Last week, the rumour mill went into overdrive over the coincidence of
two unusual developments.
One was Chinese Vice-President Xi
Jinping's last-minute cancellation of meetings with US Secretary of State
Hillary Clinton and Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong on Wednesday,
reportedly because of a back injury.
That same day, Hong Kong Chief
Executive Leung Chun Ying scrapped his trip to the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
summit held over the weekend.
Was there more to the two sudden
cancellations, people wondered? Xi is Beijing's point- man for Hong Kong and
Macau; meanwhile, Leung's government and parties affiliated to Beijing were
clearly in trouble.
The city was seething over issues
ranging from the national education programme to Shenzhen's liberalisation of
travel to Hong Kong for four million non-permanent residents.
The chatter is likely to be just
that - chatter. But what is for sure is that Leung, in the days after, unveiled
a series of measures to mollify Hong Kongers. Last Thursday, he announced that
two land sites will be reserved for Hong Kongers, who are unhappy over mainland
buyers pushing up real estate prices. The next day, he said Beijing leaders had
agreed to shelve Shenzhen's visa plans.
"The central government has
been very supportive and they are aware of the concern of the Hong Kong
people," said Leung. "So as soon as I raised this question with them,
they responded."
And on Saturday, he ditched the
unpopular national education curriculum, which Chinese President Hu Jintao had
advocated in 2007 to make Hong Kongers identify more closely with China.
The series of steps, in the
run-up to yesterday's Legislative Council (Legco) elections, signify the
importance of the polls - crucial not just to Hong Kong, but also, some
believe, to China's own path of political reform.
A key item on the incoming
Legco's agenda will be to approve the shape of the universal suffrage system
for the election of the Chief Executive (CE). This will determine how democracy
will play out in Hong Kong, which will be the first Chinese-controlled city to
elect its leaders directly.
There are conflicting views on
how open this process should be - for instance, who will form the committee to
nominate the CE candidates, and what the qualifying criteria should be.
Pan-Democrat candidates want no
entry barriers, while pro-establishment parties are far more circumspect.
"Only when universal
suffrage would return (candidates) loving China and loving Hong Kong can we
have it," wrote the Wen Wei Po, a newspaper aligned with Beijing
interests.
How it all pans out could impact
on China's own trajectory, said some observers, including Paul Yip Kwok Wah,
special adviser to then chief executive Tung Chee Hwa and known for his close
links with mainland officials.
He told The Straits Times he
believes Hong Kong is a proxy in the ongoing debate over China's pace of
political reform. "This Legco election - and the extent to which genuine
universal suffrage will be allowed in Hong Kong - is important for China,"
said Yip, now chairman of the Hong Kong Policy Research Institute.
"Hong Kong is a platform for
China's political and economic elites to wage their battles. Though small, Hong
Kong has a role to play in China's reforms; it can act as a model, and its
experience can be extracted."
Hong Kong University political
scientist Peter Cheung has also written about how Hong Kong plays an important
role as "an experiment in Chinese federalism".
He says that Hong Kong's
experiment in democratisation would be "intensely watched by Beijing's
different agencies".
Reform-minded officials, the mass
media and liberal intellectuals, among others, may want to seek out experiences
from its pursuit of democracy, he says. Others may want to get experience in
electioneering through their observations - or involvement - in the pro-Beijing
parties' campaigns.
Hence, Hong Kong needs to
negotiate for the maximum room for manoeuvre under the one country two systems
framework, rather than go barrelling against Beijing.
Hard-nosed cynics may fault the
pair and those of their ilk for being over-optimistic about the influence of
tiny Hong Kong.
But China, hardly a monolithic
entity, is contending with its own factions, each with its own ideas on how
fast, if indeed, to proceed on political reforms. Its fitful conversation on
this front has regained some momentum, with reports last week saying Xi had
stressed the need for the Chinese Communist Party to embrace reform even as he
urged restraint by advocates of faster change.
How Hong Kong charts its path to
democracy, while maintaining - or not - the all-important stability prized by
China, could thus have some bearing on the larger picture.
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