Hong
Kong is not going to
get its promised democracy
next year
By
Jonathan
Power
TFF Associate
since 1991
Comments to JonatPower@aol.com
April 27, 2006
LONDON - When nine years ago the
British lowered the Union Jack on their last remaining
important colony, Hong Kong, Chris Patten, the governor,
buried his face in his hands for the entire world to see
and felt the profoundest sentiment a proud and ambitious
politician could experience - failure.
It was indeed a personal failure to
be added to his other great misfortune, the timing of
elections back home in Britain that made it impossible
for him to become prime minister and to fulfil his other
ambition, to take Britain into the euro zone. But on that
damp evening it was the people of Hong Kong, those who
knew him well could tell, that pierced his conscience.
The British had let them down. They were giving up a
colony having unaccountably failed not to leave it a
functioning democracy.
In every country except Palestine
in 1948 - when the top British officials literally
dropped the keys to their secretariat on the steps of the
closed UN office before flying out at midnight - the
British left behind an elected leadership and a popular
elected legislature. Yet even when the British did this
right, in almost every case, seemingly built into the
decolonisation process, there was a tragic mistake that
would work over time to undermine the stability that the
old imperial Empire had prided itself on.
In India, the jewel of the crown,
the British, thanks to a series of imperious and
wrongheaded decisions made by the viceroy, Earl
Mountbatten, left as hundreds of thousands of people were
dying in a carnage of religious division.
In his book, "The Dust of Empire",
Karl Meyer records how Mountbatten swept aside all the
compromises that Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of
India's Muslims, would have been able to accept and Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at least to swallow, and went
for partition.
In Africa, the British pulled up
and left even though there was still a dearth of
homegrown experience in dealing with the great issues of
the modern world- economic development and inter-tribal
governance.
In Hong Kong it was rather
different. On the one hand the British had made such a
success of giving a paternal guiding hand to instinctive
Chinese go-getting that there was no doubt that the
deepest foundations had been dug for life ahead. But on
the other hand, the British, until the time of the
premiership of Margaret Thatcher, seemed to think they
could rule this exceptional corner of the world for ever,
despite the fact that British rule rested on a fast
expiring lease from China. And, even if Thatcher with her
forthright common sense could see what others couldn't
and that Hong Kong had to be returned to the mainland,
she was as blinkered as any past generation in failing to
see the importance of implanting democracy. Only when
Patten was appointed governor did Britain wake up and he
made a desperate, but inevitably flawed, last minute
attempt to introduce full sufferage. In the end the
Chinese outmanoeuvred him. China was able to create a
shadow government out of the pro-Beijing capitalist
barons and their supporters, and simply moved them into
place as the governing class the moment the Chinese flag
was raised.
Patten did leave something behind,
at least on paper - a commitment by China that Hong Kong
would move towards full democracy by 2007. It is this
that has been the goal of massive demonstration after
massive demonstration in recent years. Every time the
government appears to be lurching in a more authoritarian
direction the people take to the streets.
But it's now clear that universal
suffrage will not arrive next year. Beijing, waving the
document it negotiated with the British, the "Basic Law",
has insisted that only it can decide the timing of
political change, even though China has not dared
challenge the promise that democracy is the ultimate
aim.
Wiser heads among Hong Kong's
pro-democracy community are thinking they shouldn't push
it. One influential observer, who in her sensitive
position must remain anonymous, told me that "the
political parties are not yet mature enough to be ready
for full democracy. " An influential diplomat argued that
Hong Kong was a more complex situation than Taiwan,
"where unquestionably the country has the right to keep
its democracy." "Voting is a more sensitive issue here,
as democracy here could unsettle the evolving political
process in China itself", she added. But both these
people want to see, and expect China to agree to,
democracy being allowed in the next elections in
2012.
Maybe they are right. We will see.
The people of Hong Kong still have to live with the
errors of British colonial policy.
Copyright © 2006 By
JONATHAN POWER
I can be reached by
phone +44 7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
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