History of Hong Kong democracy

Elections in Hong Kong are just plain bizarre. Have they always been this way? Are things getting better or worse?

As a service to readers, we asked tough questions about the history of Hong Kong democracy to a historian at Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

FPP: There’s a weird election underway – an election at which the people of Hong Kong are forbidden from voting. Is this democracy?
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PU: Not by any stretch of the imagination. The only people who can vote are the 800 members of the election committee. Well, I guess we can take comfort from history. In the first public election in Hong Kong, only 187 voters turned up.
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Mind you, only 669 voters were registered in 1888. The election was arguably less attractive than the present ones, since it was for seats for the Sanitary Board. The turnout was 28 per cent.
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In the 1880s and 1890s, there were other attempts to introduce the concept of government elections. But they were largely organized by the business community and were blatantly self-serving.
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FPP: So, no change there!
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PU: The 1889 proposal from the English traders, for example, was that the vote be granted to the right sort of Hong Kong people - namely, male persons of the English 'race' (which numbered 800 out of a population of 221,400).
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The colonial secretary, a British Hong Kong official named Lord Ripon, threw out the proposal and said he would like Chinese faces on the Executive Council. He was laughed at and replaced.
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The next time the Hong Kong man in the street was told he would have a voice in governing himself was in 1941.
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FPP: Are you really saying that the Japanese invaders were more democratic than the British or our current leaders?!
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PU: Yes! The Japanese invaders announced that the British were gone for ever, and local councils formed to run Hong Kong. – but they lost the war and then things changed.
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FPP: That’s amazing – why did the Brits not want to give Hong Kong democracy?
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PU: They did. Straight after the war. The first announcement about real elections in Hong Kong came from the post-war governor, Sir Mark Young, in 1946. He wanted to usher in an age of direct elections and 'a municipal council constituted on a fully representational basis'.
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This caused great excitement. In London, politicians agreed that democratic elections should be introduced in Hong Kong, but were nervous about the timing. Yes, there should be 'a greater degree of native participation,' said Member of Parliament Walter Fletcher in 1947, but 'it is an extremely dangerous moment to do such a thing'. He was referring to the instability caused by the million-plus refugees who had surged over the border into Hong Kong.
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Sir Mark, still a sick man after being ill-treated by the Japanese, retired in 1947, and left his 'Young Plan' for democratic elections in Hong Kong in the hands of his successor, Sir Alexander Grantham.
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Sir Alexander consulted with business leaders and a local Chinese politician, Sir Man-kam Lo, then threw Sir Mark's proposals in the bin. Hong Kong didn't need elections and business would continue with the British acting as benevolent dictators, he said.
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FPP: So it was the business community that threw it out – nothing changes.
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PU: Yes. Some historians believe the late 1940s, when Britain was granting independence to many parts of its empire, was the key opportunity to introduce direct elections to Hong Kong. Later on, China's growing opposition to the concept made it more difficult.
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The subject was next brought up in 1956, when a British Labour Party MP named John Rankin campaigned for votes to be given to the people of Hong Kong. He exposed the glaring weakness in Sir Alexander's business-led argument. Dictatorships were quite plainly a bad thing 'however benevolent', said Rankin.
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The then colonial secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, dismissed Rankin's plea, replying that he detected 'no general demand or need for the introduction of an elected element into the Legislative Council'.
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FPP: What about recent times?
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PU: In the 1960s, it became clear free elections would not be introduced in Hong Kong because China was opposed to them.
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However, the negotiators preparing the Joint Declaration in a series of behind-the-scenes talks through the 1970s and early 1980s, succeeded in getting elections listed. When the Joint Declaration was issued in 1984, it said: 'The legislature of the HKSAR shall be constituted by elections.' Also in 1984, Foreign Secretary Sir Geoffrey Howe said the process would start 'in the years immediately ahead'.
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However, the authorities in Beijing made it known that they did not approve of free, direct elections. The business community, which dominated the Executive Council, took the Beijing complaints seriously, as did the British Foreign Office. The official word was that direct elections would cause chaos in Hong Kong.
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The governors of that period, Sir Edward Youde, until 1986, followed by Sir David Wilson, decided to compromise. They moved ahead with elections, but at a snail's pace. A 1985 election saw 24 members of the Legislative Council returned by 25,206 voters, just half of one per cent of the population. A planned 1988 election did not take place.
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The first direct election didn't happen until six years after the Joint Declaration. In 1991, 18 seats were released for public election, 'balanced' by 42 appointed seats. Sir David indicated that the Hong Kong public might be politically mature enough to select two further seats by 1995!
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But when Chris Patten became governor in 1992, he speeded up the timetable, offering 30 directly elected seats in the 1995 elections, plus he gave all Hong Kong citizens the right to vote for the 30 appointed seats. In other words, we went directly to a type of full democracy -- all seats were occupied by elected people. Chaos was notably absent, and stock and property markets soared.
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In October 1996, a Xinhua report said new arrangements after the handover would 'mark a milestone in the development of Hong Kong democracy'. But, after the handover, Legco was replaced by the provisional legislature, which had zero directly elected members.
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For the 1998 May 24 elections, the number of directly elected seats was cut to 20. The number of voters for the functional constituencies was been cut from two million to 140,000. The 40 seats not filled by direct elections, it was decided, would be given to people chosen by a complex multi-layered system of 'small circle elections'.
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In the late 90s, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa said Hong Kong people will now not be ready for free, direct elections for another 10 or 15 years.
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Now we’ve only got 800 voters, out of seven million people -- the 28 per cent of voters who attended the Sanitary Board election in 1888 now seems like a really fair democratic election!
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Pic: James Parmiento/Creative Commons

Comments

[Grateful]

Thanks very useful document indeed, which other publications took the trouble to put big issues in context like this.

[Gladys]

Welcome, it's nice to see a new publication with a satirical edge on the block.