On June 29, looking relaxed and smiling, Zhang Xiaoming, the head of Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong, told the media that enough had been said on political reform in the past two years and that, from now on, he would  “shut up”  about it.

The message cannot be clearer to pan-democrats still clamouring to reopen a dialogue on constitutional reform with Beijing, or retiring politicians planning to set up new think tanks to do the same. Hong Kong politicians can talk about politics until they are blue in the face, but Beijing officials are sending clear signals they won’t be there as interlocutors.

Concerns have been raised in some quarters – among those who believe Western liberal democracy is the ultimate political system, the “end of history and the last man”, as Francis Fukuyama erroneously predicted more than 20 years ago – that without a chief executive elected with a strong popular mandate, Hong Kong would be ungovernable.

Successive administrations have indeed run into strong political headwinds since their installation. But there are wider and deeper causes for the turbulence than the chief executive’s lack of an electoral mandate. One reason is that Hong Kong’s political system was fundamentally changing even before July 1, 1997.

For most of the time before 1997, Hong Kong was governed as a classic colonial system. With the majority in the Legislative Council being government officials or appointed non-officials, as the saying goes, “the ayes always have it”. Hong Kong was truly “executive-led” and the government was able to accomplish formidable tasks – launch a massive public housing programme, establish the Independent Commission Against Corruption, provide shelter to hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese boat people, and build a new international airport – in record time and with resounding public support.

Moreover, Hong Kong was “free” even before it became semi-democratic. Before 1997, the city already ranked high in Freedom House’s Freedom in the World index. Without democratic elections but with strong rule of law, its people’s rights and freedoms were guaranteed.

The year 1997 – the return of Hong Kong to its motherland – is the most visible watershed in its history. But it would be a fallacy to believe that   the reunification alone made the difference. The year 1997 symbolises change, but massive and transformational changes were already under way well before 1997.

These changes included the digital revolution, which flattened the world and ushered in a new pattern of specialised production around the world, and the economic ascendance of China.

Eighteen years after the reunification, the facts are clear. Hong Kong has not been able to reposition itself as a competitive and high-value player in the global production chain, other than in finance. It has lost manufacturing, and the skills and culture that go with it; and it is losing competitiveness in traditional high-value sectors such as shipping and logistics. The tourism sector, once rapidly growing, is now suffering from the ills of past over-reliance on quick and easy mainland Chinese tourism.

Worse still, Hong Kong has not been able to reposition itself in the new paradigm of a resurgent China. The erosion of pride and self-confidence on the part of Hong Kong people, arising from the economic dominance of mainland China, has compounded Hong Kong’s difficulty in cultivating a sense of national identity and comprehensive understanding of the responsibilities and benefits under “one country, two systems”.

Addressing all these problems requires much more than a popular mandate. In fact, lifting Hong Kong out of the current political impasse, economic decline and social division requires a massive feat of social and economic re-engineering.

A popular mandate no doubt helps. But recent events around the world show that playing a game of chicken with a popular mandate, as in Greece, could take a country and its people into disaster. An exercise in direct democracy to fathom the will of the people, as in the referendum in Britain on Scottish independence, does not necessarily settle political differences. Quite the contrary: such direct appeals to the people could stoke passions and sow the seeds of even greater divisions.

Commenting in 1942 on the classical doctrine of democracy, Joseph Schumpeter pointed out the fallacy of assuming that there is a “common will of the people” that signifies “the common good or interest or welfare or happiness”. The will of the people is never simple or easy to define. It could be highly changeable, fraught with disparate opinions and not always rational. Blindly following the will of the people or deftly manipulating it for short-term gains could produce disastrous consequences.

As Chinese leaders have urged, Hong Kong people should fashion a political system which fits their unique political, social and economic circumstances, rather than hankering after a Utopian system which may not fit. Just as a man cannot walk comfortably in shoes that do not fit, we cannot go forward without building a political system which truly fits our characteristics and needs.

Source: SCMP