Hong Kong turmoil tests Xi’s grasp
Quiet questioning of authoritarian style, as leaders misread crisis
China’s leader, Xi JinpBEIJING— ing, 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 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 catalogue of looming risks at the start of the year.
And although few in Beijing would dare blame 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 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 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 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 hardline instincts under Xi and fuelled 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, 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, officials concluded that Hong Kong authorities and local police could eventually restore order on their own, officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
There are hints of divisions in Chinese leadership and stirrings of discontent about 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. 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 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, 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 said.
Another sign of the disarray within the government was the reaction to Lam’s withdrawal of the bill. On Tuesday, officials in Beijing declared there could be no concessions to protesters’ demands. A day later, when 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.”
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 Xi, according to numerous officials and analysts in Hong Kong and Beijing.