MCLC: Beijing's inflexibility drives protest

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Beijing’s inflexibility drives protest
From: Kevin Carrico 
While some “patriotic” groups push conspiracy theories about the foreign origins of Occupy Central, this opinion piece finds the “black hand” driving protests in Hong Kong to be none other than… Beijing and its Hong Kong policy.
Kevin
Source: SCMP (10/6/14): http://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1608941/beijings-hard-line-real-cause-protests
Beijing’s hard line the real cause of the protests
Joseph Wong says the root cause of the street protests is not the lack of universal suffrage per se, but the authorities’ uncompromising attitude towards Hong Kong people’s aspirations
Both the Beijing and Hong Kong authorities have had more than a year to consider how best to deal with Occupy Central, whose launch became only a matter of time after the National People’s Congress Standing Committee set limits on the nominating process for the 2017 chief executive election.
Similar to other democratic movements, it was the students who struck first and fast. They started a class boycott, then held a demonstration outside the government headquarters, and finally broke into the adjacent open area that had been sealed off recently by the administration.
The arrest of student leader Joshua Wong Chi-fung and his 46-hour detention, which a judge, in granting a writ of habeas corpus, criticised as “unreasonably long”, were the first signs that the Hong Kong police had decided to play it tough against the protesters.
So when the Occupy Central leaders advanced the demonstrations originally scheduled for October 1, the 65th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, the police reacted aggressively, such as by refusing to allow a group of lawmakers to bring amplifiers into the assembly area.
Shortly after Commissioner of Police Andy Tsang Wai-hung reiterated at a press conference that the police would use the minimum level of force necessary to maintain order, a total of 87 canisters of tear gas were fired against the peaceful and unbelieving crowds, among them old people and children. The most “offensive” accessories these people carried were umbrellas, which they used as shields against pepper spray.
To most Hongkongers, the use of tear gas to disperse a peaceful – albeit technically illegal – assembly was the last straw. The public opinion behind the 1.5 million signatures collected by the anti-Occupy Central campaign evaporated instantly. The dramatic images of volleys of tear gas being fired drove many otherwise disinterested people to the streets. Occupy Central and student leaders, who stressed that the movement has become spontaneous with no one in charge, demand the resignation of Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying and the revocation of the NPC Standing Committee decision as conditions for ending the movement.
Recapping past events leading to the present stand-off helps one to understand the root cause of the most serious crisis faced by Hong Kong since the handover. In my view, the root cause is not the arrangement for universal suffrage per se. Instead, the crisis is due to China taking a new hardline policy towards Hong Kong, and the inability or unwillingness of Leung to convince Beijing of the need to take proper account of Hong Kong people’s concerns.
Take Occupy Central as an example. Right from the start, public support for this civil disobedience movement never exceeded 30 per cent. Also, while the majority would like to see genuine universal suffrage, successive polls indicate that they do not insist on the method of civic nomination proposed by the student groups and endorsed by Occupy Central. It is true that more than 700,000 people voted in the electronic poll conducted by Occupy Central to select the preferred civic nomination method.
However, many of them did so out of protest against the release by Beijing of a white paper on the implementation of “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong, which asserts the central government’s full authority over the administration of Hong Kong.
Even so, the number of people who were willing to defy the law by taking part in Occupy Central was consistently estimated by the organisers to be around a few thousand only.
China’s hard line towards Hong Kong was manifested again when it handed down the NPC Standing Committee decision, which surprised even the most patriotic camp. For example, China did not even bother to make any window-dressing concession, such as increasing the number of committee members slightly, or relaxing the 50 per cent nomination threshold to, say, 40 per cent, which is already more than sufficient to bar unwelcome candidates.
This deliberately uncompromising position pushed many moderate academics to the opposite side, and they have since become strong sympathisers and supporters of the protesting students.
If China’s policy towards Hong Kong’s political reform has hardened, Leung must bear some responsibility. For example, in his report to the central government on the outcome of the public consultation, he did not highlight the strength of feeling behind civic nomination, or the majority’s wish to see a more democratic nomination procedure for the chief executive election than the previous arrangement of the small-circle Election Committee.
To the vast majority of Hong Kong people, Leung does not seem to have conveyed to Beijing fully and accurately their concerns over the apparent intrusion of China’s authority into Hong Kong’s internal affairs, and the erosion of Hong Kong’s core values such as press freedom and freedom of expression and assembly. As guardian of Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy, Leung has not met public expectations, hence his low popularity rating.
Leung denies any involvement in the aggressive strategy adopted by the police in dealing with protesters, such as the use of tear gas, the deployment of anti-riot squads carrying automatic rifles, and the display of the warning sign “Disperse or We Fire”. Other disturbing images taken by the media captured a police officer spraying pepper directly into the eyes of a non-threatening protester and another pointing his rifle at an unarmed crowd.
As the police commissioner reports to the chief executive, Leung assumes ultimate responsibility for handling the Occupy demonstrations. As head of the Hong Kong SAR government, he will also be held accountable by the central government if he cannot resolve the crisis.
When will this “umbrella revolution” end? Not for a long while. How will it end? A belated concession by the government to defer the second round of public consultation on political reform is no longer enough. A revocation of the NPC Standing Committee decision would be unacceptable to China, for face and a host of political reasons. A bloody crackdown to quash the movement is unthinkable, but not impossible.
Finally, Leung’s resignation, to provide a window for reconciliation and restarting the public consultation, will continue to be strongly rejected publicly by Beijing and the Leung administration, but in due course it may turn out to be a less repugnant choice to China than a Tiananmen-style ending.
Whatever the ending, it will take a long time for Hong Kong to heal the wound.
Joseph Wong Wing-ping, a former secretary for the civil service, is a political commentator
This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as Pushed too far
by denton.2 at osu.edu on October 6, 2014
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