Rule that is simultaneously timid, fearful, and harsh: China’s problem is that it cannot free itself of a mind set that values control above all else
Small paper umbrellas, symbols of the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, on display last month. Photograph: Alex Ogle/AFP/Getty Images
Monday 1 December 2014 14.44 EST
China’s obsession with control is the enemy of sensible policy. If nothing that comes from outside the ranks of the governing elite can ever be permitted, and indeed must on principle be opposed simply because it does come from outside, the result will be rule that is simultaneously timid, fearful, and harsh. That is the lesson of Hong Kong, where both the local authorities and Beijing have made misstep after misstep. The result is that the police are still beating and arresting student demonstrators more than a month after the first, peaceful, protests against the Chinese government’s insistence that it must control who can and who cannot stand for the position of chief executive.
True, the number of demonstrators has fallen, as has popular support for their cause. True, the use of force has been, so far, relatively restrained. The situation is manageable, but that does not mean that China has won, if by winning is meant winning over that large proportion of the population of Hong Kong who want their city to have the autonomy and gradually evolving democracy they believe they were promised, and in return for which they were ready to offer a qualified loyalty to Beijing. What China has done in Hong Kong will preserve control but deepen alienation.
It will have a price, too, outside China, where it is seen as yet another indication that compromise and the Chinese communist party are strangers to each other, whether in dealing with non-Han minorities, in territorial issues with neighbours or in relations with other major states.
Taiwan is a case in point. The disastrous results for the ruling Kuomintang in the weekend’s elections there mainly reflect the unpopularity of President Ma Ying-jeou, a good man who lost his political touch, rather than than any deliberate repudiation by voters of his and his party’s relative closeness to Beijing. Yet the fact that the “one country, two systems” formula has been almost completely discredited by events in Hong Kong is part of the context. Mr Ma’s criticism of Beijing in a speech last month in which he supported the Hong Kong demonstrators and called for China to move toward constitutional democracy did him no good electorally. This may have been because voters felt that he acted less than wisely in dealing earlier this year with the Sunflower student movement, which demanded that increased trade with the mainland be monitored to prevent it being used by China to gain political influence in Taiwan.
But it is also true that the narrative of convergence to which Mr Ma tried to appeal has lost its power. The Chinese are prisoners of another narrative, in which China’s rise is a phenomenon benefiting its neighbours as much as itself, in which opponents are seen as a tiny minority manipulated by hostile powers, and in which democracy is a flawed western concept that has no relevance for China. The refusal to allow the British parliament’s foreign affairs select committee to visit Hong Kong is typical of this deeply counterproductive attitude. If there are Chinese officials who understand this, they have yet to show their hand.
