy local administration, not at Beijing. But it could be infectious. China has long sought to curtail democratic development in the territory for fear that a democratic example would spill over to the mainland. Beijing remembers the mass support that Hong Kong gave to the democracy movement in China in 1989. Its knee-jerk response to the demonstration has been a clamp-down on news. So much for post-SARS openness.
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But Wen Jiabao, it should be recalled, was also the man beside then-Party Secretary General Zhao Ziyang when he visited students in Tiananmen Square in 1989, an act which earned Zhao dismissal by Deng Xiaoping. Wen survived, but has continued to present himself as a consensus-building, approachable man of the people.
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In Hong Kong, Wen has the advantage that he, like President Hu Jintao, is new in the job. He is neither personally nor politically associated with the chief executive of Hong Kong, Tung Chee-hwa, or the business groups which have thrived on Tung's domestic policies and his particular connections in Shanghai and Beijing.
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Changes at the top in China have already been followed by the removal of the mayor of Beijing, and the uncovering of a billion dollar land and corporate scandal in Shanghai.
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Even before the demonstration, Wen clearly realized that things were going wrong in Hong Kong. His visit passed without a single word of public praise for Tung. The problem is how to clean up the government in Hong Kong without either being seen as interfering in its purported autonomy, or giving in to populist aspirations in Hong Kong.
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The reason for the demonstration was the government's proposed new security law which, in the wrong hands, could easily be used to stifle freedom of speech and assembly. But it was as much a protest against three other things:
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The failure to advance democratic representation in Hong Kong. Since 1997, the powers of its legislature have been curtailed in favor of government by executive fiat, and no progress made towards a genuinely democratic franchise. Bumbling administration by the world's highest paid ministers and top bureaucrats which exacerbated the severe acute respiratory syndrom crisis and economic woes. The self-interests of members of an inbred business/bureaucratic elite which has been using the levers of government to feather their own nests.
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Tung has created a system in which ministers are accountable only to him, and he is accountable only to Beijing. Mutual loyalties have enabled some to survive scandals which elsewhere would have required immediate resignation, and possibly legal action. In short while Asia has been modernizing, giving power to rising middle class and professional interests and accepting pluralism as part of progress, Hong Kong's leadership has offered an odd mix of Communist centralism, bureaucratic authoritarianism and business cronyism.
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The opposition to this unholy alliance has long existed in popular speech, in the media, and through a judiciary that is still reasonably independent. Now it has come to life on the streets of a city which has often been inaccurately described as apolitical.
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The problem for China is how to advance change at the elite level in Hong Kong in a way which requires only modest surrender to democratic pressures. It is not just a matter of persuading Tung that he is too old, ill or tired to continue. It means a wholesale clean-out of arrogant, incompetent and venal power-holders who have used patriotism as cloak to cover all failings.
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Wen may now understand that Hong Kong may be able to live without a fully representative legislature, and even with most of the security bill. But it will not live quietly with an administration so out of touch with its people. The people need to believe that their leaders represent Hong Kong's interests, not those of particular business groups or acolytes of Beijing. Unless Wen can engineer real change, the Hong Kong fever will rise further and the danger of infecting the mainland will grow.
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By the same token, the Hong Kong protests may provide Wen with a lever for advancing more open and accountable government on the mainland. Hong Kong's frustrations could bring benefits to systems on both sides the border.

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