Hong Kong is now facing a series of governance crises: a stagnant economy, an incompetent government void of any legitimacy, its marginalization by the fast-growing cities of Shenzhen, Shanghai and Beijing, and persistent tensions with China over universal suffrage in elections for the territory’s chief executive and legislators.
China introduced highly restrictive conditions on the nomination of candidates for the first direct election of the territory’s chief executive in 2017. Pledging allegiance to the Chinese Communist Party is to be taken as a precondition for becoming a chief executive, legislator or judge.
Hong Kongers have supported the Occupy Central with Love and Peace campaign. China has publicly condemned the pro-democracy activists as terrorists and traitors. It has deployed extreme nationalistic rhetoric and party-controlled propaganda in a smear campaign to justify the use of violence against the protesters.
Revealing the remnants of authoritarian thinking and China’s obsession with total control, this scare tactic is not what Hong Kong needs. It will polarize the division between pro-democracy and pro-Beijing supporters, undermine the fragile governing institutions and strengthen China’s conservative hardliners, seeking to maintain the “status quo” and put a brake on the territory’s democratization.
Beijing’s handpicked Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying (梁振英) has done nothing to mediate tensions between China and the territory. His tenure has been marked by public outrages, rampant corruption and failure to fulfill campaign promises to promote social and economic equality. He has promoted cronies to senior posts in his Cabinet and undermined the freedom of press. In a rally on July 1, demonstrators called for his resignation.
Despite the odds, all is not lost for Hong Kong. The latest US pivot to Asia presents the territory an opportunity to position itself as a laboratory of democratic activism on Chinese soil and gives its civil society much international attention to pursue its own agenda.
To resolve conflicts and regain confidence, a smarter approach for China is to put in place universal suffrage for Hong Kong’s chief executive and legislators. This will require direct and equal negotiation between Hong Kongers and the Chinese leadership.
Joseph Tse-Hei Lee is a professor of history and co-director of Global Asia studies program at Pace University in New York.
World leaders are preparing themselves for a second Donald Trump presidency. Some leaders know more or less where he stands: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy knows that a difficult negotiation process is about to be forced on his country, and the leaders of NATO countries would be well aware of being complacent about US military support with Trump in power. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would likely be feeling relief as the constraints placed on him by the US President Joe Biden administration would finally be released. However, for President William Lai (賴清德) the calculation is not simple. Trump has surrounded himself
US president-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named US Representative Mike Waltz, a vocal supporter of arms sales to Taiwan who has called China an “existential threat,” as his national security advisor, and on Thursday named US Senator Marco Rubio, founding member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China — a global, cross-party alliance to address the challenges that China poses to the rules-based order — as his secretary of state. Trump’s appointments, including US Representative Elise Stefanik as US ambassador to the UN, who has been a strong supporter of Taiwan in the US Congress, and Robert Lighthizer as US trade
Following the BRICS summit held in Kazan, Russia, last month, media outlets circulated familiar narratives about Russia and China’s plans to dethrone the US dollar and build a BRICS-led global order. Each summit brings renewed buzz about a BRICS cross-border payment system designed to replace the SWIFT payment system, allowing members to trade without using US dollars. Articles often highlight the appeal of this concept to BRICS members — bypassing sanctions, reducing US dollar dependence and escaping US influence. They say that, if widely adopted, the US dollar could lose its global currency status. However, none of these articles provide
On Friday last week, tens of thousands of young Chinese took part in a bike ride overnight from Henan Province’s Zhengzhou (鄭州) to the historical city of Kaifeng in search of breakfast. The night ride became a viral craze after four female university students in June chronicled their ride on social media from Zhengzhou in search of soup dumplings in Kaifeng. Propelled by the slogan “youth is priceless,” the number of nocturnal riders surged to about 100,000 on Friday last week. The main road connecting the two cities was crammed with cyclists as police tried to maintain order. That sparked
RSS