“I have to work 15- or 16-hour shifts, with very little rest. […] I think we are much more lenient than other countries. What we should do is not let the demonstrators leave because they are taking shifts and going home, eating meals and sleeping; if we don’t let them leave, the protests will wither away quickly.”
October 4th there. A Hong Kong police officer the NYT found, similar in age, interests and outlook to many of the protestors, but playing a different role: “If anyone I know confronts me, I’ll do my job.”
And what a job, everywhere between thankless and heartless, depending on who you ask (a curious mixture of watching and waiting and teargasing and pounding has been tried over the past month in response to the protests, angering police, protestors, counter protesters and just about everyone else it seems).
If “we are much more lenient than other countries” bothered you back there, it’s worth pointing out that Hong Kong has quite a reputation in China for being… indulgent, to take a politicized vocabulary to protest handling there. A 2003 protest “caused no property damage, and not a single arrest was made. Police officers stayed polite and even friendly while also making sure that protesters followed their designated route through the heart of downtown.”
October 2014 again. Police with their hands tied or no, it turned out the protests did wither, and then came back, and then oscillated between the two states for over a month.
Then, with some consultation held, the Chinese government offered to take a document of the protesters’ concerns to government officials and create the apparatus for dialogue on future constitutional changes. A vote was to be held amongst the protesters as to whether they accepted this, but was cancelled on Sunday.
Now it’s a waiting game for Hong Kong’s government (once things are off the popular/media radar they can be swept away), police scan the web for incitement to protest (hitherto a police tactic that was more mainland China than Hong Kong it seems), and the threat of what mainland China will do to all concerned in Hong Kong if things continue.
That’s now, but to get here we need to go back to then:
“After the handover in 1997, the agreement was that Hong Kong would keep its ‘Basic Law’, the freedoms it had under the British, until 2047. The West hoped that ‘One Country, Two Systems’ would give time for change on the mainland; Beijing hoped Hong Kongers would learn to ‘love the country.’”
Part of the basic law, basic law article 45, looks to have the Chief Executive of Hong Kong chosen by universal suffrage – once a representative committee has nominated candidates. As votes and timetables for implementing this have emerged over the years more specific controversies have built up over of the ‘hows’ of landing this piece of legislature. The issue the current protests have been raising is: will the public be able to nominate candidates in the 2017 Chief Executive election.
Other dissatisfactions over social conditions (Hong Kong’s another astral wealth gap) have combined with these arguments into a pro-democracy movement that’s really pushed for the ‘universal suffrage’ element while not really being hot on the representative committee section (thinking it would be the government’s choices, not the people’s).
I guess it’s about whether ‘universal suffrage’ is the same achievement for a people if their choices are selected for them beforehand.
The Standing Committee of China's National People's Congress’s decision on the 2017 election came on 31st August. It called for a committee to nominate candidates. Not quite the ‘one person, one vote’ the pro-democracy side had hoped for.
The protests started around the end of last month. Students first, joined by Occupy Central [with Love and Peace] – who’d been planning a demonstration since 2013 if moves towards ‘universal suffrage’ fell short of hopes this year.
So they were all there, gathering outside the Hong Kong Government HQ and filling several intersections – bringing the financial district to a standstill. Things escalated after quite a forceful removal of protestors who’d illegally entered the forecourt of the Central Government Complex, getting Occupy involved.
That was around the end of September. It smacked the retina – tear gas seeping up through the crowds and batons and people being dragged in and out of the fray. We might not have seen where it came from but that element of the story certainly got our attention.
What a thing to be happening in one of the world’s major financial centres. Counter protests have been held by various pro-Beijing groups, with others in Hong Kong worried about the damage the protests are doing.
Indeed, Hong Kong must go on, and the current Chief Executive, Leung Chun-ying, believes that doing just that – having Hong Kong’s financial district’s wealth creation talent untroubled by democratic protests – will bring its own form of democracy.
It’s all a bit trickle down, with Leung Chun-ying not wanting to open up the elections to a popular vote – the mass poor would be too dominant a voice. A representative selection would vote instead, avoiding candidates having to make a populist pledges and instead plumbing for the skill of good wealth generating business to improve everyone’s lot.
“That screening, he said, would insulate candidates from popular pressure to create a welfare state, and would allow the city government to follow more business-friendly policies to address economic inequality instead.”
How’s that for political discourse incommensurable with our own – “insulate candidates from popular pressure to create a welfare state.”
There was something P. J. O’Rourke once said in a documentary about American politics. Talking about US politicians’ disingenuous attempts to distance themselves from the influence of special interest groups, he noted that the biggest special interest group was the electorate.
So the Chinese authorities are trying to define, perhaps refine, what ‘universal suffrage’ means as a promise.
Tellingly the two sides, for and against the protests, have been dubbed ‘pro-democracy’ and ‘pro-Beijing’ by the media. You either want to tear down the system and give it to the people, or you trust the government to make the right decisions on your behalf, ‘insulated from popular (perhaps populist) pressure.’
I remember a lecturer at university talking about direct democracy. The only point of direct engagement, where our choice is recorded and counted, is the actual point of voting in the booth – the rest of the time all the decisions are made for you. Those decisions made in your name are somehow ‘yours’ based on that one little point of your voting.
That’s once every five years we get to experience direct democracy. General election, say, every five years and life expectancy of, say, 80 years. Less the 18 years prior to voting age... 12.4, say, 13 General elections in your lifetime. Say that the act of voting takes 60 seconds, you get 13 minutes of democracy in your lifetime.
If you think that is a ridiculous way of looking at it then that possibly tells you something of where you stand in the spectrum of political engagement and on these sorts of protests.
‘Self-indulgent’ is a common criticism – it’s levelled at UK protestors and it’s been levelled at Hong Kong’s. Protestors smugly shun responsibility for the more important practical worries in most people’s lives – bills and scraping a living. It’s academic, impractical, and maybe even unimportant: what they are asking for – way beyond what most people have any need for.
Will direct democracy pay the bills?
Protesters and their sympathizers though, they’d say that all your practical worries stem from the fact that your limited say in politics prevents your problems ever being appreciated by those in power.
By the time your tick box choice filters up as a few totalled statistics they think you voted for them because you like middle income tax breaks or traditional British values or a clutch of highly specific, highly disparate micromanagement policies: cutting waiting times for certain NHS patients here, 5p off a particular foodstuff category there, a promise to support Britain’s proud handmade garden ornament industry…
Looking at these protests, if you’re not joining in or agreeing you are forced to ask yourself: do I then trust the system to get things right on my behalf? And if it’s not, do you trust the system to change the system?
‘Self-indulgent’ is a common criticism – it’s levelled at UK protestors and it’s been levelled at Hong Kong’s. Protestors smugly shun responsibility for the more important practical worries in most people’s lives – bills and scraping a living. It’s academic, impractical, and maybe even unimportant: what they are asking for – way beyond what most people have any need for.
Will direct democracy pay the bills?
Protesters and their sympathizers though, they’d say that all your practical worries stem from the fact that your limited say in politics prevents your problems ever being appreciated by those in power.
By the time your tick box choice filters up as a few totalled statistics they think you voted for them because you like middle income tax breaks or traditional British values or a clutch of highly specific, highly disparate micromanagement policies: cutting waiting times for certain NHS patients here, 5p off a particular foodstuff category there, a promise to support Britain’s proud handmade garden ornament industry…
Looking at these protests, if you’re not joining in or agreeing you are forced to ask yourself: do I then trust the system to get things right on my behalf? And if it’s not, do you trust the system to change the system?
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