JIN ZHONG
HONG KONG, China, Dec. 10
The by-election for Hong Kong's Legislative Council held on Dec. 2 should not be ignored; it was significant in terms of the territory's future democratic development.
Prior to the election, opinion polls showed a 10-percent lead for Anson Chan, former head of the civil service under the British government and now considered pro-democracy, over Regina Ip, former security chief now viewed as pro-Beijing.
On the other hand, some media had analyzed that Chan might lose because of the pro-Beijing group's tactics to discredit her and also its overwhelming influence within the Legislative Council.
Similar to Taiwan, Hong Kong society can be divided into two groups, the pro-democracy and pro-Beijing (also known as leftist) camps. Neither group had a strong enough candidate to guarantee a win for the one open seat in the Legislative Council, therefore each decided to support a popular public figure, Anson Chan and Regina Ip, who both had no party affiliation but had different political leanings.
Both women served as public officials under previous administrations. This reveals a characteristic of Hong Kong politics -- political parties are not yet mature enough to provide leadership on a par with the administrative system. This is related to the city's strong commercial orientation and limited political experience, as well as the effective system of governance left behind by the British and the tremendous influence now wielded by mainland China.
In addition, this election demonstrated that the desire for democracy among Hong Kong citizens is increasing.
Chan's participation in this election symbolized this aspiration. Chan is a retired former top official, who is already 68 years old. She seeks neither power nor her own private interests, but is driven by the fundamental desire to see democracy practiced in Hong Kong. The political risk she faced was not akin to that of Aung San Suu Kyi, the Burmese pro-democracy activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991. Nevertheless, Chan resolutely and determinedly cast herself into this competition to represent the consciousness of the elite class in Hong Kong.
On the other hand, Regina Ip, former head of the Security Bureau, is publicly recognized as a conservative in Hong Kong's political circles. Her participation in the election reflected the reality of Hong Kong's increasingly "red" drift. In order to win votes, she had no choice but to apologize for advocating a treacherous security bill under Article 23 of the Hong Kong Basic Law, which would have subjected Hong Kong to China's Constitution in matters related to national security and prohibited Hong Kong from establishing ties with foreign political organizations or bodies. Moreover, in her campaign pamphlets Ip even promised to strive for universal suffrage in Hong Kong in 2012.
In fact, China's central government, dominated by the Chinese Communist Party, the supreme ruler of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, will not permit Hong Kong to introduce universal suffrage in 2012 or even in 2017. China will not make this concession.
Some may not understand why the Chinese government is so stingy. If you pay attention to the efforts mainlanders have to make just to have their basic human rights respected, you will get the point.
The Chinese government cannot sit back and allow democracy to be practiced under the nose of the CCP. It cannot tolerate Hong Kong crossing the line -- allowing one person one vote to elect the chief executive -- under China's red flag with five stars. This would undermine the system of control maintained by the CCP. What's even more dangerous, it would break the myth that the one-party system will last for dozens more years. If 100,000 mainland tourists were to visit Hong Kong, the Chinese people would soon be shouting, "That's enough!" and demanding that they be given political power.
In fact, the practice of democracy both in Taiwan and Hong Kong can provide good experience for the future China. Taiwan already has a certain democratic foundation, and Hong Kong is striving toward that. The ideal of democracy that the whole world -- except for China -- recognizes lies in building up a system that truly protects human dignity and rights, rather than selecting a leader the people like.
There are many complaints about the 200-year-old democracy in the United States and the 20-year-old democracy in Taiwan. Even in Russia, although there are no bans on newspapers or political parties since communism was abandoned and democracy instated, the dark side of that society surprises us.
All the facts tell us that building a democratic system in China, where the traditional society under imperial power lasted for thousands of years, will be a long and slow process. While the Chinese are moving forward with that process, there will be both joys and frustrations. The future will definitely not be won or lost through a single election.
(To be continued)
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(Jin Zhong is editor-in-chief of Open Magazine, a political journal based in Hong Kong. This article is edited and translated from the Chinese by UPI Asia Online; the Chinese original can be found at www.ncn.org and in the December 2007 issue of Open Magazine. ©Copyright Jin Zhong.)
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