• Protesters are waging a battle for Hong Kong’s future. Equally, the confrontation reflects a showdown between two global orders – one led by the liberal West and the other by the authoritarian Chinese model
• The only way out is for Hong Kong to accept that it is part of China, and for China to accept that Hong Kong is different
Over the past three months, protesters in Hong Kong have proved that the return of their territory to China in 1997 was not an event cast in political stone.Admittedly, there are two kinds of protesters. The first are what we might call civic dissidents, or those who have come out into the open to push back China's increasing encroachment into the “one country, two systems” arrangement under which Britain handed the territory back to China.The second are anarchic dissidents, who employ violent tactics to demonstrate their defiance of Chinese rule. Whether the latter are democratic extremists or paid agents of external forces – and, if so, which forces – may never be known. What is true is that there are more peaceful demonstrators than their violent counterparts. Otherwise, all of Hong Kong would have been in flames by now. It is not.
However, what the demonstrators have done collectively is to prove that, long before the 50-year “one country, two systems” formula expires in 2047, China will have to come to terms with Hong Kong's autonomy. Equally, however, Hong Kong residents need to acknowledge China's sovereignty as the framework of that autonomy. Only in that way can Hong Kong recover from the protests.The tussle over Hong Kong's future is not a purely domestic issue. It involves a showdown over two contrasting systems of international order.
The first order is represented by the imperial Leninism of the Chinese state. Mandarins, whether Confucian or Communist, have presided over a system where citizens have been subjects of the state: the state did not belong to them. Centuries of imperial rule continued in the Leninist absolutism of Mao Zedong and his successors. The monarchy was reincarnated as the party, but the people remained subjects.
The second order is represented by the West, under which Hong Kong flourished economically. Of course, China, too, has achieved prosperity under its autocratic system. However, having enjoyed a degree of liberal freedom under British rule, Hongkongers do not wish to trade their prosperous freedom for prosperous servitude.
Their defiant attitude is reflected in the triumphalism of Western democracies as they gloat over the spectacle of Hongkongers battling their fellow Chinese on the mainland even though the West will not intervene militarily in Hong Kong to wrest it from China. Groups calling for Hong Kong's independence live in a fictitious world to which they cling out of sheer desperation.
However, the absence of Western military intervention does not mean the international dimension of the Hong Kong crisis will disappear any time soon. Hong Kong will remain a test case in the global contest between a liberal international order predicated on the will of the people expressed through universal suffrage, and an authoritarian international order in which states seek to control the political imagination of their people.
Hong Kong exemplifies that existential contrast internally because it is a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China. It is an inalienable part of an authoritarian China but, equally, it is only a special part of it, its autonomy guaranteed by the terms of its transfer to the People’s Republic in 1997.
The first half of that equation has seen propagandistic exhortations for Hong Kong residents to love the motherland. They would – but only on their own terms. Those terms are derived from their experience of liberal democracy under British rule.
Of course, Hong Kong was a British colony. A colony by definition cannot be democratic because, had it been so, it would not have been a colony but would have been independent. However, Britain was a democracy and it was within that larger constitutional framework that politics in Hong Kong functioned.
The best illustration of a protective liberal democratic framework was the fierce independence of the colony’s judiciary, which was underpinned by the free courts of a democratic Britain.
This leads to the second half of the equation. Hong Kong owes allegiance to China, as it should, only as long as the motherland respects the freedom that the prodigal city won during its long exile into the democratic expanses of liberal Britain.
The extradition bill,which sparked the protests, transgressed the sense of Hong Kong returning home because it would have subjected the SAR’s residents to the opaque judicial system of the Chinese party-state. That legal straw broke the political camel’s back.
It went against the grain of what makes Hong Kong itself: a deep sense of cultural “Chineseness” infused with Western liberal democratic values. Hong Kong does not have the power to recreate China in its own image. But Hong Kong will not be recast in China’s image, either: that is the message of the street rebellion.
China would do well to heed that message. It would not do Beijing any good to ignore the reality that Hong Kong is simply different. Incorporating that difference into the unitary nationalism of China is the challenge.
It is not an insurmountable challenge. After all, it was Beijing itself that agreed to take back Hong Kong under the “one country, two systems” formula.China's aspirations to be a global power are palpable in its economic links with Asia, Europe and Africa. Its military prowess is evident in the South China Sea. Its soft power is felt in its cultural attractiveness to millions around the world through the peaceful spread of the Chinese language.
It would be a shame if the internationalisation of the Hong Kong issue were to subvert Chinese national power from within. China would do well to remember that, while all power is international, all politics is local. It is the local which determines the international.
Derwin Pereira is founder and CEO of Pereira International, a Singapore-based political consultancy. He is also a member of Harvard University’s Belfer Centre for Science and International Affairs.
The article was originally published on SOUTH CHINA MORNING POST.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy.
