Tom Plate :
Hong Kong is one of the world’s great metropolises, most travelers concur, and China sports the world’s largest overall economy, most estimates agree. And so, if anything, when the two got re-connected years ago, it should have been a marriage made in political heaven – David meets Goliath and they get hitched!
Until recently, in fact, the relationship seemed to be bobbing along rather swimmingly. In 1997 Beijing, after long negotiation, took back Hong Kong from London, which had bossed the place since mid-19th century. The territory’s economy then soared; not a whole lot of people there seemed to miss the British rule too terribly much; and on the whole the iconic “one country/two systems” policy out of Beijing was playing out well enough.
But recently anti-Beijing anger began swirling around the world’s most spectacular harbor like a gathering typhoon. The agitation was over the specifics of the rules by which the territory’s 2017 general election would be run. Very briefly: Beijing would permit universal suffrage on condition that the nominating system produced only candidates who “loved China” (i.e., more or less supported Beijing); whereas, opponents inside Hong Kong wanted a completely wide-open, free-swinging nomination process.
To the instantly and easily alarmed Beijing, that second option meant – in logical theory anyway – the possibility of the election of even a Taiwanese separatist, if getting enough votes. That was far more ‘democracy’ than Beijing could stomach. Rather like the US, as a matter of fact, it prefers election results that produce friends rather than enemies.
The final rules and procedures of the 2017 election were the legal province of the National People’s Congress in Beijing, and the new rules handed down from Beijing said that while everyone can vote, not everybody can run. But instead of accepting this as a very unsurprising compromise, the pure-democracy folks in Hong Kong went bonkers. And in this they went too far. In any real-world political system, including even an established and vigorous democracy, much less a developing one, a fair-minded person could have well concluded about Beijing that someone up there was trying to meet the agitated people down by the big harbor at least at some halfway point. After all, China holds absolutely sovereignty over Hong Kong, which is not an independent country. And under Chinese rule, it should be noted, Hong Kong has had more local elective democracy than permitted by London during its many decades of rule. So where is the balanced perspective?
What’s more, in some London circles it looked as if serious sulking (or craven political posturing) was still going on. Who lost Hong Kong?! In July, from London, nothing less than the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, chaired by Richard Ottaway, announced an inquiry into whether the 1984 Sino-British agreement, which stipulated explicitly that the territory would have a significant degree of autonomy, was being dishonoured by Beijing.
At this, a furious China cried foul. The British, after all, had lorded over their ill-gotten gain from the Opium War for 157 years without offering elections. Again – where is the honest balanced perspective? Beijing surely has a point in arguing that outside interference in the internal political affairs of a sovereign state is rather not cricket. Imagine the reaction in the West if some blowhard Chinese legislator were to opine on the impending referendum on independence for Scotland by expressing sympathy for the separatists!
It’s rare that one side or the other get everything one wants in the difficult world of politics. In fact, extremism and vapid posturing of any kind need to be avoided whenever possible in this crazy world of ours where cultures, religions and political systems are crammed ever closer together.
What also must be accepted is that China’s rise deserves to be treated by the West with dignity and whenever possible with understanding and even support. Any other course of action will almost surely lead to a most unnecessary conflict of unimaginable dimension. We should be able to do much better than that. We had better.
(Tom Plate is a veteran US journalist and scholar)
