September 6, 2016
Nathan Law, right, and supporters celebrating on Monday after he won a seat on the Legislative Council in Hong Kong. He was a leader of the protests that closed major thoroughfares in 2014.
Tyrone Siu/Reuters
HONG KONG — In Canada, it is the Québécois. In Spain, the Catalans. In Britain, the Scots.
Now, China must deal with its own version of a democratically elected indigenous movement, elevated to positions of political power on Sunday in the only place in the authoritarian country where that is possible: Hong Kong.
Six young people — none older than 40 — were elected to Hong Kong’s legislature on platforms that called for the city’s 7.3 million people to decide their own fate, a generation after Britain and China decided it for them by negotiating the handover of the onetime British colony to Chinese rule.
These new legislators stand apart from more established and moderate pro-democracy lawmakers who for decades have tried to work with Beijing while pushing for expanded direct elections. Their success speaks to the cost in public opinion that Beijing has suffered for its steadfast refusal to compromise on popular demands for greater participation in the selection of Hong Kong’s leader next year.
Outside Hong Kong, the Chinese authorities can deal with independence-minded minorities with an iron fist, suppressing movements in Tibet and in the western region of Xinjiang, for example, that are pushing for more autonomy from Beijing. But in Hong Kong, political freedoms are protected until 2047 by a mini-constitution that China agreed to honor to regain sovereignty over the city in 1997.
It remains to be seen how China’s central government will deal with these newly minted lawmakers, all of whom may be politically active for decades to come. The youngest is 23. A move by the Hong Kong election authorities to bar five candidates from running may have backfired. Turnout on Sunday spiked to a record, and the biggest vote-getter of any of the 35 legislators elected in geographic districts was one of the six upstarts, Eddie Chu.
“This is nothing short of a strategic setback for Beijing,” said Zhang Baohui, a professor of political science at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. “These people are now officially inducted into the political framework, and they are going to give Beijing a hell of a time in the future.”
For now, it is unclear how China will deal with the new political force, whose potency was indicated by a July poll showing that almost 40 percent of people in Hong Kong aged 15 to 24 supported independence after 2047. On Monday, China’s government appeared to be silent on the elections, focusing attention on the Group of 20 summit meeting in the eastern city of Hangzhou.
In Beijing, a representative of the cabinet-level office dealing with Hong Kong affairs said that “some organizations and candidates were using the election to promote ‘Hong Kong independence,’ ” Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, reported on Monday evening. Such talk went against the Chinese Constitution and Hong Kong law and was harmful to the city’s wellbeing and stability, the representative said, according to Xinhua.
“We resolutely oppose any form of ‘Hong Kong independence’ activity either inside or outside the Legislative Council, and strongly support the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region’s punishing it under the law,” the representative’s statement said.
But the rise of the indigenous movement looks like a direct result of how Beijing has overseen its relationship with Hong Kong. While the city has its own political and legal mechanisms and coexists with the mainland under a concept known as one country, two systems, China has considerable influence over some of Hong Kong’s most important aspects, a power that is codified in the city’s mini-constitution, known as the Basic Law.
Such was the case in August 2014, when China’s own rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress, set rules on planned elections for Hong Kong’s top official, the chief executive, all but guaranteeing that only candidates supportive of Beijing could appear on the ballot.
That decision led to the huge street protests that shut down several major thoroughfares in Hong Kong for two and a half months beginning that September. All six of the new lawmakers took part in one way or another. One of them, Nathan Law, was among the leaders.
Before the protests, known as the Umbrella Movement, talk of self-determination simply was not part of the dialogue. The failure of the movement, along with subsequent actions by Beijing that were seen as eroding Hong Kong’s autonomy, including the arrests last year of five Hong Kong booksellers, led the six, and many others, to seek a solution to Hong Kong’s problems outside the existing system.
“People have lost faith in one country, two systems, and through the election they expressed their disappointment,” one of the newly elected lawmakers, Sixtus Leung, 30, known as Baggio, said on Monday morning after learning of his victory. “I personally support Hong Kong independence.”
The six young candidates collectively will make up less than 10 percent of the Legislative Council, and pro-Beijing parties are guaranteed a majority because almost half the seats represent industry and social groups, including travel agents and insurance brokers, that are dominated by pro-Beijing lawmakers.
But Mr. Leung, who won election after a pro-independence candidate in his district, Edward Leung (who is not related), was disqualified, said he planned to use his office as a springboard to help promote the independence movement. Members of the Council receive a monthly salary of about $12,000, in addition to allowances for staff members and administration that total almost $1.3 million over a four-year term.
Edward Leung, who backed Baggio Leung in his campaign, said in an interview last week that this new flow of money could be used to fund materials, including books and articles, advocating independence.
“The transfer of Hong Kong’s sovereignty to China was never authorized by the people, and neither was the constitutional Basic Law; it was a deal between Britain and China,” he said. “We were deprived of our right to self-determination. China’s rule over Hong Kong was illegitimate in the first place.”
Past generations of pro-democracy lawmakers in China, known as pan-democrats, generally accepted that Hong Kong was part of China and sought to work within the confines of the Basic Law to open up the city’s government to more democratic participation. The new generation are a different breed.
“There is no way Beijing can accommodate them, appease them,” Mr. Zhang said. “They cannot be bought by Beijing.”
