The fly in China's ointment

Submitted by AWL on 30 September, 2014 - 6:02 Author: Chan Ying

The current wave of protest has spread like wildfire from the Admiralty area, where the administration centre of the Hong Kong government is located, to Wanchai, Central and Causeway Bay areas on Hong Kong Island, and to Mongkok in the centre of Kowloon.

In short, the major roads of HK's financial district and all key urban areas with the highest population density is occupied 24 hours around the clock by protestors.

The escalation of protest was directly triggered by the police's use of teargas in the Admiralty area. From 6 pm to well past midnight yesterday, the police fired 87 rounds of teargas indiscrimately into crowds of people who were protesting peacefully. They were responding to the Occupy Central leaders' call to bring the civil disobedience campaign forward from 1 October to yesterday, after the police had arrested over seventy students who scaled the government HQ's perimeter walls.

The deployment of riot police and the repeated use of teargas marked a turning point. The TV broadcasts of this heavy-handed move and of heavily clad riot police wielding batons and even raising of armed rifles against a defenceless crowd including families with young children, led to even more people coming out of their homes onto the streets. Rumours started flying that the police are about to open fire and that the People's Liberation Army were getting ready to come out of their barracks. Even after the authorities shut down Admiralty station, people kept arriving on the scene.

Throughout the days of civil disobedience, not a single shop window in the glittering financial district was broken and not a single police vehicle was touched, even though the protestors had a huge superiority in numbers that surprised and vastly outnumbered the police. Today the police decided to withdraw their riot squads and the crowds continued to bring traffic to a halt at will while interacting with office workers coming into work on Monday.

Tonight there is a mood of celebration as the crowds raised demands for the Chief Executive Leung Chun Ying to resign.

The depth of feeling is not just against Beijing's election reform restrictions, but also against a very unpopular Chief Executive who was elected by a highly unrepresentative election committee of merely 1200 people in 2012.

Leung had defeated the local tycoon candidate Henry Tang after a dirty campaign exposing Tang of illegally building an underground wine cellar and swimming pool in his residence. It later transpired that Leung's own mansion contained illegal construction which he sought to cover up. Leung's confrontational tactics against elected legislators and his contempt for public opinion, plus his failure to deliver promised measures such as building more public housing had made him the most unpopular of HK's three chief executives since 1997. Hong Kong has now reached a state of ungovernability.

Xi Jin Ping is in the ascendancy, tightly consolidating his power as China's President and making bolder moves against his factional opponents in the Communist Party. In less than two years he has moved against an unprecented number of party leaders, charging them with corruption.

Former Party leader Jiang Zemin and his Shanghai gang are Xi's major remaining obstacle to total control of the CCP. This goes well beyond the previous purges by new party leaders of a few factional opponents and the use of anti-corruption as a ploy to boost prestige and to keep party bureaucrats in line.

Xi is already seeking to publish his writings in several volumes to coincide with the 65th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Xi's project is to consolidate the party's grip on power at any cost as China continues to develop economically, including even a change of ideology.

In Xi's eyes, both Putin's Russia and Singapore are attractive enough models of de facto one party tyrannical states, while the legacy of Maoism and the inefficiency and corruption of the CCP is increasingly becoming a liabilitiy.

To succeed, Xi cannot afford to be derailed by a turbulent Hong Kong spinning out of control. Hong Kong remains a crucial part of Xi's ambitions for a modernised and strong China, given its global importance as a financial centre. It would not be in his interests to be forced to impose martial law and crack down on Hong Kong in full glimpse of the world's media, 25 years after Tiananmen.

As soon as Xi decides that Leung Chun Ying is a liability he will be removed from office to give Beijing an opportunity to coax Hong Kong into a new deal. Yet Leung must know that his best prospect of surviving is to polarise the situation in Hong Kong until Beijing's heavy hand is forced. Leung is rumoured to be an underground member of the CCP in Hong Kong.

Can the struggle for democracy by a small city of seven million people really have a pivotal effect on a country as vast as China? After all, Hong Kong's populace is not exactly a revolutionary vanguard of worker militants. Yet this is a city where over 1.5 million out of seven million were on the streets 25 years ago in protest against the 4 June massacre — a highly politicised population with a stubborn cultural streak that refuses to be assimilated by China, that despises the vile corruption and trampling on basic human rights that occurs daily on the mainland, and treats the nouveau riche taking their loot out of China with utter contempt.

China's evolution towards a regime like Russia is by no means assured, and Hong Kong could be the fly in the ointment.

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