A Political Barometer (政治晴雨表)

On the lst July, 1997, some 17 years ago, a piece of red cloth with 5 yellow stars on it fluttered over Hong Kong and another one with thick white bands against a similarly red background slowly went down, wiping off a dirty mark in Chinese history: losing the so-called Opium Wars which resulted in the Treaty of Nanking 1842 whereby the island of Hong Kong was ceded to that tiny island kingdom off the coast of Western Europe "in perpetuity" and the tip of what in the Land Registry records is written as "Kowloon" (as distinguished from New Kowloon, another area in the Kowloon Peninsula north of Boundary Street but south of the Kowloon Ranges together with what's called the New Territories, which were "leased" to the same island kingdom under Second Peking Convention in 1898, following the defeat of China by tiny Japan in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895.)  The return of the sovereign rights over Hong Kong, New Kowloon and the New Territories to the bosom to its motherland was non-negotiable. That's what Deng Xiaoping told Margaret Thatcher, the "iron lady" of Britain. Before the steely resolve of Deng, the iron will of the British Prime Minister buckled: she faltered at the steps of Great Hall of the People in Tian An Men Square in Beijing when she came out from the long awaited "negotiations".

Deng was a truly innovative statesman. He knew that owing to historical reasons, Hong Kong could not be treated the same way as the rest of China. He pledged to Britain and the people of Hong Kong that for the next 50 years, ie. for slightly more than 2 generations, a different socio-economic-political system would be practised in Hong Kong under the unprecedented principle of "one-country, two systems" which includes the political system.  Under the Joint Declaration between Britain and China in 1983, the people of Hong Kong was promised a democratically elected Chief Executive and a similarly elected legislature. 17 winters and summers have since passed. Still no signs of a truly democratically elected CE and Legislative Assembly in Hong Kong being in place! They are conspicuous by their absence.

Hong Kong is now a political mess, something neither China nor the people of Hong Kong find desirable. Solution? Both difficult and simple: a paradigm shift in the mind-set of those ruling Hong Kong either directly and indirectly. Is true democracy good for Hong Kong? Will the economy be affected if so? No one really knows, though many claim that they do: those who now stand to benefit enormously if we "don't rock the boat". The question is: is it a good boat for the people of Hong Kong as a whole and not just for an extremely small minority of those in charge of steering and guiding that boat? They talk as if it is such a boat. Is it? And if it is not, why shouldn't it be rocked? We are not blind, though they think that we are. They may have forgotten that we got eyes too and we are fully capable of telling what is good and what is not by looking at what's happening around ourselves. 

Should Hong Kong become another Singapore with all political power concentrated firmly in the hands of an efficient central government? That's probably the wishful thinking of Beijing. But Hong Kong is not and cannot be another Singapore: the racial, economic, cultural and historical mix are vastly different. The people of Hong Kong have become accustomed to the rule of law (not "rule by law"), to freedom of speech and freedom of political assembly. Moreover, the gap between the rich and the poor is much less in Singapore than in Hong Kong: the Gini Coefficient in Hong Kong in 2013 was 0.537 and rising but that in Singapore was only 0.463 and falling  (cf. China 0.473 also rising). When old ladies with bent backs in their 70's are found scavenging for paper cartons and pushing trolleys full of bundled up old newspapers everywhere in our older quarters, when some hourly or daily paid workers have to work more than one shift to keep body and soul together and when a young u-grad couple don't earn enough to be able to afford some decent housing on a mortgage, when a taxi driver died from overwork, what further signs do we need that a threshold of toleration has been reached and that the time for some pretty radical changes has come. We can't afford to wait. And we won't. As in so many other things, there is a limit to people's patience. We should never over-estimate the patience of the people in Hong Kong. In South Korea, you won't find 100,000 people marching peacefully in the streets. You will find people with white head bands marching with wooden poles in their hands. What more can you ask of the sheep-like people in Hong Kong? We may be most gentlemanly, but we are not fools.  There's much wisdom in the popular Chinese saying,  "Never drive a dog into a blind alley".

By any accounts, 17 years is a pretty long time. If we were to start counting from the date when democracy was promised to us from 1983, it's a full 31 years! We can't be expected to swallow that blatant "excuse" still being paddled around viz. that we must "move gradually" towards our final goal. Not any more. That excuse wears really thin after 31 years. We're not kids any more. We do know the difference between "moving gradually" and not being prepared to move unless being fiercely kicked in the "ass".

Perhaps it's about time that those in control of our political fate spend a bit more time on this simple reflection: real and effective changes can't be made unless our government has the support of the people expressed through their votes in a "truly democratic" election system. We don't want "counterfeit democracy" which is "passed off" as if it were an authentic political product. We don't mind "A- goods" or even "B-goods" from Shenzhen but we don't want "A-goods"  in our political system. There is a vital difference: we can very well do without fake "consumer goods" in our lives if we choose to but we can never forgive ourselves if we were to knowingly accept "fakes"  in our political democracy, something very serious, something which affects every aspect of our lives, not just our life as a consumer. Politics is always the art of the possible. In politics, there can be no permanent friends. Neither can there be any permanent enemies. All too often, the most dangerous people we got to face may not be our "enemies", but our "friends". Our political leaders should therefore beware of their "friends" and remember that the road to hell may well be paved with "good will" and "good intentions".  

We don't want fake-democracy  because even the blind can see what lies at the root of all the tiresome bickerings and those political farces we witness almost daily at our Legislative Assembly: that a government without "legitimacy" can never be expected to have the support of its people. There is "bound" to be "suspicions" about everything it does, especially about the "collusion between the government and the rich", real or imagined. Hong Kong has become ungovernable. When there is no genuine trust by the people in its government, "efficient government" can only become "a mirror moon" on the surface of the water ie. an illusion. Our political leaders may have a lesson or two to learn from the Great Yu (大禹) who dealt with the mythical Great Flood in ancient China not by building more dams, but by opening more water channels to lower the level of flood waters. It won't do them any great harm if they were to learn a few basic principles from our hydraulic engineers and from the principles of fluid dynamics: the higher the dams, the greater will be force for potential damage when they burst. There is still enough time for a change of mind, before it's too late. But time is running out. 

The photos I took at yesterday's march are self-explanatory, as they say:  "res ipsa loquitur".

By the most conservative account, nearly 100,000 were at Victoria Park. Many expressed themselves, not with their words but with their feet. I could see that not a few were upper middle class, a normally pretty taciturn group. Perhaps it's about time that those who have power over the political future of Hong Kong wake up to the political reality. It may be a most unpleasant experience to be disturbed from one's sweet dreams. But pleasant or not, what's got to be done has got to be done! Unless one is prepared for a bloodpath. It's as simple as that. No one wants that, least of all the people in Hong Kong, the people of Hong Kong and people with the genuine interest of Hong Kong and China in their heart.  One 4th June is quite sufficient for China. Only the stupid or the stubborn will refuse to read the writings on the wall. What do the people of Hong Kong really want? The answer is blowing in the wind and the rain on the streets and pavements of  Lockhart Road and Queen's Road.