No one in Hong Kong should be surprised by the National People's Congress Standing Committee ruling on the way that the chief executive and Legislative Council are appointed in 2007 and 2008, respectively. It was patently obvious long before the handover that the mainland would always obstruct the development of democracy in Hong Kong. Sovereignty, after all, was passing to a totalitarian government with no record of toleration of pluralistic political structures.
The day has long since passed when the Hong Kong people could in any way influence the pace of democratic change. The real decisions that determined the Standing Committee's recent pronouncements were made 20 or more years ago.
Cast your minds back to the Joint Declaration of 1984, the agreement by which Britain and China facilitated the handover of Hong Kong. The whole question of the pace of democratic change was left deliberately vague. We were promised a legislature 'constituted by elections' and that the chief executive would be 'appointed by the Central People's government on the basis of the results of elections or consultations held locally'. The problem was that no one defined 'election'. In secret correspondence between the Foreign Office and Beijing up to 1990, the two powers colluded to subvert the meaning of the word by agreeing to a snail's pace of development prior to (and through) the handover, with 'elections' in which privileged elites would predominate.
The public consultation in Hong Kong that followed the Joint Declaration was similarly designed and interpreted to dampen any expectation that democracy would be accepted in Hong Kong. After a methodologically flawed survey, the British government was able to pronounce that, in broad terms, the Hong Kong people were satisfied with the guarantees provided. Sceptics challenged the conclusions but they had no power to influence them. Legco was not permitted to vote on the Joint Declaration and was, in any case, effectively a rubber-stamp institution.
Hong Kong had, by 1989, been abandoned by Britain to meet the realpolitik imperatives of Sino-British relations. In 1981, Britain removed from the Hong Kong people their last protection, and Britain's own most powerful bargaining chip, by bringing in the Nationality Act, which denied Hong Kong people the right of abode in the UK.
They then, with China, negotiated away the nationality rights of the Hong Kong people, and against all precedent transferred some of its citizens to another jurisdiction, without the consent of those transferred, in peace time and without the threat of force. British nationals in Hong Kong were left with a worthless travel document, the BNO passport, as their only 'safeguard'.
