Hong Kongs message to Beijing The Umbrella Revolution in democratic-minded Hong Kong is an embarrassing rebuke for Communist China ................................................................................................... The scenes beamed to the world this week of tens of thousands protesting outside the Hong Kong government’s office have a quality of déjà vu. What has been nicknamed the ‘Umbrella Revolution’ because protesters used them to protect themselves against tear gas and pepper spray fired by the police last week was foreshadowed by a demonstration that started one Sunday afternoon a little more than two years ago. In late July 2012, Hong Kong witnessed almost 100,000 people making their way to the government offices in the heart of the downtown business district. The roads were closed to traffic but were so jammed with people that it looked as if every imposing skyscraper in the area had been evacuated at a moment’s notice. The 2012 protest was against the new “moral and national education” curriculum being imposed on schools in Hong Kong. The new course, devised most likely by local bureaucrats rather than Beijing, described the Communist Chinese government as “progressive, selfless and united”. Dubbed patriotic education, it was Chinese history the way the Communist Party tells it: inconvenient moments such as the massacre of students calling for democracy in Tiananmen Square in 1989 and Mao’s murderous mayhem of the Cultural Revolution had been airbrushed out of existence. The civics textbooks derided democracy as a system in which “political parties wage bitter fights to the detriment of the people”. This might sound like a critical assessment of India’s, but India does not really figure in the Chinese consciousness, except for Bollywood. The criticism was directed at the US — and at democracy. The protests were initially led by a group founded by a 15-year-old named Joshua Wong. Wong had started a Facebook campaign because he was, as a colleague wryly observed, another teenager who was angry about school. Wong made the argument that to “brainwash” students was to permanently alter their freedom to criticise, and would change Hong Kong’s liberal values. Under the terms of Britain’s handover agreement with China, Beijing had pledged to allow the bustling financial centre its capitalist ways, its independent, horsehair wig-wearing judges, its sensationalist media, and a separate local government. Last week, Wong was one of the first leaders briefly arrested as protests demanding a genuinely free election for the person charged with leading the city momentarily spun out of control after protesters tried to break through police barricades. Joshua Wong in 2012 when he organised a rally against the Chinese ‘patriotic’ education. He was briefly arrested last week as protests gained momentum Past often is prologue. To understand the ongoing protests, one has to start with those crowds slowly wrapping themselves like a human python around the gargantuan headquarters of the Hong Kong government that late July afternoon in 2012, which looked very different from a typical political demonstration. Most of the people protesting were mothers and fathers marching with their children or pushing prams; the protests came to be called the ‘baby buggy demonstrations’. Moved by this demonstration of civic duty and parental love, I walked away convinced that the protest would make the Hong Kong government see the folly of trying to force-feed Communist propaganda on this sophisticated and liberal city. I was wrong; the government stuck to its position, the protests continued on and off for weeks till high school students like Wong’s group, who had been joined by college students as well, laid siege to the government building in September. A dozen or so university students and lawyers staged a hunger strike, which brought many middle-class members out over a weekend when the government headquarters were completely surrounded, again by about 100,000 people. As I walked among the youngsters, I was struck by how polite they were as they passed water bottles and snacks to other protesters and cleared away the litter — just as they have been doing this week, while also erecting signs apologising for the inconvenience to the public. Many students were sporting black T-shirts with Mahatma Gandhi’s profile on them and his famous line, “An unjust law is a species of violence.” Protesters wearing raincoats and carrying umbrellas face pepper spray from riot police, as tens of thousands block the main street to the Central district outside the government headquarters in Hong Kong One of the hunger strikers, a college student, called after me in a slightly delirious voice as I finished interviewing him, “Please tell the world China sucks.” It was one of those moments when the notion that China will ever rule the world, to borrow the evocative title of Martin Jacques’ book of a few years ago, seems utterly implausible. Starting with this bustling city at the tip of China, the Communist regime has few admirers and almost no allies, a requirement for superpower status. When ethnically Chinese students deride China in American slang, organise protests by using Facebook and wear T-shirts with Gandhi’s sayings emblazoned on them, the Communist regime’s image problem seems insurmountable. Taken aback by the strength of the opposition to the new curriculum, the Hong Kong government capitulated. It was one of the most exciting stories in the 10 years I worked in Hong Kong. This time, the students are no longer asking the government to drop courses; they are seeking to teach the local government — and China — a civics lesson. The recent protests started as an effort to expand the debate about when and how Hong Kong would be able to elect its chief executive through genuine universal suffrage, which Beijing recently refused to allow for the nth time, despite international commitments it made when the city was returned to it in 1997 that the chief executive, or de facto mayor, of the city and legislature would be elected by universal suffrage by 2007-08. The students have now escalated matters and demand that Hong Kong’s chief executive step down, which China is unlikely to accede to. Another group inspired by Gandhi’s methods of civil disobedience plans to court arrest if necessary to bring the business district to a standstill. A battle of wills is underway with the local government betting that support for the protesters will peter out as their encampments get in the way of daily life in this fast-paced and famously impatient city. Hong Kong is an accident of history. The British officer who negotiated for it as part of the spoils of the Opium Wars in the mid-19th century hadn’t done his due diligence. The new colony was famously derided as a barren rock; the hilly terrain of Hong Kong island mostly uninhabited and mostly uninhabitable at the time. What it had was parking berths in abundance for ships; it is one of the world’s great natural harbours, an enormous advantage as the city became an export hub in the aftermath of the Communist victory in China in 1949. A protester walks in tear gas fired by riot policemen In the 20th century, the city’s laissez faire British administrators made it one of the freest places in the world to do business. Combined with the natural propensity for hard work, entrepreneurialism and craftsmanship of the Chinese, this made the city a launching pad for countless self-made fortunes. There is no place in the world, perhaps not even in America, where I have interviewed more people who were self-made multimillionaires or billionaires: the billionaire Li Ka-shing who started his career making plastic flowers, the media magnate Jimmy Lai who swam to Hong Kong as a penniless urchin, the actor Jackie Chan whose mother carried hot water in plastic buckets to school so he could occasionally have a warm bath, all started in life with very little other than gigantic determination. The city operates on principles best described as the mirror-opposite of the Fabian socialism imported from mid-century Britain to plague present-day India. When I moved away in the mid-1990s, I was called in by the tax department to settle my taxes before I left. I anticipated an ordeal; the form and the formalities took five minutes. (The city has a flat tax rate of 15 per cent; it is a pleasure to pay taxes.) I recently asked for a frequent visitor’s visa. Again, it took five minutes. Among the beneficiaries of such low taxes and high efficiency are many Indian businessmen and latterly Indian bankers. On my first afternoon in Hong Kong in 1993, the businessman Gulu Lalvani, ranked one of the richest men in Britain at the time because of a fortune made from manufacturing telephones and consumer electronic in China, took me to his office window to show me the expansive view of the harbour. Tugs, merchant ships and Chinese junks ploughed the harbour in a scene that looked like a city during rush hour. The ferries, started by a Parsi businessman, that cross between Kowloon and Hong Kong trumpeted their horns. The setting sun made the skyscrapers across the harbour seem as if they had been burnished by gold. There were buildings built on slopes of hillsides at improbable angles. Both the harbour and the streets were characterised by what the great biographer of Hong Kong, Jan Morris, described as Hong Kong’s “impression of irresistible activity. It is like a cauldron, seething, hissing, hooting, arguing, with a pace of life so unremitting, a sense of enterprise so challenging that one’s senses are overwhelmed by the sheer glory of human animation. Or perhaps by the power of human avarice. The beauty is the beauty, like it or not, of the capitalist system.” Standing by that window, listening to Lalvani pointing out the sights, I fell in love with the city and decided to move there from New York. Less than three years later, I accepted an offer in 1996 to work in Hong Kong in such a hurry that I did not even bother to ask about the salary. A few weeks before the return of Hong Kong to China on June 30, 1997, I found myself in the office of Ranjan Marwah, then chairman of a head-hunting firm, Executive Access, that he had founded. The former Hindustan Times reporter had arrived in the city with $300. He says the money was to buy his father a TV set. In the adaptable Hong Kong style of the city’s multi-millionaires, he had parlayed early success selling advertising space on those enormous neon billboards to start his current business. Like the Star Ferry, the neon are an icon of Hong Kong. From a distance, they contributed to the sense of a city that was like a giant jewel-box, magically rising from the harbour. When I asked Marwah about how Hong Kong would fare after the handover, the melodramatic Marwah pulled me out to the terrace of the office’s penthouse floor. Standing on the mini-putting green installed there, he pointed to the five-star hotels nearby. They were all booked solid for June 30 by industry associations and wealthy Hong Kongers. Marwah’s point was that while the world watched the handover with bated breath, the smart money and the smart set would be partying. Marwah was right — and wrong. Economically, the city has prospered after the handover. While successive Indian governments have spent decades arguing whether disinvestment is backdoor privatisation, investment banks in Hong Kong have gone forth and multiplied the valuations in multi-billion dollar listings of everything from China’s railways to its agricultural bank. Wealthy mainland Chinese evade capital controls in China to use Hong Kong like Monaco, stashing money there and buying some of the most expensive homes, driving up real estate prices to levels where middle-class friends in the city cannot afford to buy a home; a 400-square-feet home is more than 11 times the median annual income. Politically, the picture is much more complicated. The run-up to the handover and its aftermath gave birth to an opposition in Hong Kong. Having a government run by local people rather than Britishers made its citizens believe the local administration should be accountable. The bureaucrats who run Hong Kong and successive chief executives, hand-picked by Beijing, are aware of this change, but respond in the alternately sluggish and over-confident manner of a colonial administration. The current chief executive, C Y Leung, ought to have been different. In 2011 and 2012, he ran a sharp-elbowed campaign: Leung was seeking to overturn the odds in an election involving 1,200 mostly pro-Beijing business executives that pitted him against Henry Tang, a textile magnate who was believed to be Beijing’s choice. Tang made so many gaffes that his candidacy seemed a plot to defame Beijing. After the media revealed that a basement of more than 2,000 square feet had been constructed in his mansion without government surveyors’ approval, Tang put the blame on his wife. He said she had not informed him because their marriage had been in trouble at the time. The basement included a wine cellar and a Jacuzzi and entertainment den in a city where most people live in 400-square-feet flats. A couple of months after losing the election, peppered also with reports of Tang’s extra-marital affairs and illegitimate children, Tang used Christie’s to very publicly auction off part of his wine collection, airily declaring he had more Burgundy than he could drink in a lifetime. Beijing’s preference for such slow-witted scions of business families to lead Hong Kong has unsurprisingly contributed to a situation where the student protesters these past weeks have dismissed local governance as a “sham democracy”. This problem of legitimacy dates back to the very birth of post-colonial Hong Kong. On July 1, 1997, Beijing abolished the legislative council, arguing that the elections instituted by Hong Kong’s last governor, Chris Patten, were illegal and put in its place a provisional legislature, packed with tycoons close to China. The territory’s first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, like Tang, inherited his fortune as the son of a shipping magnate. Tung proved both inept and unlucky. The Asian financial crisis began the day after he took office on July 1 1997 while SARS hit in 2003. When asked about the need for race discrimination laws in the city when an Australian colleague and I interviewed him, Tung seemed unaware the problem existed. (The front page story in the local paper the day before had been of a Sindhi businessman who passed himself off as ‘Italian’ to rent a home). More than 500,000 people in July 2003 took to the streets to protest proposed legislation to police subversive behaviour, regulations publicly viewed as too much like Communist China. Midway through his second term, Tung was packed off into retirement in 2005 by Beijing, resigning because of ‘ill-health’. For a city often described as being apolitical, even as early as the late 1930s by W H Auden (“Here in the East, the bankers have erected a worthy temple to the comic Muse”), the story of Hong Kong in the 21st century has been bookmarked by large political protests. On the night of June 30, 1997, the leader of the local Democratic Party, Martin Lee, and other party members chanted slogans against the Chinese leadership for replacing elected representatives like themselves. The police commissioner at the time instructed his force to drown out the protests by playing Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. At the handover ceremonies inside the new convention centre where dignitaries like Prince Charles, then President Jiang Zemin and Deng Xiaoping’s widow were assembled, the bands played another Beethoven favourite from the end of his Ninth Symphony; “Ode to Joy” has widely been used as a protest anthem from Pinochet’s Chile to Tiananmen Square, 25 years ago. Wong and many of his fellow protesters are too young to remember the rousing music from the night of Hong Kong’s handover. But, their protests are an echo of the ugly anomaly that has existed from then. A liberal city with a free press, an independent judiciary and a higher per capita income than Britain’s was “handed over” to a dictatorial Communist regime and a local bureaucracy baffled by the task of bridging such a huge divide.
Posted on: Sat, 04 Oct 2014 05:03:37 +0000