 One year ago in 2003 felt different. Then half-a-million Hong Kongers displayed a popular will to protest not seen since after the Tiananmen Square killings of 1989 (when a million marched in Hong Kong.) The worry in 2003 shared with 1989 an imminent fear. Article 23 legislation proposed by the Tung administration would kill key freedoms inherited from the British as surely as the PLA killed peaceful demonstrators in 1989.
One year after 2003 the fear seemed less imminent. Hong Kong's Chief Executive, tail-between-legs, had withdrawn Article 23 in the late summer of 2003. Hong Kongers concluded that many pre-handover freedoms still remained intact. A feeling emerged that those freedoms would not be attacked again until at least after the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Admittedly, whilst the CCP in Beijing allowed Mr Tung to step backwards from Article 23 they stepped forward elsewhere. They announced universal suffrage was off the table when electing the next Chief Executive in 2007 and, for good measure, also for legislators in LegCo during 2008. A certain rapprochement was even engineered between the Hong Kong Democrats and Beijing in the weeks preceding July 1 2004.
All this suggested the number of protestors in 2004 would be down on 2003. Mix in the hot weather, a strengthening economy and a conveniently re-scheduled PLA open day (see background, below) and the protest march appeared to be forming nearer the quarter-of-a-million mark. But Hong Kong people proved everyone wrong and demonstrated in similar quantities to 2003. Organisers counted 530,000 or 7.5% of the population (the police stopped counting after three hours - see background).
Discombobulating Mr Tung
 Surprise at the same number of protestors as 2003, though, was only half the news from July 1, 2004. The more telling half of the news was the response of the HKSAR Chief Executive. 'I clearly hear your views,' Mr Tung stressed once again. 'I understand your aspirations. In the difficult year just past, we are grateful for the criticisms, advice, support and encouragement that you have given us.'
Run that again? Hong Kong people have given the government support and encouragement?
But let us not digress from Mr Tung's ultimate message which is of delay. 'We would take forward constitutional development with the ultimate aim of universal suffrage in accordance with the principle of gradual and orderly progress, the provisions of the Basic law, as well as the interpretation and decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee.'
The translation and ultimate point is simple. Beijing is boss and Mr Tung will not listen to anyone else. What is especially shocking is not that 'One Country Two Systems' seemingly counts for naught in the mind of Hong Kong's leader but that Mr Tung continues with his discombobulating logic ad infinitum: I will listen to the people but, er, I will only listen to Beijing.
Mr Tung, in fact, seemed to think that Hong Kongers were incapable of recalling that after the march in 2003 he produced fairly identical fudge. After the march in 2003 he was humble; he was willing to make improvements; he would keep doing his best; he would ensure everyone kept co-operating for the good of Hong Kong and the motherland. Above all he would try to see Hong Kong people maintain a harmonious relationship with the CCP.
When will push become shove?
The demonstrators on July 1, 2004 and Mr Tung's Confucian response solved a question left over from July 1, 2003: Capital-D Democracy will inevitably arrive in Hong Kong or will fester around as an unhealed wound. The acid question however is when?
Despite Beijing's ruling to the contrary, the most obvious date for universal suffrage still remains 2007 (the election of the next Chief Executive) and 2008 (LegCo). Both proceed the Beijing Olympics when China will want to appear to the world as modern and enlightened. After Beijing Olympics the CCP will have greater opportunity to indulge their totalitarian instincts.
How Hong Kong galvanises new thinking from Beijing between now and 2007 will be an interresting story. But standing back from the tension and argument which will inevitably surround those dates it is interesting to glance at the unfolding of social movements elsewhere. An entirely unscientific answer from an entirely unscientific sample says broad political movements require about a decade or so to achieve their goals. Here are some examples from Britain and America:
- Post Civil War America
The XIV and XV amendments to the American constitution, guaranteeing citizenship rights and the right of blacks to vote, passed in 1868 and 1869, was close to a decade after the Civil War.
- Post World War II America
America's civil rights movement peaked around a decade after the US Supreme Court rulings of the 1950s. Dr Luther King had a dream in 1963 and President Johnson pushed for the Great Society.
- House of Lords reform in Britain
Britain's long overdue reform of the hereditary upper house in 1911 was the culmination of nearly a decade of activity following Queen Victoria's death in 1902.
- The first socialist government in Britain
The first Labour government was elected in 1924, close to a decade after the igniting of European socialist aspirations in the Russian Revolution in 1917.
Of course no bookmaker would give any odds that what happens in the US or UK means Hong Kong gets universal suffrage in 2007, or 2012 for that matter, simply because by then there will have been a decade or more of popular tension. What happens in a tiny city with 0.5% of China's population is unique and unpredictable.
A decade is also very arbitrary. The Chinese Communists took a mere three years to defeat the Nationalists at the end of WWII whereas Indian independence from the British took several decades after the Gandhi-led salt marches of the 1930s awakened the forbidden thought of India without the British. Big things, in other words, can happen slowly or they can happen quickly. But in the end they always happen.
|
