Exclusive | Beijing ‘under no illusion’ apparent calm in Hong Kong means city no longer has radical supporters, former city leader CY Leung says
- ‘I don’t think anyone, Beijing included, has the illusion of being able to change the political situation in Hong Kong overnight,’ Leung Chun-ying says
- He urges young Hongkongers to travel to mainland China and see for themselves the lives people have
Beijing recognises that Hong Kong’s political situation will not change overnight despite the recent years of apparent calm, former city leader Leung Chun-ying has said as he called for more to be done to win over the supporters of radicals.
In an exclusive interview with the Post, Leung, who is now the city’s only vice-chairman of Beijing’s top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), said it was too early to conclude if the social divisions from the social unrest in 2019 had healed.
Work had to be done to make Hong Kong residents, especially those previously cynical about mainland China, understand the prospects there and to learn more about their country, he said.
“I think we should take a long-term view on the political situation in Hong Kong. It is not going to be changed overnight. I don’t think anyone, Beijing included, has the illusion of being able to change the political situation in Hong Kong overnight,” the former chief executive noted.
“Because, after all, if you assess the situation by the percentage and the number of people who voted for the opposition, particularly people who voted for the more extreme members of the opposition, it’s actually quite a large number. It’s much larger than the number of people who emigrated.”
There have been no official statistics on the number of people who moved overseas, but Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu last year acknowledged an emigration wave that has created a brain drain in his policy address, noting the local workforce had shrunk by about 140,000 over the previous two years.
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Official figures in the United Kingdom, meanwhile, suggested a total of 123,800 Hongkongers had arrived in the country as of August this year since a new route to British citizenship started in January 2021, followed by Beijing’s implementation of the national security law in the city.
Leung said they might have moved for personal, business or family reasons, but even if it was assumed everyone emigrated for political reasons, the number who voted for the extreme end of the political spectrum in Hong Kong was still larger than those who had left the city.
When Leung was city leader in 2016, about 2.2 million people voted in the Legislative Council election, a record number. Among them, about 367,800 residents cast a vote for eight localists and radicals vying for a seat. That was the last Legco election to include opposition parties.
In 2021, the country’s top legislature decided to overhaul Hong Kong’s politics in the wake of the 2019 social unrest, in which all levels of the city’s electoral system went through a makeover, including the Legco and chief executive elections, followed by the district council election – slated for December 10 this year.
“I think we need to take a long-term view, and we need to sort of work on this part of the population. Hopefully, people will be more rational about Hong Kong’s relations with the rest of the country,” he said.
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“When I said we should take a long view, I mean as well that we should be very careful. We shouldn’t look to change the political outlook of our people, particularly the young people, overnight. But again, I don’t think anyone out there, Beijing included, has this wish in the short term.”
As a CPPCC vice-chairman, Leung suggested one of the ways would be to encourage the city’s young people to go to the mainland and see for themselves, no matter whether it’s some neighbouring cities like Nansha or Shenzhen, or even “far-flung corners of the country” such as Heilongjiang or Xinjiang.
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“I would recommend to young people in Hong Kong that they are interested in, for example, wines, that China is becoming a big wine country … Go and spend time in the summer, harvest season, in a vineyard … and do some star gazing in [China’s northwestern] Ningxia,” he said, pointing to mainland China’s answer to the famous Bordeaux region.
“But we don’t need to talk politics. Just go and see for yourself. See the kind of life that people have and form your own view.”
He said similarly, people should form their own view on Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative based on actual experience, and not based on what they hear from others.
The belt and road blueprint refers to Beijing’s plan to link economies in Asia, Europe and Africa into a China-centred trade network.
“We need time. We shouldn’t rush. We have this period of calmness in which to do such work: to encourage people to go to the mainland to see for themselves,” Leung said.
