As Hong Kong Presses for More Democracy, Friction With Beijing Rises
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Version 0 of 1. HONG KONG — Looming over a modest Chinese medicine shop here that sells dried deer penises for virility and bat feces for vision is a 40-story monolith of dark glass and gray steel: the Hong Kong offices of the Chinese Communist Party. For Wu Beihan, who sells traditional remedies from ancient wood drawers at the medicine shop, the dark-suited cadres next door have become an unexpected source of extra business this winter, snapping up anxiety relievers like winter mulberry leaves. “They have worried hearts and are coming here more often,” he said. Anxiety is understandable at the skyscraper, the Central Liaison Office. Factional struggles in Beijing have spilled into Hong Kong, with the abrupt removal this winter of the long-serving director and deputy director at the liaison office, together with a rapid-fire series of transfers and retirements among other aides. Turmoil at the liaison office has coincided with, and possibly fed, mounting frictions between Hong Kong and the mainland. Tens of thousands of people have joined large street demonstrations against the Beijing-backed government here, scuffles have broken out between Hong Kong residents and the many mainland visitors, and plans are under way for a large-scale civil disobedience campaign. The Beijing-backed local government has responded with a series of initiatives to allay residents’ objections. These have included steep taxes on apartment purchases by anyone who is not a permanent resident, notably mainlanders; a ban on pregnant visitors from the mainland, who had been clogging Hong Kong’s obstetric wards so as to gain legal residency for their offspring; and the shelving of a plan for schools to teach a patriotic education course extolling the Communist Party. But government supporters have also organized a series of noisy but peaceful counterdemonstrations. According to local news media, they have paid as much as $25 apiece to hire protesters for an afternoon, including young street thugs with the bleached blond hair that often signifies gang membership. Few expect Beijing to respond to political difficulties here by granting greater democracy. The new member of the seven-person Politburo Standing Committee who is expected to oversee Hong Kong policy in the years ahead is Zhang Dejiang, a North Korean-educated hard-liner from the so-called Shanghai Faction in Chinese politics, led by former President Jiang Zemin. Yu Zhengsheng, another member of the Standing Committee, and Mr. Zhang gave strong warnings at the National People’s Congress last week that Hong Kong residents must safeguard national security — a thinly veiled threat against embracing Western concepts like democracy. Wang Guangya, the director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office in Beijing, went further in asserting that China’s enemies see Hong Kong as a beachhead “for subverting the socialist system.” Willy Lam, a longtime Chinese politics specialist, said that the new team installed at the Party Congress in November was united in its hostility toward greater political pluralism in Hong Kong. They also share a deep suspicion that democracy advocates are being manipulated by the United States so as to create trouble in China’s backyard at a time of geopolitical tensions in the region, as China asserts its territorial claims in the East China Sea and South China Sea. “There’s no difference at the top regarding Tibet, Hong Kong and Taiwan; there are no liberals,” Mr. Lam said. Ever since Britain returned Hong Kong to China in 1997, mainland China’s influence over the city has been divided between the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office in Beijing, which is a cabinet agency of the Chinese government, and the Central Liaison Office here, which is under the Chinese Communist Party. The Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office has been under the control of Jiang Zemin’s allies for many years, while the Central Liaison Office has been run by allies of former President Hu Jintao, who stepped down on Thursday. But the longtime liaison office director, Peng Qinghua, an ally of Mr. Hu’s, was abruptly moved in late December to become the party secretary of impoverished Guangxi Autonomous Region. His recently arrived replacement is Zhang Xiaoming, a lifetime civil servant at the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office who retains close connections there. Li Gang, the longtime deputy director of the Central Liaison Office, also lost his post in late December, and was transferred to the liaison office in much smaller Macau. Mr. Peng and Mr. Li both resisted their transfers, lobbying unsuccessfully for postings in Beijing instead, said a Beijing adviser on Hong Kong policy who insisted on anonymity because of the political delicacy of the issue. The Central Liaison Office declined to provide a comment. Mr. Zhang has quickly established a reputation for himself by calling for greater political obedience here to Beijing’s will. In a column in a Hong Kong newspaper shortly before he was named to run the liaison office, Mr. Zhang called for Hong Kong to enact new internal security regulations. A previous effort to enact such legislation, in 2003, triggered pro-democracy demonstrations that drew hundreds of thousands of protesters and forced the local government to shelve the plan. Echoing the worries of hard-liners in Beijing about democracy advocates here, Mr. Zhang has publicly vowed to resist any “foreign forces” that might try to intervene in Hong Kong politics. He has also begun hinting at a new interpretation of the legal formula for the preservation of Hong Kong’s independent legal and economic system under Chinese sovereignty, which is known as “one country, two systems.” Mr. Zhang has emphasized the “one country” portion of the formula, stressing that China’s sovereignty must be respected at all times. These comments, echoed by other Chinese officials in the past few weeks, have awakened concerns here that civil liberties may be eroded in the years ahead. Fu Ying, the spokeswoman of the current session of the National People’s Congress, sought last week to meet those concerns, saying that the formula of “One Country, Two Systems” would be preserved. Benny Tai, a law professor at Hong Kong University, is organizing a pro-democracy campaign of civil disobedience for next year that is supposed to emulate the Occupy Wall Street movement by staging mass sit-ins in Hong Kong’s central business district. But the Beijing adviser said that the current view in Beijing and in the Hong Kong government was that the police could handle any civil disobedience campaign and that public opinion would quickly turn against any movement that threatened to cause long-term disruption in a neighborhood critical to the territory’s prosperity. Many longtime democracy advocates here are worried about the prospects for change, predicting an increasingly assertive stance by the police and pro-government counterdemonstrators. “It’s going to get worse,” said Martin Lee, a founder of the Democratic Party. The biggest long-term problem in Hong Kong is that most of the population wants considerably more democracy than Beijing is prepared to tolerate. China said in 2010 that it “may” allow the entire population to vote in chief executive elections in 2017, and not just the 1,200 members of the city’s Election Committee, roughly three-quarters of whom follow the Chinese government’s instructions closely. The question is who will be allowed to run in general elections. A new survey by the Hong Kong Transition Project, an academic group that studies the territory’s democratic evolution, has found that by far the most popular option, supported by 81 percent of the population, is to have the entire population vote in a primary that is open to all candidates, followed by a runoff between the top two candidates. But the Beijing adviser said that such an approach was unacceptable to the Chinese Communist Party. Some kind of screening of candidates is needed, perhaps through having some version of the Election Committee control the nomination process, so that outspoken critics of Beijing can campaign but not appear on the final ballot. Huge steel gates at the Central Liaison Office bar entry to democracy protesters, while security guards have extra steel fences standing by in case they are needed. The faintly menacing building also attracts the occasional gawker, because it is topped by a mysterious, nearly four-story black globe. But with more democracy protests likely in the months ahead, the building’s commanding views seem little consolation for the occupants these days. “Even department heads next door come see me,” said Mr. Wu, the traditional medicine practitioner, “as they’re not feeling well.” |