HSBC board member: slaves waited for the vote, so why can’t Hong Kong?
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Version 0 of 1. Democracy protesters in Hong Kong have reacted with fury to comments by a prominent local banker and Beijing-friendly politician comparing them to American slaves. Laura Cha, a member of the board of HSBC, whose headquarters overlooks the mass demonstrations that continue to convulse the former British colony, told an audience in Paris: “American slaves were liberated in 1861 but did not get voting rights until 107 years later. So why can’t Hong Kong wait for a while?” After the comments were published in The Standard in Hong Kong, an online petition denouncing them was flooded with signatures. Launched by a protester, Jeffrey Chan, the petition declared that “the people of Hong Kong” found it “extremely distasteful and insensitive” to be compared to slaves and demanded an immediate apology. It also questioned Ms Cha’s knowledge of American history. “The full ratification of the 15th Amendment in 1870 already granted full emancipation to African-American slaves, including full voting rights,” it pointed out. But it admitted that there was indeed something analogous between the position of slaves and Hong Kongers: the struggle of African-Americans to have their constitutional rights respected “is not entirely dissimilar to the kind of voter disenfranchisement [Ms Cha] and the governments she represents [are] trying to force on the Hong Kong public”, it said. The crux of the protesters’ grievance is a decree in August granting universal suffrage to Hong Kong citizens – as promised in the former colony’s Basic Law – but restricting the nomination of candidates to a tiny number of Beijing loyalists. By Friday afternoon the petition had attracted more than 6,000 signatures. In a statement, Ms Cha said that what she had meant was that “every country’s path to democracy evolved in its own historical context”. She did “not mean any disrespect and regrets that her comment had caused concerns”, the statement said. HSBC’s Asia-Pacific chief Peter Wong told Reuters that he was aware of the speech by Ms Cha but that he would stick to the bank’s principle and “refrain from commenting on political items and issues”. Besides being an HSBC board member, Ms Cha is also a member of China’s National People’s Congress and the first non-mainlander to be appointed a vice-minister in China’s central government. She thus well represents the tight interlinking of Hong Kong big business and the Beijing political establishment that is at the heart of the protesters’ grievances. Laura Cha comments comparing protesters to 19th century American slaves have been challenged by an online petition (Getty Images) More than a month after a police tear-gas attack on demonstrators prompted tens of thousands to occupy main roads outside government headquarters and other key areas, the protesters refuse to pack up and go home. This week the main road was again a sea of umbrellas – the protest’s adopted symbol – to mark a full month of demonstrations. The massed umbrellas were extended for 87 seconds, the number of tear-gas rounds that were fired on demonstrators on 28 September. Talks between Hong Kong government officials and protest leaders have made no progress. In the protest’s early days, a local political analyst predicted that Beijing would attempt to deal with the protest by what he called “the anaconda strategy”: not trying to kill it with brute force but using indirect economic pressure to turn ordinary Hong Kong people against the mostly young demonstrators, many of them students. Ms Cha’s intervention can be seen as another example of that pressure: in her reported comments she also said investors’ confidence in Hong Kong was at a critical point. This is contradicted by other analyses: earlier this week, for example, Fitch Ratings said the demonstrations “may pose some downside risk to Hong Kong’s growth for 2014, but this is unlikely to prove a ratings risk”. |