Hong Kong's impatient push for greater democracy has little resemblance to the extraordinary images we are seeing of mass Iranian protests demanding more freedoms. But read the protest banners and you'll probably be reminded of Hong Kong. The one that struck me most read: selection, not election. That's precisely what we have in Hong Kong.
The 'selection, not election' banners mock the vote count as a fraud to ensure President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's landslide win. Our own chief executive elections are never a fraud in that sense. There is no vote-rigging to ensure a certain outcome. The ballots of the 800 members of the Election Committee are properly counted.
But there the difference ends. It is still a selection. An election becomes a selection when only 800 out of millions are allowed to choose. In that context, you can call the election a fraud.
Huge crowds of Iranian protesters waved 'where's my vote?' placards. It wasn't that they were excluded. All the millions of eligible voters were included. The placards simply meant that a vote becomes worthless if the outcome is predetermined.
Hong Kong plays the selection game differently to ensure a predetermined outcome. Rather than manipulating the votes of millions, the millions are not allowed to vote. The desired outcome is ensured through exclusion instead of manipulated inclusion.
Hong Kong people haven't reacted to this in the same way the Iranians are reacting to their claimed fraud. There are no huge, angry street confrontations with riot police who fire live bullets. Hong Kong authorities wouldn't dare shoot at unarmed protesters anyway. We have enough democracy to make sure of that.
The huge street protests we do have are never angry ones. They are, in fact, quite carnival-like. And they are never aimed solely at challenging the authorities on our chief executive selection disguised as election. Even the July 1, 2003, march that drew half a million protesters was more about the public's loss of faith in the government than about democracy.