Hong Kong’s unpopular leader Carrie Lam acknowledged on Tuesday that public dissatisfaction with her government fuelled a landslide win by pro-democracy candidates in local elections, but she drew fresh criticism by offering no new concessions to resolve months of violent protests.
Lam admitted that the district council election result revealed public concern over “deficiencies in the government to deal with” the unrest. In a shocking result, candidates opposing control by China seized an overwhelming majority of 452 elected seats in the city’s 18 district council bodies historically dominated by a Beijing-aligned establishment. It was a humiliating rebuke to Beijing and Lam, who has dismissed calls for political reform and repeatedly suggested that a silent majority supported her administration.
Since the polls, pro-democracy politicians have stepped up calls for Lam to meet key demands such as direct popular elections for the city’s leadership and legislature, and a probe into alleged police brutality against demonstrators. But in her weekly press briefing, Lam sidestepped those calls, instead denouncing street violence and repeating earlier pledges to step up a cross-party dialogue on the root causes of the turmoil, proposals previously dismissed by her opponents as inadequate.
Dictatorial governments of the world live in a mindset of Potemkin villages. They think that anything that they do is acceptable to the populace. However the harsh reality is that the people have the final say in the arbitration of power. In this century alone the Arab revolution has shown that the people have the final say in deciding who gets the authority to govern them-as the toppled governments of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt learned quickly.
The raw energy and passion of the youth have mostly spearheaded these movements, as they are currently doing in Hong Kong. Carrie Lam thinks that as long as she has the support of Xi Jinping she can do what she wants and get away with it. But even Xi will think twice if the protests go on for another year or so.
Ultimately even a leader acceptable to her authoritarian masters may fall from grace and become unacceptable-such is the power of the movement of the youth. The current Chinese administration itself owes its existence to such a movement-a movement which Mao Zedong did much to harness.
While it may be difficult for the Chinese Communist Party to remember its humble origins-it too should remember that it owes its rise to the power of the people. It would do well to remember the words of WB Yeats who wrote in 1899 to ask others to tread softly on his dreams. It would do well to respect the wishes of the Hong Kong populace who only want their rights guaranteed under the Basic Law.
