Opinion Battlefield Hong Kong
Protests on the island are not just about the next election, but about democracy.
Hong Kong’s recent struggle to force Beijing to honour the promise of democracy and autonomy it made to the territory and its citizens in 1997, when it took over from Britain, is unprecedented in scale and exuberance. The standoff escalated over the weekend, when Occupy Central protesters — “Central” is Hong Kong’s main downtown district — advanced a civil disobedience campaign scheduled for October 1. The Hong Kong police responded with surprising brutality, deploying riot police and tear gas. This appears to have emboldened protesters, who are urging fellow citizens to join up, and the movement seems to have taken on a life of its own.
The confrontation was sparked by the suspicion that China intends to renege on the spirit, if not the letter, of its pledge to preserve Hong Kong’s special status, which includes a “high degree of autonomy” and eventual “universal suffrage”. The island’s next chief executive is due to be elected in 2017, and Beijing has made it abundantly clear that only candidates loyal to the Communist Party of China will be allowed to contest. That would make a mockery of democracy in Hong Kong, bringing the electoral rights of Hong Kongers on par with the mainland, where every adult citizen can vote for local legislators — so long as the party approves.
The fear is that the campaign for political reform will spin out of control, provoking more skirmishes with the police, arrests, even intervention from the mainland. For now, Beijing seems to have decided that the threat of an opponent winning leadership of Hong Kong and stoking demands for political reform on the mainland is too big to countenance. This is a pivotal moment in Hong Kong’s relations with China, a contest between competing aspirations and expectations that will bear on its future well after the 2017 election is settled.
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