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We would love to know exactly how the triad agents provocateurs were coordinated to descend on the Hong Kong protestors at the end of last week. Were there direct or indirect lines of communication to the motherland? Did they truly act on their own? Or did they simply take their cues from the Orwellian pronouncements coming out of Beijing, in which the government predicted that if the altogether peaceful protests continue there would ultimately be “chaos” and violence? (The progression of these statements, as well as “reporting” on other critics of the protests, can be found at Xinhua).
In an outstanding post on the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage blog, Harvard PhD student Akos Lada explains what is going on with fascinating parallels to North Korea; the underlying research for the piece was also presented at the American Political Science Association for those wanting a more extended version (here; Lada’s website with applications to Ukraine-Russia as well here).
Lada notes that culturally proximate states pose particular threats of diffusion, including of democracy. In negotiating the transitional agreements in Hong Kong, Chinese authorities took a huge risk. At the time, Hong Kong accounted for no less than 18 percent of Chinese GDP. (It now accounts for only 3 percent; bargaining power has changed). China was anxious to recover the territory, but also to assure investors and Hong Kong citizens that it was capable of allowing the existing system to continue (if you have the patience, the Chinese White Paper on “One Country, Two Systems” is a surprisingly accurate portrayal of the course of the negotiations, and certainly of Chinese understandings of them). Yet to do so, it needed to make institutional compromises that guaranteed a modicum of representative rule (representative rule, it should be added, that went well beyond what the British had set in place). The dilemma for China is the obvious question of why such democratic processes and guarantees of political and civil liberties cannot be extended to the mainland’s citizenry?
To solve this problem, it is important to characterize “the other” in highly unflattering terms. This is where Lada makes the interesting parallel to North Korea. Lada compares how the North Korean media portrayed South Korea before and after its democratization in 1987. He finds that the characterizations become more harsh after South Korea democratized. References to the suffering of the South Korean people go up, and the newly democratic regime is portrayed as dictatorial, “far surpassing its predecessor dictators in terms of its tyrannical nature.’’ Such statements have been a staple of North-South relations during the Park era.
Similarly Orwellian characterizations are coming out of China with respect to Hong Kong. The Chinese regime has gone out of its way to portray Hong Kong as a cesspool of foreign intervention, anti-patriotic sentiment and anti-democratic practices that will result in “chaos.” As Lada argues, mainland stories depict the Chinese government as representing stability, and as the defender of rule of law and development in Hong Kong.
We do not see the Hong Kong confrontation coming to a good end. The core issue is being portrayed as the electoral one, but it is possible to argue that the Chinese have not violated the letter of their commitments. They will in fact allow “universal suffrage” with respect to the selection of the chief executive—everyone will be able to vote. But a body hand-picked by the Chinese will control the nomination process. The deeper issue, however, is one of whether China’s relations with Hong Kong can be understood in a federal framework; this is the main challenge that the White Paper seeks to dispel. What China fears is not a vote per se, but the emergence of parties in Hong Kong that would seek to expand the independence of the Hong Kong government from Beijing, for example, by arguing that the Basic Law implies the existence of residual powers vested solely in Hong Kong. Once you start down that road, there is no end; the Chinese government will not allow this to happen, even if it takes a second Tiananmen to make the point.
