China
has no choice
but democracy in Hong Kong
By
Jonathan
Power
July 16, 2003
LONDON - When six years ago the British lowered the
Union Jack on their last remaining important colony, Hong
Kong, Chris Patten, the governor, buried his face in his
hands, for the entire world to see, and felt the
profoundest sentiment a proud and ambitious politician
could experience - failure. It was indeed a personal
failure to be added to his other great misfortune, the
timing of elections back home in Britain that made it
impossible for him to become prime minister. But on that
damp evening it was the people of Hong Kong, those who
knew him well could tell, that pierced his conscience.
The British had let them down. They were giving up a
colony having unaccountably failed to bequeath it with a
functioning democracy.
In every country except Palestine in 1948- when the
top British officials literally dropped the keys to their
secretariat on the steps of the closed UN office before
flying out at midnight- the British left behind an
elected leadership and a popular elected
legislature. Yet even when the British did this
right, in almost every case, seemingly built into the
decolonization process, there was a tragic mistake that
would work over time to undermine the stability that the
old imperial Empire had prided itself on.
In India, the jewel of the crown, the British, thanks
to a series of imperious and wrong headed decisions made
by the viceroy, Earl Mountbatten, to whom London had
unwisely entrusted to much power, the British left as
hundreds of thousands people were dying in the carnage
triggered by the last minute division of the subcontinent
into a secular Hindu dominated state and a religious
Islamic one, Pakistan.
In his new book, "The Dust of Empire", Karl
Meyer records how Mountbatten swept aside all the
compromises that Mohammad Ali Jinna, the leader of
India's Muslims, would have been able to accept and Prime
Minister Jawaharlal Nehru at least to swallow, and
decided for partition.
In Africa, boundaries were the least of Britain's
worries. These had been settled by joint imperial diktat
at the Conference of Berlin in 1884. But experience was
another matter. Whilst the British had known for a long
time that India would have to go its own way, in Africa
the idea was resisted, at least until the 1960s when
suddenly, too suddenly, a Conservative government
believed it had to give way before the rising agitation
of the black middle class for independence, although it
meant, as in Zambia, leaving when there only 17
university graduates. But even in those territories where
the British had done better than that there was a dearth
of home grown experience in dealing with the great issues
of the modern African world- economic development and
inter-tribal governance. Africa quickly fell part, as
Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist, put it, and now
almost everywhere countries are having to be put back
together, brick by brick.
In Hong Kong it was rather different. On the one hand
the British had made such a success of giving a paternal
guiding hand to instinctive Chinese go-getting that by
the time of the shedding of the colonial burden Hong Kong
was such a powerhouse in every modern way- economic,
financial, administrative, medical, educational and
artistic- that there was no doubt that the deepest
foundations had been dug for life ahead. But on the other
hand, the British, until the time of the premiership of
Margaret Thatcher, seemed to think they could rule this
exceptional corner of the world for ever, despite the
fact that British rule rested on a fast expiring lease
from China. And, even if Thatcher with her forthright
common sense could see what others couldn't, she was as
blinkered as any past generations had been on failing to
see the importance of the need to plant deep the seeds of
democracy. Only when Chris Patten was appointed as the
"last governor" did Britain wake up to its
responsibilities and he made a desperate, but inevitably
flawed, last minute attempt to introduce democracy. In
the end he was outmaneuvered by the Chinese. Beijing knew
that the people with money in Hong Kong, the capitalist
barons, wanted to ingratiate themselves with the new
master-to-be. They were able to create a shadow
government out of this class and its supporters and
simply moved them into place, ignoring the
Patten-reformed legislature, the moment the Chinese flag
was raised.
But Patten did leave something behind, a commitment by
China that Hong Kong would move towards democracy in
2007. China knows if it is ever to woo Taiwan it is going
to have to honour that promise. The massive demonstration
in Hong Kong on July 1st against a new security bill and
by implication in favour of more democracy has made that
promise even more difficult to break. Beijing really has
no choice to take up what is in fact its only option. If
it wants the stability and economic success in Hong Kong
it craves for, democracy is the solution. Whilst it is
struggling to work out this difficult conundrum its
"viceroy", chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, will go on
making more awful mistakes just as Mountbatten did and
make life for everyone more difficult. It's up to Beijing
to see the way ahead with a rather clearer eye than the
British did in 1947.
I can be reached by phone +44
7785 351172 and e-mail: JonatPower@aol.com
Copyright © 2003 By
JONATHAN POWER
Follow this
link to read about - and order - Jonathan Power's book
written for the
40th Anniversary of
Amnesty International
"Like
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