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A member of "We are Hongkongers, Not Chinese" waves the colonial Hong Kong flag outside the central government's liason office in Western district on October 1, 2012. Picture: Dickson Lee
Opinion
Then & Now
by Jason Wordie
Then & Now
by Jason Wordie

Why Hong Kong independence movement is dead in the water

Long before handover negotiations began, those in the know understood China would never tolerate any separate state on its turf

Jason Wordie
Jason Wordie
Why you can trust SCMP

Renowned British political philosopher Isaiah Berlin noted in 1958, in the essay “Two Concepts of Liberty”, that “concepts nurtured in the stillness of a professor’s study could destroy a civilisation”. History demonstrates that we underestimate the transformative power of seemingly wacky ideas – and the individuals who promulgate them – at our peril.

For instance, Adolf Hitler’s autobiographical Mein Kampf was routinely dismissed as far-out ravings when first published, in two volumes, in 1925 and 1927. Yet within a decade, its chillingly coherent message had brought Europe to the brink of destruction.

Anna Wu (left), who led a delegation of the Hong Kong Observers to Beijing for a week-long visit, is surrounded by reporters on arrival at Kai Tak Airport, in December 1983. Picture: SCMP

All it takes for evil to flourish – the old truism proclaims – is for the good to do nothing. And so it is with nonsense in academic life. Once superficially plausible drivel breaks the species barrier and crosses over from university seminar room to infect the general public, dangerous contagion begins. Interested parties – and Hong Kong has no shortage of those, right across the political spectrum – help feed the contami­nation, which begins its hard-to-stop advance into wider society.

Dr Horace Chin
And so it is with woolly minded “schol­ars” and their advocacy of Hong Kong independence. Dr Horace Chin Wan-kan – employed by that world-renowned centre for intellectual excellence, Lingnan University, in Tuen Mun – and his seminal work “On The Hong Kong City-State”, along with the exponential growth of “localism”, “nativism” and what­ever else this work helped spawn, offers a prime home-grown example.

That some­thing so patently impossible – on so many levels – as Hong Kong independence has prompt­ed such unified criticism from across a spectrum of political opinion is unremark­able, however much it may be reported to the contrary.

While local identity politics have come to the fore in recent years, Hong Kong independence thinking has no serious historical precedent. Plans for constitu­tion­al reform in Hong Kong along the lines of those intended – and subsequently developed – for political indepen­dence in Singapore and the Federation of Malaya were abruptly halted in 1952. The reasons were clear. Behind the scenes, China’s leadership made it plain that they would tolerate the continued existence of British and Portuguese colonies on their southern coast for their own political and economic reasons.

What they were not prepared to countenance, how­ever, was any manifesta­tion of indepen­dent – or even seriously independent-minded – separate territories anywhere in China.

Then chief secretary David Akers-Jones (back) speaks at the Hong Kong Observers' Tenth Anniversary Commemorative Lectures, while Emily Lau Wai-hing, a journalist at the now-defunct Far Eastern Economic Review, looks on.

Over the following decades, everyone involved in Hong Kong’s preparations for return to Chinese rule implicitly recognised this unshakeable fact. Even the 1970s political and social activists who formed the Hong Kong Observers (which included, for a time, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying) did not advocate Hong Kong independence. A high degree of autonomy from China, as a firewall against aspects of Communist rule that many in their own families had decamped to Hong Kong to avoid, was the limit of their ambitions.

Surveyor Leung Chun-ying in 1979.

The root causes of Hong Kong indepen­dence thinking are easy enough to track. Exponentially accelerated “mainlandisation” in recent years has rendered the idea of “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong”, and all those other reassuring 1980s phrases, very hollow indeed. An entire generation has watched from the sidelines as their hometown has lost its way in the course of their short lifetimes.

Eventually, many concluded – rightly or wrongly – that as the local puppet administration is ulti­mately selected and appointed by Beijing (regardless of polite media flannel about “election races” and “candidates”) Hong Kong’s manifold contemporary ills were all the fault of China.
A protester is confronted by a PLA soldier outside Central Barracks.

For these young activists, China had 19 years to win Hong Kong over – and blew it. In the absence of any alternative, many have concluded that the best option for their increasingly beleaguered city is to shout, “Go away!” to the sovereign power.

Back in the real world, however, infan­tile tantrums generally end in tears, and in this instance, the wailing has barely begun.
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