Hong Kong Protests Present a Challenge to Xi Jinping’s Rule

By EDWARD WONG and CHRIS BUCKLEYSEPT. 29, 2014

BEIJING — China’s Communist Party has ample experience extinguishing unrest. For years it has used a deft mix of censorship, arrests, armed force and, increasingly, money, to repress or soften calls for political change.

But as he faces massive street demonstrations in Hong Kong pressing for more democracy in the territory, the toolbox of President Xi Jinping of China appears remarkably empty.

Hong Kong is already a mature, prosperous enclave that has grown relatively immune to the blandishments of mutual prosperity that helped keep it stable for 16 years of Chinese rule. And as a former British colony with its own laws and traditions of liberty, a severe crackdown on mostly peaceful protests would almost certainty backfire here, especially under the glare of international attention.

“On the mainland, as long as you can control the streets with enough soldiers and guns, you can kill a protest, because everywhere else is already controlled: the press, the Internet, the schools, every neighborhood and every community,” said Xiao Shu, a mainland writer who is a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. “In Hong Kong, the streets are not the only battlefield, like on the mainland.”

What Prompted the Hong Kong Protests?

Unrest in Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory and global financial hub, could lead to a long confrontation between the government and demonstrators.

Hong Kong, a British colony until 1997, when China resumed sovereignty, has operated under a policy of “one country, two systems.”
The city maintains an independent judiciary, and residents enjoy greater civil liberties than residents of mainland China. Hong Kong has a robust tradition of free speech.
Democratic groups say Beijing has chipped away at those freedoms, citing an election law proposed last month that would limit voting reforms.
China had promised free elections for Hong Kong's chief executive in 2017. But the government rejected a call for open nominations of candidates, instead proposing that candidates would continue to be chosen by a committee dominated by Beijing.
The current city leader, Leung Chun-ying, has clashed with the pro-democracy opposition. After the crackdown on protesters Sunday, some called for his resignation.

At the same time, Hong Kong has been under Beijing’s sovereignty for long enough now that even modest concessions could easily send signals across the border that mass protests bring results — something the authorities in Beijing seem determined to prevent, mainland analysts say.

Hong Kong’s future, therefore, may rest heavily on whether Mr. Xi has the clout, skill and vision to figure out a solution that keeps the territory stable without sparking copycat calls for change closer to home.

“This is already much bigger than anything the Beijing or Hong Kong authorities expected,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who studies democratic development. “They have no strategy for peacefully defusing it, because that would require negotiations, and I don’t think President Xi Jinping will allow that. Now, if he yields, he will look weak, something he clearly detests.”

Mr. Xi’s record so far — unyielding opposition to political liberalization and public protests has been a hallmark of his rule — has suggested a politician who abhors making concessions. He has fashioned himself into a strongman unseen in China since the days of Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong, and few if any party insiders and political analysts expect him to give serious consideration to the demands for full democratic elections in Hong Kong.

In fact, his strongman style may have helped create the crisis.

The protesters are demanding open elections for Hong Kong’s leader, the chief executive. China has agreed to allow the position to be elected by popular vote starting in 2017.

But China’s rubber-stamp Legislature last month rejected any changein election rules that would open the race to candidates not vetted by a committee that is heavily pro-Beijing. And while there still may have been room for compromise, Mr. Xi met with business leaders from Hong Kong in a closed-door session in Beijing last week to reiterate that the party will not allow political change in Hong Kong, the former British colony of 7.2 million people.

“If he had negotiated from a position of strength,” Mr. Diamond said, “and pursued a strategy of delivering ‘gradual and orderly progress’ toward democracy in Hong Kong, albeit at a more incremental timetable than democrats were hoping for, he could have pre-empted this storm.”

Instead, Beijing has only hardened its position. On Monday evening, a commentary on the website of People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, claimed the upheavals in Hong Kong were instigated by democratic radicals who had sought support from “anti-China forces” in Britain and the United States and had sought lessons from independent activists in Taiwan. It called them a “gang of people whose hearts belong to colonial rule and who are besotted with ‘Western democracy.’”

Such harsh words might, in the context of a mainland Chinese protest, point to an imminent major use of force on the part of officials, followed by arrests, show trials and long prison sentences.

Area of Protests

Thousands of people have been gathering in several parts of Hong Kong since Sept. 24, demanding democratic elections.

But it is doubtful that that is a viable option in Hong Kong. Given the size of the crowd now in the city’s streets, perhaps only the use of force on the level of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre would suppress the protests, absent any political solution. Such bloodshed would greatly damage the party’s legitimacy and jeopardize the city’s standing as a global financial center.

On mainland China, deployment of the green-uniformed People’s Armed Police — a paramilitary force that specializes in crowd control — is virtually guaranteed to quash a protest, and officials across the country, from the Tibet Autonomous Region to Guangdong Province, next to Hong Kong, often fall back on that game plan. But on Monday, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leaders appeared to acknowledge their misstep in quickly resorting to force by pulling back the police.

Mr. Xi has another reason not to give in to the protesters’ demands, said Deng Yuwen, a former editor at Study Times, a party newspaper: any meaningful concessions could inspire rallies on the mainland around other causes.

Hong Kong activists and students “haven’t understood that the central government won’t deal with Hong Kong issues purely in terms of Hong Kong,” he said. “They view Hong Kong in terms of China as a whole. They worry about the reaction in Hong Kong being replicated in the mainland. I don’t think that Occupy Central understands that.”

Yet options remain for compromise if Mr. Xi chooses to pursue them.

One is replacing Leung Chun-ying, the current chief executive, a figure much loathed by the pro-democracy advocates. The call among the protesters for his ouster is almost universal. On one street on Monday, protesters had decorated a bus to resemble a coffin for Mr. Leung. Elsewhere, people denounced a cardboard effigy of his face.

Such a move might be enough to sap energy from the protesters, even though it would be unlikely to meet their demands. If Mr. Leung were ousted, Beijing would almost certainly install someone equally sympathetic to the party.

Another option would be to allow the public to vote for all or most of the members of the 1,200-strong nominating committee that would then select a handful of chief executive candidates for a general election.

“I think that is a solution most Hong Kong residents would go for, and it complies with the Basic Law,” said Mr. Xiao, referring to the constitutional framework of Hong Kong.

There could also be ways for Beijing to appear to change the committee without truly relinquishing control, but even the appearance of compromise might be more than Mr. Xi can muster.

From the start of his tenure, he has spoken to party officials of the need to heed the lessons of the former Soviet Union, which crumbled for a variety of reasons, including what Chinese officials believe was lax control of the different ethnic regions far from Moscow and the satellite states of Eastern Europe.

“In the end, nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist,” Mr. Xi has said of the disbanding of the Soviet Communist Party, according to party documents.

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