In today's China, is democracy even possible?
Chang Ping says the Hong Kong debate on universal suffrage raises the fundamental question of whether real democracy is ever possible today under a modern autocracy
Chu Anping, the renowned liberal scholar and journalist who was persecuted and "disappeared" during the Cultural Revolution, once said: "Under the Kuomintang's rule, democracy is a matter of degree, of having more or less democracy. Under communist rule, it is a choice between some and none."
Only two weeks ago, the debate in Hong Kong on how to implement universal suffrage in the 2017 election centred on a question of degree - namely, what kind of arrangements would be the most democratic. On August 31, the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress presented the Hong Kong people with the choice of "either/or" - either Hong Kong accepts an electoral framework that is far worse than it had hoped for, or there'll be no universal suffrage.
On the face of it, this isn't a hard choice to make: some is better than none, and a tiny bit of progress is still progress. But Hongkongers should understand that such limited universal suffrage isn't new even in mainland China.
By law, some 500,000 villages on the mainland elect their own village chief and members of the village council through a "one man, one vote" system. According to the law, "no organisation or individual may appoint, assign or replace the village committee members" and "registered voters may directly nominate candidates".
Direct elections extend even to the lower rungs of the NPC. These include the representatives to the legislatures for districts that are not part of a municipality, counties, autonomous counties, townships, ethnic townships and towns. Not only are these deputies elected by "one man, one vote", political associations and civic groups may also nominate candidates for election. Even regular voters who wish to nominate their own candidate may do so - a group of 10 can jointly propose one.
In other words, the civic nomination that Hong Kong's pan-democrats have been fighting for has long been practised in mainland elections. China has even experimented with the direct election of the heads of townships and towns.
In 1998, a year after Hong Kong's return to the Chinese fold, the small Buyun township of Suining city, in Sichuan , saw the direct election of its chief, touted at the time as the first such election in "new China".
Fifteen people who registered themselves as candidates went through a period of Western-style campaigning, attracting the votes of some 6,000 people. In the end, Tan Xiaoqiu, who was considered the most capable among the candidates, won the election. He served for two terms, and was generally judged to have done a good job as chief.
Similar elections were also held in Shenzhen and other regions, but because they in fact run counter to the law and administrative system in practice, these electoral experiments soon died out.
Meanwhile, across China, the direct election of village heads is understood to be an affair largely manipulated by the government. There have been exceptions, of course, most notably the case of Wukan village in Guangdong.
There, people's anger over land grabs by local officials erupted in late 2011 into a sustained, "do or die" campaign for the right to freely elect their own leadership. The Wukan residents won that fight in early 2012, and were given a taste of genuine autonomy, albeit briefly. Protest leaders such as Lin Zulan and Yang Semao were elected to be, respectively, the village party secretary and a member of the village committee.
It took just one year, however, for Wukan's road to democracy to come to an abrupt end. The village committee that pledged to resolve the land issues did not do so after finding its hands tied. Internal conflicts within the committee also contributed to its disintegration. Before long, villagers were accusing these democratically elected officials of misconduct and corruption.
The cases of Buyun and Wukan have been widely studied. Many analysts would agree that this lesson can be learned: a small-scale experiment in democracy in a larger environment that is autocratic is bound to run into many obstacles, and is destined to fail. In this context, any kind of "one country, two systems" experiment has no way of succeeding.
Hongkongers may not deign to compare their city with Buyun and Wukan. Hong Kong is, after all, much bigger than either of these places. More importantly - as Hong Kong people never tire of pointing out - the city has for over a century enjoyed a tradition of the rule of law, social order, and freedom of speech.
Perhaps Hongkongers don't know that Chinese townships and villages have a history of over 2,000 years of self-rule. Historians have long noted that, in imperial China, the emperor's powers rarely reached down to the counties, and that the clans were largely left to govern themselves in these areas.
The history of "new China" tells us that it's only too easy for an autocratic government to crush a such a tradition. The debate in Hong Kong over universal suffrage once again raises the question of whether real democracy is possible under an autocratic regime.
It's a question many Hongkongers would rather avoid, and the rest of the world would rather not bring up.
