Beijing Supporters "Win" Hong Kong's "Elections"

Hong Kong held elections to its Legislative Council [Legco] on Sunday, and of the 30 seats to be filled by the voters, the "pro-democracy" candidates won 25. In any sane electorate, that is a substantial majority. The People's Republic of China, which has run Hong Kong as a "Special Administrative Region" for seven years, isn't a sane electorate. It has pro-Beijing "functional constituencies" select another 30. The result is a false sense of democracy and a Legco that does as its told. The PRC remains a communist state, if anyone had forgotten, and uses the tricks of the communist trade to stay authoritarian.

The functional constituencies essentially undermine the idea of "one nation, two systems." The system in Hong Kong is rigged against the people just as it is on the mainland. There are 28 of these monstrosities, and four of them use the single transferable vote familiar to many countries with proportional representation. The remainder use the American and British "first-past-the-post." But the method of their election makes no difference because the electors here are drawn from interest groups like bankers and accountants whose very livelihood depends on the stability a content Beijing allows. In short, they have a vested interest in following orders. Whom they elect shouldn't come as a surprise once one understands why they are given this special treatment in the first place.

Of course, it wasn't enough for the Reds in Beijing to stack the deck; they had to cheat once they had slanted the playing field. Human Rights Watch described the conditions in the last few weeks of the campaign as a "toxic political climate," and it also said, "the past 12 months have seen some of the most worrying violations of human rights since the 1997 handover." HRW says there were threatening phone calls and letters as well as vandalism and arson against the pro-democracy forces. One businessman was told to photograph his ballot to prove how he voted or his bottom line would suffer. And most awful of all, a pro-democracy candidate, Ho Wai-to, was arrested in the Guangdong province of the PRC, allegedly for hiring a prostitute -- one suspects he's innocent, and the Beijing government decided to sling mud.

When the communists in Cuba act like this, the conservatives in the US start to froth at the mouth and demand tighter sanctions (which haven't worked against the jackass Fidel Castro for 45 years). When the Chinese do it, Washington mumbles softly about progressing toward democracy -- piffle like this that Colin Powell told AFP reporters Matt Lee and Christophe de Roquefeuil back in May, "we have expressed to the Chinese some of our concerns with respect to the manner in which they are suppressing some of the democratic expressions that come out of Hong Kong. And we stay in close touch with the Chinese authorities, as well as the authorities in Hong Kong." Perhaps, the trade deficit the US has with China keeps the White House soft on communism with a Chinese face.

And as early as yesterday, the pro-Beijing crew were trying to stifle dissent. James Tien, chairman of the Liberal Party (a misnomer indeed), said, "I certainly think this is an appropriate time for Mr. Tung [Beijing's top man in Hong Kong] to reintroduce Article 23." This bans acts of subversion and treachery, which will be defined by the Reds in Beijing and used by police backed up by a justice system that still has a gulag system of camps. The people of Hong Kong stopped this a few months ago by rioting, but with 35 votes out of 60 held by the Reds, rioting may not work.

"Democracy with Chinese characteristics" has been a nonsense phrase used by communists to justify the nation's lack of not only democracy but also liberty for decades. However, in one sense it is true; under Chinese democracy as practiced in Hong Kong, the people don't elected the government. They elect the opposition.


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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