HONG KONG, 8 April 2004 — China’s edict that it must have the final say on how Hong Kong elects its leaders will result in several more years of wrangling over the former British colony’s political rights, analysts said.
Far from ending a divisive row over the pace of reform, the interpretation of the city’s Basic Law miniconstitution Tuesday by a Beijing parliamentary committee had only deepened the dispute, they said.
Failure to address the key issue of how to replace the territory’s leader, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, made more wrangling inevitable said Hong Kong University political analyst Sonny Lo.
“There is no doubt that there will be endless disputes over whether or not the chief executive is elected,” Lo told AFP.
The Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s highest parliamentary body, ruled after studying key clauses in the Basic Law that reform was possible but only with Beijing’s approval.
Democrats have attacked the committee’s interpretation as having rendered meaningless the high degree of autonomy promised to the city at the 1997 handover of sovereignty from Britain to China.
They have vowed to continue the fight to have democracy introduced in 2007 when the next chief executive is to be chosen.
“The ruling was relatively light but it still hasn’t settled whether or not the chief executive will be elected by universal suffrage,” said Lo. He believes the NPC’s move was prompted mostly out of concern that the unpopular government of Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa was unable to govern properly.
Tung’s popularity has been dented by a run of crises last year, including the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) outbreak and mass protests against an unpopular security bill, which has left him politically weak.
The ruling’s imposition of a clause demanding any moves to change electoral law must be approved by the NPC before being put to the Hong Kong people has put Tung in an impossible position, Lo says.
“He has to show to the NPC that there is a consensus for change in Hong Kong. This is a problem for Tung because if he doesn’t accurately report the consensus feeling, the people will feel cheated and he’ll lose whatever credibility he has left.”
A taskforce has been gathering data on Hong Kong’s views on change and Tung is expected to present its findings to the NPC very soon.
With some polls putting support for reform at around 60 percent Lo said the city would be watching carefully to see if Tung tries to water down the findings before his communist bosses.
“(The ruling) will exact a tremendous pressure on the government to provide an accurate consensus report.
“If it cannot then the Hong Kong government will find itself in a crisis of legitimacy — it will have a problem of governability.
Paul Harris, political professor at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University has a more pessimistic view, saying the NPC’s ruling has exposed China’s feelings of political vulnerability.
“Everybody knew China had the power to overrule Hong Kong but everybody wanted to believe it would never use it. Well it has. It shows that the present leadership in Beijing has abandoned the long-term strategy that marked the era of Deng Xiaoping and is now embracing a less constructive ideology.”
