Opinion | To recover from the Occupy protests, we need to remember how Hong Kong got into this mess

The sentencing of the protest leaders doesn’t really close the case for the city. The protests had their roots in political and social problems of the last administration that need to be solved before they crop up again

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On July 3, 2014, lawmaker Wong Yuk-man (top) threw a glass and documents at chief executive Leung Chun-ying during a question-and-answer session in the Legislative Council. Divisive politics in Hong Kong predated the divisive Occupy protests that would start in September 2014. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Published: 9:00am, 29 Apr 2019Updated: 9:00am, 29 Apr 2019

Anyone who thinks Hong Kong can just move on after the sentencing of the leaders of the Occupy protests must be as naive as the judge said those activists were, in championing civil disobedience in pursuit of democratic reform. What true closure can the sentencing of the activists bring to the competing political narratives of a city that remains deeply polarised five years on?

The movement and those street demonstrations of 2014 might have brought the polarisation to the forefront, but they weren’t the cause of it. The public mistrust of the Hong Kong government, the distrust between Beijing and the Hong Kong pro-democratic camp, and the pent-up social frustration were already there, but they had been swept under the carpet. All the Occupy movement did was lift the carpet.

If we think we can sweep all of our problems under some other carpet and pretend everything is all right, we are seriously kidding ourselves. The Occupy case should be a sobering lesson to all: the longer we sit on our hands, the more likely our problems are to blow up into another round of social unrest.

The distrust between the central government and the pro-democratic camp runs deep, but efforts had once been made for both sides to engage and they had sometimes paid off, like with the 2010 electoral reform. Moderate democrats, even though they were under pressure from others in their camp, chose the much harder path of engagement, negotiation and compromise, and were instrumental in delivering actual changes in the city’s electoral arrangements.

Unfortunately, it was not to be repeated. When we look back on it now, we have to admit the 2010 package – expanding the Election Committee that chooses the chief executive from 800 to 1,200 members and adding 10 seats to the legislature – is huge, especially since we have achieved nothing else.

Since 2010, no one has been willing to take the risk of actually trying to do the hard work required of politicians. Instead of practising the art of compromise, Hong Kong politicians have turned into agents of polarisation. And with that, the distrust between Hong Kong and Beijing has deepened. Add to the mix a chief executive who thrived on political confrontation, and the resulting mess – Occupy protests, violence, riots – was perhaps unavoidable.

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