500,000 people demonstration, referendum for universal
suffrage, 79-days Occupy Movement……efforts to fight for democracy in the past
decade or so have not yet paid off. The Chief Executive election of Hong Kong held
on March 26, 2017 remained as a political
game dominated by the power elites, most of whom have direct or indirect
political and economic relationships with the Beijing government. Unlike the past four Chief
Executive elections, the democrats neither boycotted the Beijing-controlled
election nor nominated a candidate to expose the loopholes of the existing
political system. This time, they chose to support a pro-China, and somewhat
anti-democracy, candidate in the name of public opinion.
To understand the
democrats’ weird move, we need to have a brief knowledge about the political
system which has shaped the pro-democracy movement in Hong
Kong over the past two decades. Since the handover of sovereignty
from Britain to China in 1997, Hong Kong
has become the Special Administrative Region of China. The first two Chief
Executives of Hong Kong were elected by the Election Committee (EC), a
committee formed by 800 major political and business figures who purport to
represent the majority view of the Hong Kong
people. As stipulated in the Basic Law, the mini-constitution of Hong Kong written
by the Beijing
government and some pro-Beijing politicians in the 1980s, such undemocratic
setting would ultimately be replaced by one-person-one-vote within 10 years after
the handover. However, the promise has never realized. Through re-interpreting
the Basic Law in 2004 and 2007, the Standing Committee of the National People’s
Congress (NPCSC) of the Beijing government
delayed the progress of democratization and ruled that no universal suffrage
would be held in Hong Kong until 2017. Despite
such promise, the NPCSC has set high threshold for the nominating process of
the Chief Executive election, meaning that such “universal suffrage” could
easily be manipulated by Beijing
and would not be a genuine one. Political reform based on the NPCSC decision
was thus vetoed in 2014 and the Chief Executive election of this year continued
to adopt the previous method of election: a 1200-members EC [1] is going to
decide who is the leader of Hong Kong . Although
some democrats can become a member of the EC under the current institutional
design, their voices are never loud enough to influence the election result [2].
All they can do is to nominate a pro-democracy candidate to make some dissent
voices (like what they did in 2007 and 2012) or use their votes to force the
pro-Beijing candidates to make some concession to the pro-democracy movement.
Capitalizing the
momentum of the 79-days Occupy Movement in 2014 and the growing discontent
towards the Beijing authority in the civil
society, the Hong Kong democrats made a small
breakthrough to obtain more than 300 seats in the EC election last year. Although
this could be a good chance to at least make a stronger democratic claim and advance
the pro-democracy movement, the democrats ruined it all. On the one hand, they
did not come up with a clear goal of what they should do other than stopping
the incumbent Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying, an assertive hardliner and a
pro-Beijing politician, from running for five more years. On the other, they
were obviously unprepared to deal with the landslide support for one of the
Chief Executive candidates, John Tsang Chun-wah, the former Financial Secretary
of the Hong Kong government, in the civil
society.
The success of John
Tsang was unexpected for both the democrats and observers, but it could not be
simply understood as an excellent political spinning project. Instead, it
should be interpreted as a mobilization of political emotions. To compete with
his major contender, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor [3], the former Chief Secretary
of the government, who was widely perceived as Beijing ’s
favourite, John Tsang popularized himself among the Hong
Kong citizens not so much by a drastically different policy agenda
but by an emotional mobilization. Contrary to Carrie Lam, the image of whom was
often seen as the parallel of Leung Chun-ying, John Tsang presented himself not
only as a benevolent leader but as a good husband, a friendly former fencing
coach, a martial arts lover, and a guy who loves the local, grassroots culture
of Hong Kong . Blurring the line between the
public and the private realms, John Tsang showed the public his “authentic
self”, something people long for in the era in which people no longer trust the
politicians and in which political emotions have increasingly been managed [4]
by the Beijing authority in the name of patriotism. Subverting the conventional
wisdom that politics is dirty among the Hong Kong
citizens, John Tsang’s image was so fresh and friendly that people could not
stop following him.
John Tsang’s play
of political emotions was much more than that. Rightly identified anxiety,
anger, and hatred as the dominant emotional climate [5] of the Hong Kong society over the past few years, John Tsang deployed
“Trust, Hope, Unity” as his campaign slogan. By contrasting the current devastating
socio-political situation of Hong Kong with
the good old days of the early 1990s [6] in his propaganda, John Tsang effectively
manipulated the notion of hope to invoke memory of the past society, a
depoliticized society with rapid economic growth. Yet, it was by no means a
progressive political vision. Scholars of Hong Kong
studies have generally agreed that what apparent political stability and
economic prosperity of the 1990s masked were the unquestioning support
of a neoliberalist market economy and the tacit acceptance of an undemocratic
(but administratively efficient) government. If John Tsang was advocating a
political vision, it was more about bringing Hong Kong
back to an era in which all inconvenient truths were hidden and all people were
economic and apolitical animals than mobilizing people to care about the
political future of the city to fight for a democratic, free, and equal
society. John Tsang’s notion of hope
was about the future, but such future was articulated with an unachievable and
unprogressive past. In a political climate filled with anxiety, anger, and
hatred, nostalgia simply fueled hope. John Tsang’s emotional mobilization
worked extremely well. Just before the election, he achieved a support rate of
over 60% in public opinion poll, almost a double ahead of Carrie Lam.
Hope, an emotion
usually used by the leftist and the liberal, was effectively appropriated by
John Tsang. Confronting anxiety, anger, and hatred, John Tsang provided the Hong Kong people with the subversive emotions of hope,
happiness, and optimism. The Hong Kong people
were once again mobilized and unified [7] like what happened during the 79-days
Occupy Movement in 2014. Yet this time they were not standing for the broader
liberal, democratic goals but a politician who was a core supporter of the
neoliberalist market economy, who has never made any concrete pledge to
democratization, and who was at most a rebel within the pro-establishment camp.
Debates, disputes, and disagreements were haunting the democratic camp in the
past two months. Social cleavage was once again deepened due to diverged
opinions regarding whether the democratic EC members should abstain or vote for
a popular candidate who might never help advancing democracy. At the end, the Hong Kong democrats chose to dance with the devil and
cast their votes to John Tsang in the name of public opinion. Indeed, no matter
which side they choose and no matter who wins the election [8], they have
already lost the heart of the Hong Kong
people. The mainstream public sentiment has already chosen to side with a
pro-establishment political figure rather than the democrats and trusted that
he could bring a better “future”.
Losing hope, the Hong Kong democrats are losing ground. The democrats will
have a hard time to regain the momentum of the pro-democracy movement in coming
years. Perhaps the first and foremost task for them is to learn how to do efficient
emotional work in political mobilization. Anger and hatred have been deployed
for mobilizing democratic campaigns in the past two to three years, but these
two emotions alone have been insufficient to make good impact, as previous
campaigns have repeatedly proven. So what would be the right and effective
emotions for mobilizing successful pro-democracy campaigns? It is time for them
to learn from John Tsang.
[1] The number of EC member was increased from 800 to 1200
in 2012 under the political reform in 2010.
[2] All EC members must go through an election. However,
such election has been tightly controlled by the Beijing
government through its invisible hand in the political and business sectors of
the Hong Kong society. This means most EC
members are likely to be pro-China, allowing the Beijing government to control the Chief
Executive election easily.
[3] Another candidate of the election was Woo Kwok-hing, a retired judge.
[4] Sociologist Arlie Hochschild argues in her book The Managed Heart that emotions have
been more and more falling under the control of capitalist institutions whose
goal is to increase consumption. But the more emotions are being managed, the
more people search for an authentic self and genuine expression of emotions.
[5] This is largely the result of the massive Occupy Movement
in 2014. On the one hand, people who support democratization have become more hostile
to the Beijing authority, the Hong Kong
government, and the Hong Kong police, and
become more worried about the political future of the city. On the other hand,
the powerholders have mobilized even stronger counter-movement to halt
democratization. Social cleavage has been deepened over the past few years and
mutual trust has been declining.
[6] Despite their apparent political dispute over
democratization of Hong Kong, both the British colonial government and the Beijing government had joined to carry out a
political-economic engineering project to make Hong Kong
as prosperous as possible before the handover. For the British colonial
government, they wanted a glorious departure. For the Beijing
government, they wanted a respectable city to celebrate the national political
project of re-gaining the sovereignty of Hong Kong .
Political stability and economic prosperity were hence the two main themes in
the dominant discourses of Hong Kong in the
early 1990s.
[7] It is believed that John Tsang’s supporters come from
three camps: the centralists, the mild democratic supporters, and the mild
pro-China supporters.
[8] At the end, Carrie Lam won the election by securing 777
votes, while John Tsang and Woo Kwok-hing could only manage to obtain 365 votes
and 21 votes respectively. It is interpreted that the Beijing authority has done a lot behind the
scenes to help Carrie Lam to secure her votes.
