All politics is local but this does not mean it doesn't follow global patterns. The row over national education - and the Occupy Tamar movement it provoked - exposes deep fissures within our body politic, most notably an entrenched and growing distrust of the Hong Kong and central governments. This discontent and anger were reflected in the Legislative Council election results yesterday, in which the more "radical" pan-democrats fared surprisingly well over the more traditional democrats in the geographic polls.
The issue of what and how a curriculum subject should be taught may be particular to Hong Kong, but the anti-government anger and distrust is not. Those who have joined mass protests in recent times on the streets of New York, Madrid, Paris, London, Athens and Rome, would have felt right at home in Tamar over the past two weeks. Public servants and leaders are seen as either incompetent, corrupt or both, representing vested interests, whether or not they have been democratically elected.
The public perception that governments may not be representative - and therefore not really legitimate - is widespread around the world. It is not only a problem for authoritarian governments like China's or an "executive-led" one like Hong Kong's, but for major democracies as well. And while we struggle for democracy here, the so-called Beijing consensus and "authoritarian transition" for developing countries have never enjoyed more prestige, or at least a serious hearing, overseas.
As wealth and capital in the last two decades were globalised, so was mass discontent, especially since the onset of the Western financial crisis. It's been more than a decade since Nobel economics laureate Joseph Stiglitz published , a critique of the neo-liberal agendas of transnational economic bodies like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organisation. Its title has proved more prescient than the author knew. There is now deep anger at governments from East to West.
The 18th-century philosopher Rousseau said legitimacy is the first problem of politics. Politicians and citizens are relearning how right he was.
