By
Yi-Zheng Lian
Mr.
Lian is a former chief editor of the Hong Kong Economic Journal and a
contributing Opinion writer.
At long last, on Wednesday Carrie Lam, the leader of Hong
Kong, announced, along with a few other largely symbolic measures, the formal withdrawal of the contentious extradition bill
that set off a summer of protests. But this is a totally unacceptable response
to the crisis facing the city. And no less than her earlier steadfast refusal
to concede anything to the protesters, the gesture — so minor and coming so
late — only confirms what many of us suspected are the interests she really
serves.
Far more revealing than what she just announced publicly are
statements she recently made in private. Last week, in the midst of intensifying police brutality
against the protesters, Mrs. Lam met with a privileged group of businesspeople
and told them, off the record, that she would quit “if I have a choice.”
Her talk was recorded on the sly, leaked and disclosed on Monday. On Tuesday,
she told journalists that she had never tendered her
resignation to Beijing and had not considered doing so.
Maybe she thought she
was showing a softer side at that private meeting last week — her human face,
if you will — but the performance was shabby, a mixed bag of practiced remorse
and the callousness typical of the ruling class. And more.
Now was no time for self-pity, she said, and yet she went on
to lament, choking up at times, that she no longer dared to go out for shopping
or to get her hair done, for fear of being met by throngs of young people in
black T-shirts and black masks (black is the protesters’ preferred color). All
this she said even as hundreds of police officers in full riot gear have been
let loose these days, bashing the skulls and breaking the teeth
of protesters and innocent bystanders alike, pulling off the underwear of a
young woman they arrested and deliberately crushing hands under their
boots. The chief executive can’t visit her coiffeur? Big deal.
Sign Up for Debatable
Get the big debates,
distilled. This comprehensive guide will put in context what people are saying
about the pressing issues of the week.
Sign
Up
Advertisement
Mrs. Lam is heard
saying in the recording, “for a chief executive to have caused this huge havoc
to Hong Kong is unforgivable.” Quite so. Especially since “havoc” is a gross
euphemism for what Mrs. Lam has done. She has undermined constitutional
guarantees and political freedoms. She has politicized what was once a
professional police force and turned it into a tool of oppression that acts at
the behest of Beijing. She has given the police unheard-of license to make
arrests in hospitals and bully patients, and to mistreat — my euphemism this
time — protesters and reporters at the front lines. The special governance
system that Beijing had promised would govern Hong Kong and keep it distinct
from the mainland until at least 2047 has been thoroughly trampled.
Yet it is to a small group of businesspeople — and
presumably a very select bunch of those — that Mrs. Lam made “a plea to you for
your forgiveness.” But forgiveness for what, from them? For allowing the
protesters to close down the airport for a couple of days? For
sending a little tremor through the
real estate market, still sky-high, which has made developers so
very rich for so very long? For knocking some 5,000 points off the Hang Seng Index since May?
For hurting the city’s big corporate families?
Mrs. Lam has yet to properly ask for the forgiveness of Hong
Kongers. (In June, she said, “I offer my most sincere apology to all people of Hong Kong,”
but then flatly refused to do anything they asked.) In her talk to the business
group, she recited almost verbatim from the Basic Law,
Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, that in her capacity as chief executive she is
required to serve two masters: the central government in Beijing and the people
of Hong Kong. In fact, she seems to be serving only Beijing and a small
business elite in Hong Kong.
Only, other swaths of the business sector have had little patience for
Mrs. Lam’s intransigence. The Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce pointedly asked her to
make serious concessions toward the protesters in late July.
And so finally on Wednesday, Mrs. Lam announced the formal
withdrawal of a bill that would allow the extradition of criminal suspects to
mainland China, one of five of the protesters’ demands. This is ridiculous on
her part, after holding out all summer as she has while protesters have been
tear-gassed, maimed and subjected to cruel treatment by the police — and while
much of the city’s population has supported them, turning up for marches in the
hundreds of thousands. At this stage, nothing short of the government’s
addressing the protesters’ fifth, and most sweeping, demand — real universal
suffrage for both executive and legislative elections — can be enough. Some
protesters have already declared on the online forum LIHKG, “Five Demands. Not
One Less.”
Whatever the protesters’ next response to Wednesday’s
announcements, and however the government then follows up, Mrs. Lam’s
off-the-record talk with the business group last week holds hints of what may
come in the medium term.
She said that she had
gotten clear hints from Beijing that no matter what happened in the streets of
Hong Kong, China would not send in the People’s Liberation Army; Beijing just
wouldn’t risk damaging its “international profile,” which took so long to
build, as “not only a big economy, but a big, responsible economy.” There is
unintended mercy in cold calculus, apparently.
But this also means,
in the words of Mrs. Lam, that the authorities in Beijing are “willing to play
it long,” and “so you have no short-term solution.” Put another way: China’s
strategy is essentially to play a game of attrition, conceding as little as
possible while expecting the Hong Kong government and the local police to hold
out longer than the protesters, despite the risk of imposing significant costs
on the city in the meantime.
“You lose tourism,
economy, you lose your IPOs and so on, but you can’t do much about it,” Mrs.
Lam is heard warning the business group. Then she tries to sound reassuring:
“But after everything has been settled, the country will be there to help, with
maybe positive measures, especially in the Greater Bay Area.”
Yet will
businesspeople just sit still and wait, especially in a financial center like
Hong Kong, where being nimble and making quick money are the highest business
virtues? And the opposition movement is not stupid: It is trying to prolong the
conflict, hoping to sap the economy enough that the business sector will start
clamoring for a comprehensive political solution.
On Tuesday, a nameless pro-independence group claiming to be
active on the front lines of the protests — and responsible for knifing an off-duty policeman
this weekend — issued a manifesto. (Here is the original in Cantonese;
here is an adequate summary in English.)
The document criticizes the so-called courageous-militant arm of the resistance
movement as being too costly in human terms: Close to 1,000 protesters have
already been arrested. But it also argues that so-called peaceful-rational camp
within the movement is too costly in financial terms: Millions of dollars have
been spent on political advertisements in Western media. And so this nameless
group proposes a more sustainable strategy: a low-cost and high-risk effort
that would pinpoint its use of violence, targeting individual police officers.
That, it argues, could quickly demoralize the entire force, especially since
many officers joined the force for job security and good pay.
First reactions to
the manifesto online were conflicted, even among protesters. Would such as
extreme approach be tolerated, if only tacitly, by the mainstream resistance?
Just maybe,
especially considering that the courageous-militant response to mounting police
brutality, which was unimaginable just three months ago, is now accepted, even
celebrated at times. Beijing isn’t the only one playing a game of attrition in
Hong Kong.
Yi-Zheng Lian, a commentator on Hong Kong and
Asian affairs, is a professor of economics at Yamanashi Gakuin University in
Japan and a contributing Opinion writer.
No comments:
Post a Comment