MCLC: HK Legislature rejects Beijing-backed plan

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HK Legislature rejects Beijing-backed plan
Source: NYT (6/18/16)
Hong Kong Legislature Rejects Beijing-Backed Election Plan
By MICHAEL FORSYTHE and ALAN WONG
HONG KONG — In quiet negotiations as well as public protests, they have pleaded and demanded for nearly two decades that Beijing allow Hong Kong’s leader to be elected by the general public. But in a dramatic vote on Thursday, pro-democracy lawmakers here rejected a bill that could have been their last best chance to achieve that goal.
In doing so, they redrew the battle lines in the struggle over Hong Kong’s future and may have ushered in a more volatile era in the city’s politics.
The measure that failed would have allowed the public to elect Hong Kong’s next chief executive in 2017 from a slate of two or three candidates nominated by a committee controlled by China’s ruling Communist Party.
But in a twist that speaks to the awkward politics of a freewheeling former British colony ruled since 1997 by an authoritarian government in Beijing — as well as a last-minute parliamentary blunder by allies of the Chinese leadership — the bill won only eight votes in the city’s 70-member Legislative Council.
The legislature’s pro-democracy camp voted unanimously against the plan, arguing that as it allowed Beijing to screen candidates before they appeared on the ballot, it would have been a perversion of the principle of universal suffrage, akin to the meaningless elections held in Leninist states such as the Soviet Union of old — or in the rest of China today.
“Let us show the world that we are not fools,” one of the lawmakers, Claudia Mo, told her colleagues during the televised debate.
Beijing’s supporters in the legislature argued that some progress was better than none and that Hong Kong should embrace the historic chance to become the only city in the People’s Republic of China permitted to elect its leader by one-person, one-vote balloting.
An embarrassing misstep by the pro-Beijing camp, however, meant only eight lawmakers actually voted for the proposal. The others walked out before the vote in a failed attempt to force a 15-minute delay so a senior member of their bloc could return to the chamber.
The bill’s defeat was assured in any case because it needed the support of at least two-thirds of the Legislative Council to pass, and 28 members — 27 from the pro-democracy camp — voted no.
Those who had campaigned against Beijing’s election plan, including the leaders of last year’s huge street demonstrations, were hardly rejoicing.
The plan’s failure “is no cause for celebration,” Joshua Wong, the 18-year-old student leader who became the public face of the protests, said outside the legislature on Thursday. “We have defeated a bogus voting plan, but we will have to shift from playing defense to playing offense to get the election that we desire.”
By rejecting Beijing’s offer of a partial step toward open elections, the pro-democracy lawmakers are taking a huge gamble. In effect, they are betting that they can do better — that they will find a way to persuade or pressure the Chinese leadership to give Hong Kong more.
In 2007, China said it would allow Hong Kong residents to vote for the chief executive in the 2017 election. InAugust 2014, China’s legislature proposed changes to the electoral process, which prompted mass demonstrations in the city.
But their prospects are uncertain to say the least, given that there seems to be little appetite here for more of the mass demonstrations that attracted global attention last year — but failed to squeeze any concessions from China’s Communist leaders.
As if to underline the public weariness with street protests, very few of the students who occupied downtown Hong Kong for months in tent cities last year were on hand to witness Thursday’s vote. Turnout was also well below expectations at a rally against the bill on Sunday.
At the same time, the pro-democracy lawmakers have opened themselves to a new line of attack — that they turned down the best offer Hong Kong would ever get.
After the vote, the pro-Beijing newspaper Ta Kung Pao wrote that those who blocked the measure would be “condemned throughout the ages.” Hong Kong’s current leader, Leung Chun-ying, accused the lawmakers of “denying five million eligible voters the right to elect the chief executive.”
Hong Kong is part of China but retains a great deal of autonomy, including an independent legal system and robust civil liberties, as part of an agreement with Britain that led to the former colony’s return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
Those civil liberties were on full display during the Legislative Council’s debate. One lawmaker invoked the 1989 suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and another, Ms. Mo, said Communist Party agents in Hong Kong were “goons.” Those comments, if uttered by a Chinese citizen a few miles north in Guangdong Province, might invite imprisonment.
But the democracy movement in Hong Kong faces a long and grim struggle to wrest voting rights from the wary Communist leadership in Beijing, which put the blame for the protests last year on foreign agents plotting to undermine the party’s 65-year hold on power in the mainland.
Pro-Beijing politicians said the Chinese government, having seen its preferred plan rejected, would not move to set more generous terms. The official Xinhua news agency endorsed that view after the vote, reporting that the government had no plan to reconsider the limits it had imposed on Hong Kong elections.
But there are risks for Beijing in such a hard-line approach. Public frustration is running high, and the government has already alienated many of Hong Kong’s younger residents, who could pose a problem well into the latter part of this century. More and more identify themselves as citizens of Hong Kong rather than of China.
Tourism, immigration and investment from the mainland that are driving up prices and reshaping the city have also fueled public anger and an increasingly strident “localist” movement.
Lawmakers in both camps say they want to focus on issues such as the yawning gap between rich and poor and Hong Kong’s ability to attract global companies. But the divisions bared by the battle over elections may make it difficult for the government to pass significant legislation.
During Hong Kong’s colonial era, London appointed Hong Kong’s governor. But under the Basic Law, the mini-constitution that governs the city, Beijing pledged to allow Hong Kong’s people to vote for the chief executive through universal suffrage “upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.”
That was supposed to happen in 2017. With Beijing’s election plan now dead, the earliest that the Hong Kong public might be able to vote for a leader would be in 2022, and then only after a lengthy process involving public consultations and in accordance with guidelines issued by the Chinese legislature.
Some seasoned Hong Kong politicians said the best way forward might be to tackle incremental changes to the 1,200-member committee that currently picks the chief executive, giving more people a say in who gets to sit on that panel, and changing its structure to make it more representative of Hong Kong society.
Such changes would not require the approval of the central government in Beijing, said Anson Chan, who served as Hong Kong’s No. 2 official in the last colonial administration and in the first post-1997 government.
The committee is far from representative, and it is stacked in Beijing’s favor. In highly urbanized Hong Kong, long-abandoned rice paddies lie fallow and water buffalo run free, without masters. Yet when the committee last selected a chief executive, in 2012, one of the biggest groups of electors on the panel — 60 people in the last election — represented the agriculture and fisheries industries, far more than the 36 representing the finance industry in Asia’s vital financial hub.
“The next few months, I think we should all be spending our energy on looking at what could possibly be going into local legislation that will make the election committee somewhat more palatable,” Mrs. Chan said by telephone. “We just have to put our shoulders to the wheel and get everybody going.”
Crystal Tse and Austin Ramzy contributed reporting.
by denton.2 at osu.edu on June 20, 2015
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