After the extradition protests, it’s time to be pro-Hong Kong, to fix the leadership crisis and liberate the city’s potential
- The unprecedented protests have focused an avowedly apolitical and disparate city like never before. Hong Kong’s challenges run deep and can’t be addressed under the current system. Only a change that brings in critical voices can break the impasse
Unprecedented peaceful protests – student marchers joined by parents, young children, the elderly, those with disabilities, Christians, labour and business groups – have brought Hong Kong to a halt. Not physically – the city is hard-wired for work – but philosophically.
As prominent local barrister Margaret Ng Ngoi-yee put it, you may be safe now in Hong Kong but after the amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance is passed, you would no longer be safe. The sudden knowledge that the law would affect anyone visiting, in transit, or doing business in the city unleashed deep unease across broad swathes of society, including among foreign chambers of commerce, banks and multinationals with regional headquarters here.
Yet, at its heart, the issue is about vision – or the lack of it. Hong Kong faces a crisis of leadership in a system where the chief executive is selected rather than elected. In this top-down structure, there is no accountability to the people. Hong Kong's chief executives remain so divorced from realities on the ground that we have reached a debilitating impasse.
The city’s leaders have not gone through a gruelling democratic system. Candidates like Lam come from the civil service, where their work may have been exemplary but, as leaders, they have failed miserably. There is a yawning difference between a bureaucrat who takes orders and a leader with vision.
This has not happened in Hong Kong. The entire chain of command is focused on presenting “good” news to superiors and inflating the ease of unpopular tasks. Without critical feedback, the city’s leaders are left to flounder.
As the city slid into partial paralysis, the chief executive could easily have hopped into a helicopter and seen for herself the extent of the outrage. Elsewhere, government heads are quick to visit the scene of a big event or disaster to get a sense of things first-hand, but this rarely happens in Hong Kong.
Extradition protests: yet another self-inflicted crisis for the government
The city's rude wake-up call has galvanised political awareness and participation in a city long uninterested in the minutiae of government. The social contract has been simple: handle the niggles of administration and we'll get on with making money.
Curiously, at the time of the handover, none spoke of self-determination or participatory democracy. These ideas have only emerged later, through years of neglect as housing prices skyrocketed and young people despaired of ever living the dream. The street shenanigans now ensure that the city will never forget.
How best to salvage the situation? Beijing is never one to compromise, especially under duress. And, with a string of spectacular chief executive flame-outs keenly observed by their arch-rivals the US and Taiwan – the ultimate prize – this is an issue of face.
The city can grind on, slowing business to a halt. The central government could remove Lam, at once delighting students and alarming them further with proof of the sinister “Beijing hand”. Lam could do the honourable thing and fall on her sword. That would hasten the selection of a new chief executive, but not a student-sympathetic ear at the head of government.
City’s housing needs must not be forgotten
Given the dangerous polarisation of society, it is time to focus on a vigorously pro-Hong Kong agenda. People must liberate the city's potential, perhaps with a chief executive Beijing has confidence in, and a deputy picked from the pan-democratic camp.
Long-term, the citizenry and its more youthful adventurers must recognise that the special administrative region is “an inalienable part of the People’s Republic of China” (Article 1 of the Basic Law) where, “the socialist system and policies will not be practised.” (Article 5). And that the “ultimate aim is the selection of the chief executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee…” (Article 45).
As all this plays out, 7 million pairs of open eyes will make a difference. Hong Kong is finally awake, and nothing will be the same again.
Vijay Verghese is a Hong Kong-based journalist and editor of the online magazines AsianConversations.com and SmartTravelAsia.com
