Hong Kong belongs to China. But the grass-roots political movements responsible for the protests underway in the heart of the city’s financial district would never have taken root in any other Chinese city.
Freedom of speech, assembly and religion and a free press are all enshrined in Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, drafted to govern the city of 7.2 million upon its return to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 after more than 150 years of British rule. Hong Kong residents are guaranteed those rights until 2047, and a legal system inherited from the British helps keep it intact.
It is a system called “one country, two systems” that the leaders in Beijing hope — or hoped — would someday also be applied to Taiwan to encourage its political reunion with the motherland. Taiwan has governed itself since 1949.
Lately, however, Chinese officials, including President Xi Jinping, have been reminding Hong Kong that the first clause, “One country,” is in Beijing’s eyes more important than the second. Hong Kong is not an independent country. It doesn’t have ambassadors, and the People’s Liberation Army garrisons troops in the city, headquartered in a former British military building. Any changes to the Basic Law have to be ratified by the country’s legislature, the National People’s Congress, which is controlled by the Communist Party.
Changes Proposed by China
In 2007, China promised that Hong Kong residents could vote for the chief executive in the 2017 election. On Aug. 31, China’s legislature proposed changes to the electoral process, prompting the recent protests.
Current Process
Beijing’s Proposal for 2017 Election
The chief executive, Hong Kong’s leader, is elected to a five-year term with a simple majority vote by an election committee of 1,200 people.
Each candidate must be endorsed by more than half of the members of the election committee, which will appoint up to three candidates. People can then cast their vote for the chief executive.
ELECTION COMMITTEE
CHIEF EXECUTIVE
ELECTION COMMITTEE
UP TO THREE CANDIDATES
POPULAR VOTE
It is the wording of the Basic Law, and the legislature’s interpretation of what it means, that set off the dramatic street protests in Hong Kong last week. Article 45 of the law, which was ratified in 1990, states that Hong Kong’s top leader, the chief executive, should eventually be chosen “by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.” The government in Beijing has to approve any decision made by Hong Kong voters, according to the Basic Law.
British colonial governors were picked by London, and, since the handover 17 years ago, Hong Kong’s chief executives have been chosen by a small group dominated by Beijing loyalists. The current chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, was elected in 2012 with 689 votes from an election committee of fewer than 1,200 people. In 2007, the People’s Congress ruled that in 2017, the chief executive could be chosen by universal suffrage — one person, one vote.
The hitch: the “broadly representative nominating committee.” On Aug. 31, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee ruled that to appear on the ballot, candidates had to get more than half the votes of the nominating committee, which would be identical to the election committee that had picked previous chief executives. To Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists, this was unacceptable because it guaranteed that only candidates approved by Beijing would be nominated. One of the pro-democracy group’s leaders, Benny Tai, a professor at Hong Kong University, likens it to the way Iran picks its president.
For more than a year, an eclectic group of pro-democracy activists, encompassing university professors, Christian evangelicals, students and a set of lawmakers in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council, had warned Beijing that if it set rules for the elections that did not comply with internationally accepted norms for free and fair elections, they would engage in nonviolent protests in the Central district of Hong Kong, the heart of Asia’s most important financial center. They drew on civil disobedience movements of the past,citing Henry David Thoreau and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Beijing didn’t blink. Now, the movement, called Occupy Central With Love and Peace, in coordination with student groups, is carrying out that threat.
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