Hong Kong government shaken by mass youth protests

“Pyrrhic victory” for high-speed train project further weakens government and fuels opposition

Dikang, chinaworker.info

“What’s going on is a revolution.” This is the view of the South China Morning Post’s commentator Michael Chugani (SCMP 20 January). “[Chief Executive] Donald Tsang Yam-kuen should be scared. Beijing should be scared. Our tycoons should be scared,” reasons Chugani. While in reality it is not yet in the grip of a revolution, the territory of Hong Kong, its unelected government, and the government’s overlords in Beijing are unquestionably facing a serious political crisis, one that could take on politically explosive forms in the months ahead. And Chugani’s assessment may yet prove to be right.

Hong Kong has witnessed 10,000-plus demonstrations on three occasions during the first fortnight of this year. Most recently, thousands of predominantly youthful protesters camped outside the Legislative Council (Legco) from Friday afternoon to Sunday morning (15-17 January) in a protest against the government’s new high-speed rail project linking Hong Kong to Guangzhou in mainland China. At its peak late on Friday evening, the anti-express protest assembled 13,000 people. This followed a march for democracy on New Year’s Day that drew 30,000 – three times the turnout organisers had envisioned. Last weekend’s protests included a 120-hour hunger strike by half a dozen youth in the grounds of the Legco. There was also an impromptu sit-down protest by around 1,000 youth chanting “stop rail funding” that blocked all traffic outside the Chief Executive’s mansion.

Carrying a price tag of 66.9 billion Hong Kong dollars (US$8.6 billion) construction of the Hong Kong section of the new railway will set a new world record, costing twice as much as the Channel Tunnel linking Britain and France, the world’s most expensive railway to date (see box below). At root, opposition to the project flows from the elitist and undemocratic nature of the political system in Hong Kong. Rather than opposing another train link on principle, most object to the lack of democratic discussion – with other, cheaper, options rejected by the government, as well as blatant collusion between government and big business. The slogans chanted outside the Legco were “Shameful government, shameful pro-establishment, shameful functional constituency.”

“We don’t need another rail-link to mainland China,” a young shopworker in the demonstration told chinaworker.info. “I think the [Hong Kong] government is only doing this because this is what the Chinese government wants,” she added.

Government “fanning flames of discontent”

The government eventually clinched budget approval for the project after a marathon 25-hour debate (almost one hour for every kilometre of track). But this was a “pyrrhic victory” as the South China Morning Post commented. The government’s high-handed approach succeeded in alienating big layers of the population and further radicalising thousands upon thousands of youth in particular.

“The political costs for the government have been unnecessarily high,” explained political commentator Joseph Cheng Yu-shek of City University in Hong Kong (SCMP, 21 January). He warned, “the authority of the government is in decline,” while the “confrontational mentality of grass-roots social movements is strengthening.”

In a similar vein, an editorial in the South China Morning Post (19 January) declared, “Hong Kong does not have a harmonious government,” adding that the government’s actions were “fanning, rather than dampening the flames of discontent.”

Students, school students and young service sector workers were the mainstay of the mass protest outside the Legco. Following the government’s “victory” in the rail budget vote, demonstrators took up new positions at all the main exit roads from the Legco instead of dispersing as the police has calculated. A rump of pro-government legislators including the transport minister Eva Cheng were forced to clock up several hours of involuntary overtime. One of the trapped legislators phoned to police commissioner Tang King-shing and demanded the police clear a way out – talk about out of touch!

Mass media has been full of speculation about this new and radicalised youth movement, “the post-80s generation”. The dominant political features of this movement are pro-democracy and anti-capitalism. “This is the beginning of a new youth movement in Hong Kong, particularly in the aspect of anti-capitalist resistance,” another young demonstrator, Wilson, told chinaworker.info. “The protest against the high-speed train, which is going to generate great benefit for a small group of businessmen, is a protest against the ideology and value of Hong Kong-style capitalism. This type of resistance has been very rare in Hong Kong – only in the 1967 left-wing riots and anti-WTO protests in 2005 did we see this type of anti-capitalist struggle,” he said.

The character and potential of this movement is shown in the ‘Youtube’ clip below. This shows thousands of youth singing ‘The Internationale’ outside the Legco. Hearing this socialist anthem echo from the streets must have further enraged and perplexed the pro-establishment legislators trapped inside the Legco building. They perhaps supposed they had been transported back in time to Beijing during the student-led protests of 1989.

The causes of this radicalisation of the younger generation are not hard to find. The global capitalist crisis has resulted in one in five under 20s going jobless in Hong Kong, with most wages frozen for the last year in what is already a notoriously low-wage economy. There is growing anger over the blatant pro-rich policies of the unelected government, and deep disquiet over the increasingly repressive stance of the central government in Beijing.

Much media focus since the “Siege of the Legco” has been on the protesters’ alleged violent methods: some small clashes with police – who used pepper spray to push back demonstrators – and the impounding of Eva Cheng and her supporters. In fact, no arrests were made. One demonstrator was injured. For much of the time the event had a festival atmosphere. This reporter saw groups of young men and women moving through the ranks of sit-down protesters picking up litter and discarded plastic bottles. This movement is environmentally conscious!

Dramatic upturn in struggle

The political polarisation taking place in Hong Kong is set to continue with dramatic struggles in the course of the year. The collapse of authority for Donald Tsang’s government is becoming a huge liability for Hong Kong’s real rulers – the capitalist tycoons and the ‘communist’ dictatorship in Beijing. Even politicians from the pro-government camp are increasingly joining in the criticisms of “bow-tie” Tsang who just stumbles from one political fiasco to the next. His predecessor, Tung Chee-hwah, was sacked by Beijing in 2005 after half a million people took to the streets against his administration’s authoritarian security law. Should Tsang also now be dumped, in order to give the Hong Kong administration a facelift, this would mean that none of Beijing’s appointees as Chief Executive have finished their term of office.

All this matters, especially now, as Hong Kong is set to be further convulsed by a battle over universal suffrage (the lack of it). Tsang and his government are trying to sell a package of electoral ‘reforms’ that further delay, until an unspecified future date, the introduction of a one-person-one-vote system of elections. Their package attempts to preserve and beautify the hated functional constituencies, upon which the fate of the government’s high-speed rail venture depended (the final vote was 30-21 in favour – without the functional constituencies the express rail project would have been defeated).

Half the 60 seats in Hong Kong’s Legco (Legislative Council) are not elected by the population but by elite functional constituencies reserved for privileged groups such as bankers, real estate developers, lawyers and businessmen. This system was devised by the British colonial rulers in order to ingratiate the capitalists and layers of Hong Kong’s middle class and reconcile them to British rule. It has been continued under Chinese rule since 1997, and the latest government electoral reform makes no mention of abolishing the functional constituencies. The Chinese regime and Hong Kong’s moneyed elite see these anachronistic “rotten boroughs” as a way to check popular pressure and prevent “radical” political formations winning a majority.

While the mood of Hong Kong people and especially the youth is increasingly anti-establishment, at the same time the mood of sections of the establishment – and this especially the case with Beijing’s selective forays into Hong Kong affairs – is hardening against offering concessions and threatens a tougher response. Both these processes (elements of revolution and counter-revolution) were evident in the high-speed rail struggle. The struggle over universal suffrage could see ten times as many protesters take to the streets, with the potential for new mass organisations of struggle to be built. The impending by-elections triggered by the resignation of five pan-democratic legislators (three from the League of Social Democrats and two from the Civic Party) could potentially become a focal point for this next phase of the struggle.

The Hong Kong polity is divided into two camps: the pro-establishment camp that is pro-capitalist, close to Beijing, and generally supports the unelected government, and the pan-democratic camp, which demands universal suffrage and is critical of the Chinese dictatorship. Within both camps there are several competing parties and trends within the parties. The youth, who for the most part are not affiliated to any party, regard themselves as part of the pan-democratic camp.

“Beijing saw the weekend clash as rioting,” reported Democratic Party legislator Lee Wing-tat. This, claims Lee, is the reason why Donald Tsang shifted to a hardline position after Saturday’s vote. In the days before the weekend protest, Tsang had seemed to offer an olive branch to the youthful protesters. “We really have to better understand young people, listen to their voices and understand their aspirations,” he told the Legco. The Chief Executive’s stance was different after the weekend’s protests. The demonstrators had “violated” Hong Kong’s “core values” (whatever these might be). His Secretary for Security, Ambrose Lee, struck an even more bloodcurdling tone: “I strongly condemn these acts which disturb social order.”

Need for workers’ party and socialist programme

The dictatorship in Beijing, which seems only belatedly to have woken up to what is happening in Hong Kong, will be even more disconcerted by the parallels that are inevitably being drawn with the mass pro-democracy struggle of 1989. “What happened today is the same as what happened at Tiananmen 20 years ago,” said Seto Mei, a spokesperson for one of the demonstration’s organisers, Stop XRL Alliance. “We want the government to stop this skewed policy of collusion and corruption, and we want to fight for democracy.”

The upsurge in militancy among young people is an enormously progressive factor in the situation in Hong Kong. What is needed for this to develop further, however, is the spread of socialist ideas, methods and slogans within the mass movement. Use of the internet and other forms of networking have played a key role in publicising and mobilising the recent protests. There are over 110 Facebook groups against the express rail project and during the ‘siege’ of the Legco, demonstrators used its ‘WiFi’ facility to post appeals on Twitter. Mainland Chinese Twitter users have also been interacting with youth in Hong Kong, despite China’s internet ‘firewall’, passing information about high-speed rail projects on their side of the border.

But while this spread of information is a tremendous aid to the struggle, it cannot be a substitute for physical organisation: to debate and decide the way forward, map out tactics, recruit and train new campaign activists, measure and respond to the establishment’s attacks and repression. The youth must link up with other layers and especially the working class which, as the most numerous and economically powerful class, is the main force for change in society. Through democratic mass organisation, trade unions, and the strike weapon, a workers’ movement with the support and involvement of the youth, students and other layers, can defeat the ruling class and show the way towards a new socialist society.

It was a failure to grasp this point – the decisive role of the working class – that was the main weakness of the student-led Tiananmen movement in 1989. Another crucial lesson from that time is that protest in itself is not enough. It is necessary not only to say ‘no’, or try to force a change of heart upon the powers-that-be, but to have a clear political alternative to their system of rule. This can only mean a socialist alternative – for democratic public ownership and control over the banks and big companies in order to plan production and distribution to meet society’s real needs. The creation of new mass organisations of struggle, run in an open democratic fashion, and particularly a workers’ party that campaigns for such a socialist alternative, these are the essential ingredients in any successful struggle against capitalism and authoritarian rule.