China’s growing policy problems
Beijing is forced to face protesters amid other issues
Beijing is forced to face protesters as many invade the nation’s Legislative Council in effort to protect Hong Kong freedoms.
BEIJING — A new young protest generation in Hong Kong has exposed China’s failure to win over Hong Kongers — young or old — a trend that has shown up in surveys for years.
As they confront the world’s most powerful authoritarian state, few believe they can win — but their willingness to risk jail to protect Hong Kong freedoms has laid bare the problems of China’s Hong Kong policy.
Simply put, most Hong Kongers feel alienated from China: Only 3.1% of young Hong Kongers aged 18-29 think of themselves as Chinese, according to a 2017 survey by the University of Hong Kong.
Some 71% of Hong Kongers told researchers last month they are not proud to be part of China, but 90% of young people felt that way. The percentage of people identifying as Chinese sank to a record low, 11%, and the percentage identifying as Hong Kongers reached a record high, 53%.
This helps explain the defiance of younger protesters who invaded the nation’s Legislative Council last week, daubed anti-government slogans and raised a colonial-era British flag in a primal scream of frustration and distrust.
But it also poses a challenge to China’s “one country, two systems” policy — one of Beijing’s red lines, never to be challenged. The policy set down in 1984 by then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to govern Hong Kong’s return to China from Britain after a colonial-era lease expired, allowed Hong Kong to retain its own governance system with a “high level of autonomy,” its own legal system, free speech, and the right to protest.
“From the optics perspective, this looks pretty terrible,” said Ben Bland, an analyst with Sydney-based think tank the Lowy Institute. “It’s a pretty disturbing sign in terms of the failure of the whole Hong Kong project from a mainland perspective.”
Bland said Hong Kong, once regarded as an economic issue by Beijing leaders, had slowly morphed into a national security concern because of the growing prodemocracy movement, the rise of groups calling for independence, and the mass protests.
“Separatism is anathema to the party and, now, the Hong Kong government has lost control of the situation not just with the most extreme protesters but the fact that you had over a million people on the streets on a couple of occasions, which shows that they are not able to deliver control over Hong Kong society to their bosses in Beijing.”
For China, Hong Kong is a core issue, at the heart of President Xi Jinping ’s “China Dream,” which aims to see China rise as a leading global power — reversing the “century of humiliation” in the 19th and 20th centuries when foreign powers forced unequal treaties on China’s weak dynastic rulers. Hong Kong was part of the humiliation, after Britain invaded the island in 1841 as a staging point for the First Opium War — forcing China to accept opium in payment for tea.
The Hong Kong protests pose a delicate challenge at a difficult time. China faces a bruising trade war with the U.S., a slowing economy, U.S. attacks on China’s global tech giant Huawei, rising food prices after a catastrophic African Swine Flu epidemic wiped out much of the nation’s pig herd, and growing criticisms from the U.S. and other Western nations over the detention of around a million Muslims in reeducation camps in Xinjiang.
In addition, the Hong Kong protests — over the unpopular effort by the Hong Kong government to pass a law enabling extradition to China — have rattled Hong Kong’s business community. As well as being core to China’s unity, Hong Kong’s position as a global financial center, remains important to Beijing, even though China’s economy now dwarfs Hong Kong’s.
As president, Xi has reasserted the dominance of the Communist Party and taken a tough line on China’s territorial unity — including Hong Kong and Taiwan. He has centralized power and suppressed dissent, cracked down on corruption, and expanded digital surveillance of the population.
Kevin Rudd, president of the Asia Society and former Australian prime minister, speaking last month at the Lowy Institute, said Xi’s central concern was “the absolute centrality of keeping the Communist Party in power. This is followed by maintaining national unity, including Tibet, Xinjiang, Taiwan and Hong Kong, all central in the party’s eyes to its continuing national political legitimacy.”
For now, according to analysts, Beijing — and Hong Kong authorities following its lead — seems to have retreated temporarily, hoping that the protests will lose momentum and support over the summer.
“There will be a tactical pause to try to let tempers calm down because Beijing and the Hong Kong government don’t want bloodshed,” said Bland. “They don’t want mass disorder.”
But Xi’s determination to return the Communist Party to what he calls its core values makes it unlikely that Beijing authorities will allow Hong Kong to take a democratic path, no matter what Hong Kong opinion polls show.
“It looks like a vicious circle of repression and pressure and protest and reprisal is going to continue,“Bland said.