It pains to me to say Hong Kong is NOT over (Part 2): not if we try
It pains to me to say Hong Kong is NOT over (Part 2): not if we try
Hi folks, welcome to Part 2 of my series on Hong Kong, the city where I call home.
Last time, I laid out my key argument for my belief that “Hong Kong is not over”, that Hong Kong still preserves a fundamentally different system from the rest of China, and that the national security law (NSL) is only necessary for long-term prosperity. However, my belief is not blind, I see two serious issues that will prevent Hong Kong from being great again, one is self-castration and potential over-interpretation of the NSL, which is a new problem. For Part 2, I will deal with another problem, a decade-old, if not a century-old problem, a problem only people with actual stakes on the ground (not foreign tourists like Stephen Roach) will be able to appreciate. In the end, I will also lay out my vision for Hong Kong - including Hong Kong’s true potential, should these problems be tackled.
A city with no political history
After Part 1 was published, I (understandably) had some debates with others. In those debates, I had this feeling that the main difference between me and my debate opponents is that while I think it’s time to move on now, many of them would want Hong Kong to stay where it was: the previous status quo, a city with its own rules, being Chinese only in name, but nothing else, the Hong Kong that only existed in nostalgia. For me, they want to preserve the “apolitical” Hong Kong.
Indeed, Hong Kong has always been only lightly touched by politics. In ancient times, Hong Kong was no more than a tiny fisherman’s village on the periphery of the empire. Even one of its early brushes with history only served as a tiny, albeit tragic, sidenote of it: Chased by Mongolians, the last two boy emperors of the Song dynasty, Zhao Shi and Zhao Bing temporarily stayed at those barren rocks that are today’s Kowloon district for some time. Zhao Shi later died not far from Hong Kong due to post-drowning illnesses, while the 7-year-old Zhao Bing was famously held by Lu Xiufu to jump off into the sea, committing suicide after all was lost. Today, where the boy emperors stayed in Hong Kong is the place called Sung Wong Toi, or the Terrace of Song Emperors. There is even an MTR station there bearing the same name now.
That’s as much as the pre-modern history of Hong Kong.
Even when it became a British colony, politics was not at center stage. It’s a free port in the colonial system, where commerce and finance took place, where mainland refugees and revolutionaries in different periods of history could flee for temporary solace, where opium traders, coolies, lawyers, bankers, taipans, clubgoers, foreign navy men seeking fun at Wanchai, all co-mingled with each other - but no politicians and no political operatives. Colonial rulers cracked down on communists and Kuomintang with no distinction. The name of the game was simple: do not mess with politics, do not challenge Her Majesty’s government, mind your own business, and you will be fine.
Being apolitical has been a core attribute of modern Hong Kong. But it is only a mirage. It may work in a colonial system. After all, the British rule over Hong Kong was based on a temporary lease, so having no politics was okay. But when Hong Kong was folded back into China’s arms, that mirage finally reached its inevitable dissolution.
But politics in itself is not a problem. Most places in the world operate with politics. What is politics anyway? Politics is a mechanism whereby the will of diverse constituencies of a society forge consensus on proper governance and the way forward. The democratic process is such a mechanism. But so is an authoritarian system. And if politics are not compatible with time, it will break down, and a new consensus will be forming. When senate politics no longer worked, Rome morphed from a republic into an empire. When imperial rule couldn’t be sustained, the Qing Dynasty fell, and the idea of a “republic” was firmly set in the Chinese imagination. Democratic or authoritarian, they are all at least “political”, as opposed to “apolitical”.
In such light, Hong Kong’s apolitical tradition is an abnormality. In fact, my key argument is that it’s precisely this lack of politics - lack of a working mechanism to forge consensus - that’s the biggest problem of the post-Handover Hong Kong.
Take a breath, and let that sink in for a while.
This may not be comprehensible at first glance, so let me explain in detail.
Hong Kong’s “butler government”
In political terms, HK is a freak. Under colonial rule, political activities were stifled, and there had never been a genuine process of political formation. In the end, what was handed over to China in 1997 was a self-governed city, while China, the post-handover sovereign, deliberately stayed away from directly meddling in local politics, fearing any such action would prompt outsiders to question the sincerity of the “1 country, 2 systems” (1c2s) formula.
What this cocktail of historical serendipities brought about was a unique government system run by a Hong Kong political elite who were born out of the civil service, but unskilled in political operation and lacking political vision. They are good and super diligent with administrative work but have zero ability to forge political consensus. They are not election campaigners like those in the West, nor are they cadres forged through decades of grassroots work and party indoctrination like those in mainland China. In short, the HK Government (HKG) is staffed with bureaucrats, civil servants, and “butlers”, from top to bottom - but there are no politicians.
There have so far been 5 chief executives (CE )in Hong Kong’s history, and at least 3 of them fit this mold. Carrie Lam, the 4th CE overseeing the historic 2019-2020 protests, was a star pupil at school and began working as a career bureaucrat in Her Majesty’s government immediately after graduating from HKU in 1980. Many of her bizarre moves during those protests, such as the ban on wearing masks, could only be understood as coming from someone who spent decades working through the bureaucracy, but seldom talking to the real people.
The current CE, John Lee, joined the Royal Hong Kong Police Force as young as 19 years old and has been a policeman almost all of his adult life. Now this career policeman chairs one of the world’s largest financial centers. In American political terms, this phenomenon is the equivalent of a life-long CIA analyst or FBI operative becoming the president, a representative of the deep state (in the Trumpian sense) taking center stage.
Maybe the archetype of this “butler government” is the 2nd CE, Donald Tsang, a career civil servant through and through. Donald was famously always dressed with a proudly dangled bow tie, just like a butler. Years later, when he was convicted and sent to prison for corruption, one of his listed crimes was using his private credit card rather than a government card to pay for hotel stays, only to accrue for his family some air mile rewards. A little pathetic for the “boss” of Asia’s World City, isn’t it?
Now, I am not belittling butlers. I think butlering is a classy and admirable profession. A great butler is maybe at the pinnacle of the service industry. Indeed, Hong Kong’s civil service force is universally recognized for its great and clean service quality. And what else other than good service should people expect from a civil service?
The real problem is that if the HKG is a butler government, who are the masters of the house?
Now, you may jump at me and point out that the real master is Beijing, that the real ruler of Hong Kong is not CE, but the “western district”, where Beijing’s liaison office resides. This is true to some extent, but it only works for key political matters, often of the constitutional type. The vast majority of day-to-day affairs are still directly handled and decided by the HKG itself. One only needs to look at the 2019-2020 protests to see my point. Many people who were not familiar with Beijing’s way of thinking had the fear that the PLA would storm out of their army barracks at some point, risking another Tiananmen. In reality, not a shadow of PLA was seen at all, even when tear gas raged around its headquarters in Admiralty. In the end, the protests were handled exclusively by the Hong Kong Police Force.
Many people also like to say the real rulers of Hong Kong are the few real estate families. I have to say this claim is more credible than the previous one. If you ever live in Hong Kong, you will quickly notice that all aspects of your life, from housing to electricity, from foodstuffs to telecom, from buses to trams, are all controlled by a handful of families. No major policies in Hong Kong are rolled out without consulting the opinions of these families.
Yet, just like for Beijing, those families could only affect politics in a murky way. There are no clear pathways for their influence, and none of these families can ever claim publicly that they are the masters. The moment they make that claim, they will be politically dead. Power, if can’t be wielded publicly, is not real power, but something that can be canceled at any time. So they are no real masters, only some powerful whisperers.
Ultimately, we would want real masters of Hong Kong to be Hong Kongers themselves. Just like in any normal city, the city’s mayor would be graded on how well s/he does for the people of that city. But things get tricky here.
One tragic thing about the so-called “pro-democracy” movement in Hong Kong, is that it is hard to separate two different ideas: pro-democracy and pro-independence. These two were intertwined together, and it is one-sided to deny the existence of either one. Many Western watchers only like to highlight the “pro-democracy” part while ignoring the “pro-independence” part, as shown by this debate I had with
. This view fails to see China’s legitimate need to prevent an existential crisis at the national level.However, many Chinese watchers also commit a similar error of not seeing the legitimacy of the “pro-democracy” demands from the Hong Kong people. There is real discontent among the people, and this discontent has no real channel to form a political voice. In quashing the movement, the legitimate pro-democracy ideas become collateral damage. The result is, to this day, it would be a joke to suggest to regular Hong Kong folks that their interests are well-represented by the HKG.
So, it turns out, in the house where the HKG performs their butler job, the master is, hold your breath, no one! And here lies the core problem of a butler government: a lack of a mandate. Hong Kong is this “master-less”, but “butler-full” house. The butler can tell cleaning ladies to sweep here and there, and tell cooks to do this or that dish. But for what? For whom? Going where? These are not questions a butler is in a position to answer.
Such kind of setup has clear consequences. The butler government may be exquisitely good when dealing with matters that already have a procedure in place. But we are not dealing with those matters right now. What we are dealing with is a changing world, with widening conflicts, an increasingly fracturing society, a local economic crisis, and a loss of confidence from international businesses and investors… In a moment like this, we need a government capable of laying out bold visions and launching bold reforms. This is not the job a butler can do. A butler can’t manage a house that’s breaking apart.
And this particular butler does have a long record of incompetence when faced with truly difficult tasks. One obvious example is the housing policy failures. Hong Kong has been notorious for high property prices and “caged homes”, where a large number of the poor lived. In the meantime, only 25% of Hong Kong’s land is residential area. 40% are covered by beautiful country parks. For the remaining 35%, according to Ken Chu:
most of these areas are wetlands, grasslands, sites of special scientific interest or areas near country parks where development is restricted but not completely prohibited. Some of that 35 percent is being left idle, particularly rural land in the New Territories or on outlying islands, if it is not being used as brownfields.
It’s relatively understandable when the country parks are left untouched for land use, but I always couldn’t wrap my mind around why this 35% is not tapped into for housing. Instead of building on land that already exists, the HKG once opted for a massive, super-costly land reclamation project (that means filling the sea with land) called “Lantau Tomorrow Vision”, which had little hope of ever launching. (They all but dropped this plan now.) Clearly, for some reason, the HKG is simply not powerful enough to battle the vested interests and do the obvious right thing. As
, a columnist and ex-Chief Editor at SCMP commented, this was a disgrace.Now contrast that with Singapore. Hong Kong is 1.5 times larger than Singapore, but Singapore is not struggling with serious housing problems at all. Why?
People like to compare Hong Kong with Singapore these days, citing how many people and businesses have fled to Singapore from Hong Kong. But what’s the real difference between Hong Kong and Singapore? Both territories were former British colonies. Both are globally important trade and finance centers. Both have advanced common law legal systems. Is Singapore freer than Hong Kong? I can hardly say so. Singapore is a famous nanny state, where life is highly regulated in order to maintain social harmony.
Is Singapore more democratic than Hong Kong? At first glance, you may think not. Singapore is at best a one-party democracy, where the People’s Action Party (PAP) has ruled non-stop, while Hong Kong has a multitude of political parties and a pretty chaotic legislature. But, I have to say, in some sense, Singapore is much more democratic than Hong Kong. This “democracy” is not reflected by the superficial count of political parties, but by how well public participation can be mobilized into the political process. The real difference between Hong Kong and Singapore is precisely that Singapore has PAP, a highly efficient political machine, while Hong Kong only gets a butler. Why Singapore’s housing problem is far less severe than Hong Kong's? Because, Singapore has this competent political leadership, with a clear mandate from the people to do the right thing with whatever means necessary.
We can even contrast today’s Hong Kong with Hong Kong’s own past. Sir Murray MacLehose, Governor of Hong Kong between 1971 and 1982, was believed to be one of the most consequential and most beloved colonial Hong Kong governors. During his tenure, he oversaw gigantic social, economic, and political reform programs that completely transformed Hong Kong’s outlook, ranging from setting up the ICAC to combat rampant police and government corruption, to the construction of the Massive Transit Railway, to setting up the country parks, to massive public housing programs and satellite towns like Sha Tin. Many of the things we love and cherish about Hong Kong today were only created during the MacLehose Era.
Why was Sir MacLehose so powerful? Where did he derive his power from? Who did Sir MacLehose answer to? None other than Downing Street and Westminster, of course. In the old colonial structure, he had the full mandate vested in him to do whatever he thought may be necessary to make Hong Kong great.
What the MacLehose experience shows is that a clear mandate is always better than no mandate. A good house needs a good butler, but more importantly, it needs a good master, whatever source that “master” draws power from, from the people or from a colonial empire.
Hong Kong’s rightful place in the world and how should we reach there
Eventually, this dysfunction of the political system will stop Hong Kong from reaching its full potential.
And what is Hong Kong's potential?
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