When China’s National People’s Congress (NPC) placed limitations in the proposed voting law for Hong Kong last August, the decision sparked wide scale protests that quickly became the biggest political crisis in Hong Kong since the 1997 transfer of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China. In the subsequent months, the occupy movement has largely petered out, with local residents sharply divided in their opinions on the pro-democracy activists. This week the issue returned to fore when the Hong Kong Legislative Council failed to pass the Beijing proposal. With enough Pan-democrats voting against it, the proposal failed to get the necessary two-thirds majority needed. With Taiwan’s presidential elections looming in 2016, and with the U.S.-China relationship showing signs of increasing strain, such a rebuke of the Chinese central authorities could have implications ranging well beyond Hong Kong.
The roots of the so-called Umbrella Movement have as much to do with socio-economic conditions as they do with demands for true suffrage. Like many other highly developed regions in the world, Hong Kong is experiencing rising income inequality and suffers from a lack of affordable housing and uncertain job prospects for youth. Many of these problems are believed by locals to be exacerbated by Mainland China, fueling resentment against the increasingly wealthy and powerful Mainland Chinese who live and work in Hong Kong, as well as the Hong Kong government, which Hong Kong residents see as unresponsive to their concerns.
While the largely student led protest movement garnered major international attention, the government was able to wait it out until local anger against traffic and commercial disruptions caused by the demonstrators began to mount. Public opinion appears to be split over whether or not to adopt the proposed voting rules; according to the latest polling 47 percent of Hong Kong residents favor voting “yes” on the government’s proposed package, 38 percent are opposed, and the rest are undecided. The Pan-democrats hope that blocking the legislation will compel Beijing to make a compromise entailing something closer to the one-man, one-vote principle that they advocate. The risk is that by rejecting the proposed plan of direct elections (albeit with an administrative filter on candidates) Hong Kong will end up with nothing—or worse, be left to contend with a smarting Beijing disinclined to experiment with direct elections for the Executive Council position.
In Beijing, the decision undoubtedly comes as a setback, since there was a clear desire to put an end to the controversy and shift the focus away from politics and toward growth and development. On this the central government has the backing of many Hong Kong residents, particularly the older generation, which is nervous that political instability could lead to economic instability. Although there is a belief among some Pan-democrats that Beijing might be open to splitting the difference between their demands and the law as is it stands, so far there has been little indication that Beijing is willing to budge. On the contrary, during the lead up to the vote Beijing aggressively lobbied moderate Pan-democrats to vote “yes” with the pro-Beijing group, the Alliance for Peace and Democracy. In addition to counting votes, the central government has indicated that a “no” vote will mean no direct elections for the Chief Executive until at least the 2022 election. Furthermore, in the eyes of Beijing, a concession on the election law could not only embolden the pro-democracy activists in Hong Kong but also influence the upcoming Taiwanese presidential elections in 2016, where the party in favor of closer links with Beijing, the KMT, is deeply unpopular and is expected to lose.
Although coverage of the protests has been limited in the state run media, The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, has run a series of exhortative editorials stressing the historic nature of the opportunity for direct elections and that “when all is well in Hong Kong, all is well in the country; and when all is well in the country, things will be even better in Hong Kong.” On social media and among the public writ large, there is not much sympathy for the Hong Kong activists, and many Mainland Chinese are more likely to bring up the issue of discrimination directed at them by native Hong Kong residents than Hong Kong’s aspirations for more political rights. The attitude that Hong Kong is overreaching in the autonomy afforded to it under the existing “One Country, Two Systems” policy is likely shared by China’s governing elites as well.
During last fall’s protests, the United States largely refrained from publicly commenting on the situation in Hong Kong. In light of the overall cooling of relations between Washington and Beijing and the recent massive hacking of OPM, believed to have been carried out by China, there will be a push for the U.S. to take up the cause of Hong Kong’s democracy activists. The Obama Administration is unlikely to react strongly, but Congress and next year’s presidential hopefuls could weigh in. Congress in particular might revisit the terms of the 1992 Hong Kong Policy Act, which used to mandate annual Congressional reports assessing Hong Kong’s autonomy. Such action will inevitably be seen by Beijing as foreign meddling in internal matters and will likely only stiffen the government’s resolve to manage this on its terms.
Hong Kong’s Pan-democrats were stuck between a rock and a hard place. No matter how they cast their votes, it is unlikely that Hong Kong will have truly free and fair elections for the Executive Council in the near future. Moreover, a rejection of the terms offered by Beijing is clearly a provocative move in the eyes of China’s paramount leaders, one that largely rests on the faith of the democratic activists in their cause. With at best mixed public support for their actions, their decision might have internationalized an issue that was already complex and largely intractable.