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Toh Han Shih

SINGAPORE MINISTER MENTOR Lee Kuan Yew, during his recent visit to Hong Kong, pointed out that former chief executive Tung Chee-hwa was no street fighter.

'Mr Tung,' the elder statesman said bluntly, 'was too nice.'

His meaning, most observers understood, was that Mr Tung simply lacked the guts to govern.

Had Mr Lee been in Mr Tung's place and faced with half a million demonstrators demanding democratic change, they say, he would not have hesitated to declare it illegal, send in the water cannons, and perhaps pack off a few ringleaders to Gansu province for rock-breaking and political re-education.

'If nobody is afraid of me, I'm meaningless,' Mr Lee said in 1998. 'Anyone who decides to take me on needs to put on knuckledusters. There is no other way to govern a Chinese society.'

Unvarnished  authoritarianism, to be sure, is a fundamentally alien way of thinking for most people in Hong Kong.

But, oddly, one can read more to Mr Lee's message than civil obedience and brainless deference to authority. The evidence for a richer interpretation lies in Singaporean history and Mr Lee's own political achievements.

It is worth remembering the emergence of independent Singapore, and that country's love-hate relationship with its larger, more powerful neighbour and former sovereign, Malaysia. Mr Lee mentioned during a lunch talk in Hong Kong how the memory of Singapore's racial riots in the early 1960s, and the bitter 'divorce' that they foreshadowed, still pained him.

When Singapore was expelled from Malaysia  in 1965, Mr Lee's political prospects were suddenly constrained to a tiny, weak city state full of slums. The city was cut off from Malaysia's vast supplies of cheap energy and resources.

With grit, guts and realpolitik, Mr Lee then engineered Singapore's astonishing rise to prosperity with minimal support from Kuala Lumpur.

Flash forward to 2004. Hong Kong faces stiff competition from its bigger, more competitive neighbour, Guangdong.

Hong Kong's chief executive, unwilling to risk the wrath of the local population by cracking down on peaceful street demonstrations, tries to appease the mainland by behaving with less independence towards Beijing than many Chinese provincial governors do.

His obsequious conduct does little to reassure Beijing - which, in fact, reaped enormous international goodwill for its tolerance of the Hong Kong demonstrations - but fuels jealousy and resentment among mainland provinces not granted the political autonomy and preferential economic support enjoyed by the special administrative region.

A gutless performance indeed.

When  President Hu Jintao - far more popular in Hong Kong than Mr Tung - visited Macau in December last year, he took pains to distance himself from the hapless chief executive. After treating Mr Tung to an embarrassing public tongue-lashing, Mr Hu made a beeline for Guangdong  - Hong Kong, it seemed, was not worth his time.

When Mr Lee warned Hong Kong this week that 'the same tap that was open can be shut' - referring to the favours Beijing grants the territory, such as the Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement  - most assumed it was simply a warning to  democrats not to push their luck.

To be sure, Mr Lee has little love for those clamouring for universal suffrage and direct election of the chief executive. He sees street demonstrations not through the idealism of liberal democracy, but as a tough practitioner of  realpolitik,  where demonstrators are either manipulated towards Machiavellian ends, or simply crushed.

Ironically, Mr Lee's own success points to an unexpected conclusion: Hong Kong can risk agitating for democratic change. Beijing can shut off the tap, and the city can still prosper, just as Singapore did in the 1960s.

This isn't an argument for sovereign independence - that would be illegal. Even in 'democratic' Hong Kong, there are limitations to expression that must be observed, just as Mr Lee points out.

But badgering Beijing, begging bowl in hand, while denying Hong Kong's legitimate aspirations for a more open democratic system in order to curry favour at the centre, has produced disastrous results: both Beijing and the Hong Kong populace are displeased.

'You can make the life of your next chief executive onerous and burdensome by making demands which you know he can't support,' said Mr Lee. 'Or you can accept that there are these limits and within those limits, you can thrive and prosper.'

It is certainly conceivable that, should Hong Kong  people persist with their irritating demands for a fully democratic political system persist, China could 'shut off the tap' and channel its beneficence to competing regions such as Guangdong.

Maybe that would not be such a bad thing. If Hong Kong shows it can succeed on its own, it will ultimately be in a much stronger bargaining position as it integrates economically with the mainland.

Ironically, the salient lesson of Mr Lee's career is this: even if China were to withhold its largesse from Hong Kong, the city could nonetheless prosper - if only it had a street fighter at the helm.



Knuckleman shows how HK can box clever no matter the odds