Slow boat to full control
CHINA’S TENTACLES SPREAD: HONG KONG’S PROMISED AUTONOMY ERODED
‘I no longer believed we would have full-fledged democracy.’
As midnight struck on 30 June, 1997 and Hong Kong transitioned from British to Chinese rule, pro-democracy lawmaker Lee Wing-tat stood with colleagues on the balcony of the city’s legislature, holding a defiant protest.
Hong Kong marked the 25th anniversary of the handover yesterday and the halfway point of One Country, Two Systems – the governance model agreed by Britain and China under which the city would keep some autonomy and freedoms.
That model was set to last 50 years. But even in its first hours, battle lines that would define Hong Kong’s politics for the next two decades were drawn.
Furious at outgoing British governor Chris Patten’s last-gasp attempts at democratisation, China had announced that any legislator who had openly supported the measures would be thrown out. So the minute the handover became effective, Lee and many of his colleagues became seatless.
Lee said: “I no longer believed we would have full-fledged democracy.”
Twenty-five years later, there are no opposition lawmakers left in Hong Kong’s legislature at all. Many have been arrested under a national security law Beijing imposed in 2020, or disqualified from standing for office under new “patriots only” electoral rules.
Others have fled, including Lee, who now lives in Britain.
Like many, Lee had been hopeful in 1984, when the Sino-British Joint Declaration laid the path to ending more than 150 years of British colonial rule. One Country, Two Systems promised a high degree of autonomy, independent judicial power and that the city’s leader would be appointed by Beijing on the basis of local elections or consultations.
But China’s deadly 1989 Tiananmen crackdown, in which Beijing sent in tanks to crush a democracy movement, shattered Lee’s faith in the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP). In the years after the handover, mistrust between Beijing and Hong Kongers like Lee escalated.
The pro-democracy camp saw Beijing as ruthless authoritarians set on denying Hong Kongers promised rights. And the CCP saw their demands as a challenge to China’s sovereignty.
There were successful mass protests in 2003 and 2012 that led to government climbdowns. But campaigns to let Hong Kong pick its own leaders, including the 2014 Umbrella Movement, came to nothing. Tensions exploded in huge, sometimes violent protests of 2019, which China responded to with a crackdown.
Critics like Patten accuse the party of betraying its promises. “China has ripped up the joint declaration and is vengefully and comprehensively trying to remove the freedoms of Hong Kong because it regards them as a threat, not to the security of China but to the ability of the Chinese Communist Party to hang on to power,” Patten said last week.
But former Hong Kong leader Leung Chun-ying blamed years of unrest on people being misled by political figures and misunderstanding Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.
He also suggested hostile “external forces” were involved.
Echoing Beijing, Leung described One Country, Two Systems as a success and said it might continue beyond its 50-year term.
Many Hong Kongers remain unconvinced. Public confidence in One Country, Two Systems hit a historic low in mid-2020, according to polls carried out by the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute since 1994.