Hong Kong
Television screens went dark all over China as the BBC reported the dramatic results of Hong Kong’s September 4 legislative election, in which a record voter turnout increased the number of opposition legislators to the level at which they can now block any bill proposed by the Beijing-backed local government. Screens went dark because this news is deeply unsettling to the central administration of President Xi Jinping, and rightly so.
Conventional wisdom tends to the view that Hong Kong is not very important. What its 7.4 million people decide (or Taiwan’s 23 million) is of little consequence next to a Chinese population of 1.4 billion. Beijing has the ultimate power, which it will use if necessary to keep the people it rules in line. Thus what the press calls “anti-China sentiment”—i.e., opposition to Beijing—may be unmistakable and undeniable in recent elections in Taiwan and now in Hong Kong, but the drama is overstated.
This kind of analysis is common but erroneous. The developments we see on the periphery—in Hong Kong and Taiwan—are also under way in China proper, though more slowly and harder to discern because of the dictatorship. One day, perhaps not far off, they will appear inside China, as unexpectedly as they have in Hong Kong and Taiwan.
The Beijing government thus fears the demonstration effect of Chinese people ruling themselves democratically: completely in Taiwan; partially, but with a powerful veto, in Hong Kong. When the Beijing government looks at the immensely long queues of dead-serious citizen-voters in Hong Kong, whose verdict was thumbs down on China’s efforts to administer their territory properly, what do they see? Even longer queues in China proper, voting on them, with the ultimate verdict also thumbs down.
In 1989, some 250 Chinese cities were clogged by millions upon millions of citizens calling for democracy. The government of China was removed by powerful former office holders; army units were located that were ignorant enough to comply with this government’s orders, illegal even under its own constitution, which led to the Tiananman Square bloodbath of June 4.
That was 27 years ago. Since then, the Chinese people have kept their heads down. They are being distracted by officially sponsored xenophobia and militarism, as in the pointless war Beijing has started in the South China Sea. Could one today find soldiers willing to machine gun their fellow citizens? Leaders with the prestige to give such orders? Could one today freeze deep social problems with violence?
Almost certainly not, which is why Hong Kong is so important. It is a window into China; it is a place where issues are moving faster—but they are the same issues China faces. At the core is democracy.
On September 27, 1945, Mao Zedong was asked a question about democracy in writing by the Reuters correspondent in Chongqing to which he responded, also in writing. Here is the exchange:
Millions of Chinese and foreigners believed him: They believed that the Communists would be more democratic than Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists, perhaps the most important key to the seizure of power by Mao and his followers four years later. That was 71 years ago. Chinese ask: What became of those seemingly authoritative promises?
China today is certainly the largest and most systematically repressive dictatorship in the world, rated half a point below Russia by Freedom House. And President Xi shows no signs of remembering Mao’s promises. Rather, he is intent—even more so than his recent predecessors—on holding all power in his own hands, as well as restoring the party to supremacy in every sphere.
Xi wants to iron out the wrinkles produced by dissenting thought—so television cameras and microphones are being installed in university classrooms across the country. Dissenters are “disappeared” and kept in off-the-record prisons of unimaginable cruelty. Religion is under renewed attack.
Most important, the government has decided it no longer needs the United States as a semi-ally against Russia, for China is now a mighty nuclear superpower. From America have come all sorts of destabilizing ideas—so China is now reversing her foreign policy. She is championing dictatorship as a superior system while identifying the United States as her chief enemy. Who, after Nixon visited in 1972, would have imagined this new, bitter hostility?
As in Hong Kong, though, China’s population is better educated and informed than ever before. And more are reaching the standard of living where one begins to think, “I should have something to say about how I am ruled.” In 1997 the Chinese promised the people of Hong Kong that they would rule themselves democratically and elect their chief executive. In the years since, they have gotten cold feet and broken those promises. The Hong Kong people are not stupid. They have noticed. Many are enraged.
So enraged, in fact, that a growing number of the young—Hong Kong politics are generational—want independence. Independent Singapore is 278 square miles; Hong Kong is 427. They need nothing from China except food and water. Certainly not political or technical guidance, or money—their per capita GDP is higher than Britain’s.
The denial of democracy, then, is their first grievance. Others follow: the attempt to impose draconian security regulations in a place accustomed to the British legal system; the increasingly common forays of Chinese secret police into Hong Kong, where by treaty they are not supposed to go, to abduct, for example, publishers of books banned in mainland China; the attempt to introduce a crude xenophobic “patriotic” curriculum into schools, as well as the introduction of Beijing-loyal officials as heads of universities. Finally comes the attempt to eliminate the Hong Kong identity and the Cantonese language.
Almost all of the same grievances exist in China. Xi is attempting the impossible, which is somehow to stand-ardize China linguistically, culturally, and intellectually; to deny the people any participation in rule, which is to remain the sole prerogative of the self-perpetuating and deeply corrupt Communist party, with Xi as supreme leader. The Chinese will never stand for this, as a constant flow of news items from that country makes clear.
In China, though, the lack of freedom, with the façade of stability and confidence that creates, leads foreigners to assume the country is stable and growing stronger. Hence the confident projections of an economic and military rise over the coming decades.
Nothing could be more misleading. In China powerful forces are at work that sooner or later will break through the surface. China will have to decide what to do. She has no idea what to do about Hong Kong or Taiwan, which again is why the screens are dark. Even less does the ruling party have any idea of how to change itself and the country it rules.
This is why Hong Kong is so important. What happens there is not peripheral or marginal or irrelevant to China proper. It is central. It is a preview of coming attractions on the mainland. Unless we understand this, we will be caught as unprepared for change as we were in 1991, when the Soviet Union—which nearly all had considered permanent—simply vanished, for reasons that had long been brewing, visible to any who cared to look. We must not make the same mistakes twice.
Arthur Waldron is Lauder professor of international relations at the University of Pennsylvania.
