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Letters | Why Hong Kong’s protest crisis cannot be resolved by a simple reading of the Basic Law
- Given Hong Kong’s capitalist society and common law system, it is inevitable that references will be made to Western democracies when discussing how universal suffrage should be implemented in the city
- If the city had had universal suffrage, officials might not have employed heavy-handed tactics to press forward with the extradition bill
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Mr Alex Lo’s recent article on “Why we don’t have universal suffrage in 2020” (January 13) actually provides us with another opportunity to reiterate the need for genuine universal suffrage in 2020, instead of his preference for the pseudo universal suffrage package vetoed by the legislature in 2015.
Like your learned columnist suggested, Hong Kong’s democratic system is indeed complicated. To my surprise, without making an attempt to understand how foreign democracies operate, he was quick to reject foreigners’ political beliefs because of their alleged ignorance or superficial understanding of our democracy.
Mr C.Y. Leung, the former chief executive of Hong Kong, had taken a similar but softer tone when he wrote to the Post on January 10 (“On democracy, Hong Kong can’t have its cake and eat it too”). In rejecting Western democratic ideologies, Mr Leung relied directly on parts of provisions in the Hong Kong Basic Law and concluded that it would be a “mistake” for Hong Kong to follow a “Western-style chief executive election”.
It would appear that, to him, the answers to the demand for democracy and the civil unrest are as easy as reading the Basic Law.
In fact, the idea of universal suffrage is not entirely unfamiliar to the Basic Law. The term appears twice in Chapter 4 of the Basic Law titled “Political Structure”.
Universal suffrage may not be the most ideal mechanism for selecting prominent political figures. However, had universal suffrage been genuinely implemented in Hong Kong, it is difficult to envisage that city officials would have employed heavy-handed political tactics to press forward with the now-withdrawn extradition bill.
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