· Sept. 7, 2019Updated 10:21 a.m. ET
BEIJING — China’s leader, Xi Jinping,
warned a gathering of senior Communist Party officials in January that the
country faced a raft of urgent economic and political risks, and told them to
be on guard especially for “indolence, incompetence and becoming divorced from
the public.”
Now, after months of political tumult
in Hong Kong, the warning seems prescient. Only it is Mr. Xi
himself and his government facing criticism that they are mishandling China’s
biggest political crisis in years, one that he did not mention in his catalog
of looming risks at the start of the year.
And although few in Beijing would dare
blame Mr. Xi openly for the government’s handling of the turmoil, there is
quiet grumbling that his imperious style and authoritarian concentration of power contributed
to the government’s misreading of the scope of discontent in Hong Kong, which
is only growing.
On
Friday and Saturday the protests and clashes with the police continued in
Hong Kong, even after the region’s embattled chief executive, Carrie Lam, made
a major concession days earlier by withdrawing a bill that
would have allowed the extradition of criminal suspects to the mainland,
legislation that first incited the protests three months ago.
The Communist Party’s leadership — and
very likely Mr. Xi himself — has been surprised by or oblivious to the depth of
the animosity, which has driven hundreds of thousands into the streets of Hong
Kong for the past three months. While it was the extradition bill that set off
the protests, they are now sustained by broader grievances against the Chinese
government and its efforts to impose greater control over the semiautonomous
territory.
Beijing has been slow to adapt to
events, allowing Mrs. Lam to suspend the bill in June, for example, but
refusing at the time to let her withdraw it completely. It was a partial
concession that reflected the party’s hard-line instincts under Mr. Xi and
fueled even larger protests.
As
public anger in Hong Kong has climbed, the Chinese government’s response has
grown bombastic and now seems at times erratic.
In
July, at a meeting that has not been publicly disclosed, Mr. Xi met with other
senior officials to discuss the protests. The range of options discussed is
unclear, but the leaders agreed that the central government should not
intervene forcefully, at least for now, several people familiar with the issue
said in interviews in Hong Kong and Beijing.
At that meeting, the officials
concluded that the Hong Kong authorities and the local police could eventually
restore order on their own, the officials said, speaking on condition of
anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
There are hints of divisions in the
Chinese leadership and stirrings of discontent about Mr. Xi’s policies.
Jean-Pierre Cabestan, a political
science professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and an expert on Chinese
politics, said it appeared that there was debate during the annual informal
leaders’ retreat in Beidaihe, a seaside resort not far from Beijing.
Some party leaders called for
concessions, while others urged action to bring Hong Kong more directly under
the mainland’s control, he said. Mr. Cabestan said he believed that “the
Chinese leadership is divided on Hong Kong and how to solve the crisis.”
Wu Qiang, a political analyst in
Beijing, said Mr. Xi’s government had in effect adopted a strategy to
procrastinate in the absence of any better ideas for resolving the crisis. “It
is not willing to intervene directly or to propose a solution,” he said. “The
idea is to wait things out until there is a change.”
The
upshot is that instead of defusing or containing the crisis, Mr. Xi’s
government has helped to widen the political chasm between the central
government and many of the seven million residents in a city that is an
important hub of international trade and finance, critics say.
Another
sign of the disarray within the government was the reaction to Mrs. Lam’s
withdrawal of the bill. On Tuesday, officials in Beijing declared there could
be no concessions to the protesters’ demands. A day later, when Mrs. Lam pulled
the bill back, she claimed to have Beijing’s blessing to do so. The same
officials were silent.
On Friday, China’s premier, Li
Keqiang, said during a news conference with
Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, who was visiting China, that the
government supported Hong Kong in “halting the violence and disorder in
accordance with the law.”
Mr. Xi, who is 66 and in his seventh
year of his now unlimited tenure as the country’s paramount
leader, has cast himself as an essential commander for a challenging time. He
has been lionized in the state news media as no other
Chinese leader has been since Mao.
This has made political solutions to
the Hong Kong situation harder to find, because even senior officials are
reluctant to make the case for compromise or concessions for fear of
contradicting or angering Mr. Xi, according to numerous officials and analysts
in Hong Kong and Beijing.
“Beijing has overreached,
overestimating its capacity to control events and underestimating the
complexity of Hong Kong,” said Brian Fong Chi-hang,
an associate professor at the Academy of Hong Kong Studies at the Education
University of Hong Kong.
The tumult in Hong Kong could pose a
risk to Mr. Xi, especially if it exacerbates discontent and discord within the
Chinese leadership over other issues.
“I
think the danger is not that his standing will collapse, but that there is a
whole series of slowly unfolding trends that will gradually corrode his position,”
said Richard McGregor, a senior fellow at the Lowy Institute in Sydney and
author of “Xi Jinping: The Backlash.”
“Hong Kong is one, as the protests look
set to carry on despite the concessions,” Mr. McGregor said. “The trade war is
adding to the pain,” he added, referring to the current standoff with the
United States.
Mr.
Xi returned on Tuesday to the same venue as his speech in January — the
Communist Party’s Central Party School — and reprised the warnings he raised in
January without suggesting they were in fact worsening.
“Faced
with the grim conditions and tasks of struggle looming down on us, we must be
tough-boned, daring to go on the attack and daring to battle for victory,” he
said.
While he warned of “a whole range” of
internal and external threats — economic, military and environmental — he
mentioned Hong Kong only once, and then only in passing.
“By painting a dark picture of hostile
foreign forces or even unrelenting internal challenges the Communist Party
faces in retaining power, it helps justify his continuing strong hand,”
said Christopher K. Johnson,
a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in
Washington.
Some
analysts see a parallel between Mr. Xi’s handling of Hong Kong and the trade war with the United States, which, like
the economy more broadly, seems to be the greatest worry for his government at
the moment.
In Hong Kong, Mr. Xi’s government
unwaveringly supported the extradition bill. And it stuck by that position,
refusing to allow Mrs. Lam to withdraw it formally, even as the protesters’
demands grew broader. Her pledge to withdraw it now has been dismissed as too
little, too late.
In the trade talks, China also balked
at accepting President Trump’s initial demands for concessions. When the two
sides came close to an agreement in the spring, outlined in a 150-page
document, Mr. Xi appeared to balk, scuttling the process.
Now Mr. Xi faces an even bigger trade
war, with much higher tariffs and greater tensions. The government appears to
be hewing to a strategy of waiting out Mr. Trump, possibly
through his 2020 re-election campaign, even as the dispute has become a drag on
the economy.
It
remains unclear how Mr. Xi’s government conveyed its approval for Mrs. Lam’s
decision — or whether it did. Mrs. Lam’s sudden shift evolved in a matter of
days after last weekend’s clashes between protesters and the police, several
officials said.
Mrs. Lam said the decision to withdraw
the extradition bill was hers, but she also asserted that she had Beijing’s full
support for doing so, suggesting more coordination than either side has
publicly acknowledged.
The
silence from officials and in the state news media about Mrs. Lam’s concession
suggested that if Mr. Xi’s government did approve of the sudden shift, it
wanted to stifle public discussion of it in the mainland.
Mrs. Lam herself described the
tightrope she must walk during recent remarks to a group of business leaders
that were leaked and published by
Reuters.
“The political room for the chief
executive who, unfortunately, has to serve two masters by constitution, that
is, the central people’s government and the people of Hong Kong, that political
room for maneuvering is very, very, very limited,” she said.
She also offered a candid assessment of
Beijing’s views, even if one she did not intend to make public. She said
Beijing had no plan to send in the People’s Liberation Army to restore order
because “they’re just quite scared now.”
“Because they know that the price would
be too huge to pay,” she went on. “Maybe they don’t care about Hong Kong, but
they care about ‘one country, two systems.’ They care about the country’s
international profile. It has taken China a long time to build up to that sort
of international profile.”
Hong Kong’s unique status, with its own
laws and freedoms, has long created a political dilemma for China’s leaders,
especially for Mr. Xi, who has made China’s rising economic and political might
a central pillar of his public appeals.
China’s
recovery of sovereignty over the former British colony is a matter of national
pride that reversed a century and a half of colonial humiliation. But the
mainland maintains what amounts to an international border with Hong Kong.
The government’s deepest fear now
appears to be that the demands for greater political accountability and even
universal suffrage heard on the streets in Hong Kong could spread like a
contagion through the mainland. So far, there have been few signs of that.
As the crisis has grown, the government
has sent thousands of troops from the People’s Armed Police to Shenzhen, the
mainland city adjacent to Hong Kong, but the exercise was hastily organized and
used an outdated plan drawn up after the protests in 2014, according to one
official in Hong Kong.
Beijing also stepped up its propaganda,
launching an information — and disinformation — campaign against the protesters
and opposition leaders in Hong Kong.
Mr. Xi continues to barely mention Hong
Kong. He has said nothing about the protests, even in his passing reference on
Tuesday. He has not visited since 2017, when he marked the 20th anniversary of
the handover from Britain.
After the traditional August holiday
break, Mr. Xi’s public calendar of events has since betrayed no hint of
political upheaval or threats to his standing. The media’s portrayal of him,
already verging on hagiography, has become even more fawning. State television
and the party’s newspapers now refer to him as “the People’s Leader,” an
honorific once bestowed only on Mao.
“The People’s Leader loves the people,”
The People’s Daily wrote after Mr.
Xi toured Gansu, a province in western China.
Mr. Xi’s calculation might be simply to
remain patient, as he has been in the case of Mr. Trump’s erratic shifts in the trade war. In his remarks on
Tuesday, Mr. Xi also gave a possible hint of the government’s pragmatism.
“On
matters of principle, not an inch will be yielded,” he said, “but on matters of
tactics there can be flexibility.”
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