Banyan: Lovin’ Hong Kong

Can Hong Kong’s next leader satisfy her masters and the public?

In a divided society, it will be tough for Carrie Lam

Mar 30th 2017

IN THREE months, celebrations will take place at Hong Kong’s harbour-front convention centre to mark the 20th anniversary of the territory’s momentous return from Britain to China. The rumour is that President Xi Jinping himself will attend. What was striking about the handover ceremony on July 1st 1997 was that Hong Kong’s people were not represented. They were mere bystanders—or else helping with the catering. From the start, Hong Kongers were symbolically put in their place. At the convention centre, the new flag chosen for them was raised on a lower pole than that of the bigger flag of the People’s Republic of China. Both flags snapped rigidly to attention in a manufactured breeze.

The flags will fly again at the anniversary celebrations, and Hong Kong people will get a further reminder of their place when the territory’s next leader is sworn in, promising to ai guo, ai gang—love the motherland and love Hong Kong (in that order, and in Mandarin—not the local Cantonese). Carrie Lam was the resounding victor among three candidates for the post of chief executive in an election on March 26th, with two-thirds of the votes. Yet out of a population of 7.3m, the only ones with a vote were the fewer than 1,200 members of a committee stacked with supporters of the Communist Party in Beijing.

When the vote’s outcome became clear (again in the convention centre), Mrs Lam’s middle-aged supporters in the public gallery cheered and unfurled Chinese flags. They looked suspiciously like the delighted crowds that appear in mainland China when bigwigs meet the public. Mrs Lam is a capable administrator who was formerly the head of the civil service, but she lacks the common touch. Her image is of someone keen to please the masters in Beijing. Opinion polls suggested that even among the three carefully vetted candidates allowed to run, she was far less popular than the former finance secretary, John Tsang. He is more personable and wants the territory to have more democracy than it has been allowed. And so a question hangs over Mrs Lam: how will she command the support of the public?

The question has dogged all three chief executives to date, but none more so than the outgoing one, “C.Y.” Leung Chun-ying. Cool and aloof, he has never been able to shake off suspicions that he is a secret member of the Communist Party. Some of his policy measures, such as steps taken to improve the lot of the elderly, are under-appreciated. But his main mission has been political: to keep in check much of what makes Hong Kong distinct.

In particular, he faced down the huge “Occupy” or “Umbrella” protests in 2014 that grew in response to rules handed down by China’s legislature for how the chief executive’s election, just past, should be organised. The Basic Law, the mini-constitution drafted for Hong Kong before the handover, promised universal suffrage by 2017. The new rules envisaged that, too. But they also insisted on a process for vetting candidates that was clearly intended to keep democratic types out of the running. Hong Kong’s semi-democratic legislature, called Legco, vetoed the package.

Mrs Lam comes into office under the older, even more restrictive rules. It does not help that she was the civil servant in charge of the political-reform process that culminated in the Umbrella movement. It has always been an impossible task to have to balance the wishes of officials in Beijing and those of many people in Hong Kong. Now Mrs Lam has another tough assignment: running a territory bitterly divided between those who want a lot more democracy and those who prefer not to confront China.

It may appear that China seeks for Hong Kong a colonial status remarkably similar to that under British rule. Mrs Lam herself rose through the civil-service ranks under the British, and is steeped in the traditions of professionalism and integrity that the British system imbued. There is another throwback to the past, too, in the fact that Hong Kong’s tycoons united behind Mrs Lam (they disliked Mr Leung). For most of its rule, Britain allowed business interests in the colony to hold sway.

But much has changed. The last governor, Chris Patten, encouraged democracy. The Communist Party increasingly reaches into the territory to oppose it. In September elections for seats in Legco ushered in several young radicals who, beyond calling for the autonomy Hong Kong was promised, espouse a degree of “localism” not far short of independence. In an unprecedented intervention, the central authorities ruled that those who deliberately garble their swearing-in oaths must not be allowed to take up their seats. The radicals had committed that sin. Two have been barred; others look likely to be booted out as well.

One country, two identities

Another development since colonial times, points out a Legco member, Eddie Chu Hoi-dick, is the Communist Party’s increasing manipulation of its sympathisers in Hong Kong: to cheer Mrs Lam’s victory, for example, or more worryingly to disrupt activities by adherents of Falun Gong, a spiritual movement which is banned as a cult on the mainland but is legal in Hong Kong. Even Hong Kong’s triads appear to be called upon for patriotic service—for instance, countering the Umbrella protests with violence.

Mr Chu and others are nervous about such developments. Many Hong Kongers recall Mao’s Cultural Revolution, when the Communists’ supporters in Hong Kong were directed to spread chaos with protests, riots and, before long, bombs. Yet instead of undermining the colonial apparatus, the chaos of 1967 led people to assess what they deemed to be precious about Hong Kong. For the first time a Hong Kong identity formed, in conscious contradistinction to what Communist China represented. Today, on the mainland, the chaos and violence of those days are gone. But unbending authoritarianism remains, and Hong Kong’s identity still evolves in opposition to it. That is why loving both the motherland and Hong Kong often involves contortions. China’s leaders should get used to it.