{"id":21086,"date":"2019-08-27T19:02:43","date_gmt":"2019-08-27T11:02:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chinaworker.info\/?p=21086"},"modified":"2019-08-28T03:35:48","modified_gmt":"2019-08-27T19:35:48","slug":"hong-kong-five-years-since-notorious-831-ruling","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chinaworker.info\/en\/2019\/08\/27\/21086\/","title":{"rendered":"Hong Kong: Five years since notorious \u2018831\u2019 ruling"},"content":{"rendered":"

Carrie Lam\u2019s brutal \u201cno concessions\u201d line towards today\u2019s mass movement is in keeping with Beijing\u2019s tradition<\/strong><\/p>\n

Dikang, Socialist Action (CWI in Hong Kong)<\/p>\n

The fuse for today\u2019s unprecedented protest movement in Hong Kong was lit a long time ago by the Chinese regime with its attempt to perpetuate an elite-manipulated and undemocratic form of brutal capitalist rule.<\/p>\n

On Saturday it will be five years since the infamous August 31 ruling by the Standing Committee of China\u2019s pseudo parliament, the National People\u2019s Congress. The NPC\u2019s \u2018831\u2019 ruling became the trigger for the 2014 Umbrella Revolution of mass protests and 79 days of continuous street occupations. That movement too, like today\u2019s even bigger and now even longer lasting (today marks the 80th day) protests against the extradition law, was propelled forward by police violence against youthful protesters.<\/p>\n

The NPC Standing Committee\u2019s ruling exploded like a bomb in Hong Kong where many, but especially the city\u2019s pan-democratic opposition parties, had taken at face value the Chinese regime\u2019s earlier vaguely-worded promises to accept a transitional timetable towards one-person-one-vote elections (universal suffrage) for choosing Hong Kong\u2019s leader (Chief Executive) and Legco (Hong Kong\u2019s largely powerless parliament). The \u2018831\u2019 ruling made clear this will never happen \u2013 not on the dictatorship\u2019s watch!<\/p>\n

Socialist Action, the CWI in Hong Kong, and chinaworker.info<\/strong>, the voice of our mainland Chinese comrades, warned long before this that the notion of the dictatorship tolerating a form of \u2018Western-style\u2019 democracy in Hong Kong was a cruel deception. The dictatorship\u2019s earlier soundings on the issue had largely been playing for time \u2013 a filibuster.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Against \u201cWesternism\u201d\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Chinese capitalism, the rule of a \u2018Communist\u2019-linked industrial and financial oligarchy, requires a dictatorial machine complete with the world\u2019s biggest police state to keep the populace and especially the working class, whose blood and sweat produces China\u2019s wealth, in chains. It has become part of the DNA of the ruling group, reinforced since Xi Jinping\u2019s rise to power, that \u201cdemocracy\u201d and \u201cWesternism\u201d are plots to destroy China, to unleash social chaos, possibly ripping the country apart.<\/p>\n

Rather than lessening, the regime\u2019s authoritarian features have increased. Vetoing any democratic \u201creform\u201d in Hong Kong five years ago has been followed by vicious repressive laws, a purge of elected opposition lawmakers, election rigging, and political show trials against democracy activists. Processes inside China have followed a similar pattern with multiple crackdowns on labour activists, left-wing students, human rights lawyers and radical bloggers. This has culminated in the regime\u2019s refusal to allow its puppet Carrie Lam to make even small concessions to the current Hong Kong mass movement for fear of losing face.<\/p>\n

Not only this, the Hong Kong capitalist tycoons who with the CCP\u2019s blessing wield the real power in the territory, are equally antagonistic and fearful towards democracy, which would threaten their cosy world of lucrative secret business deals, tax haven privileges and super-profits. The real position of the tycoons is shown by their public declarations of loyalty to the government in recent weeks and their calls for the mass protests to end.<\/p>\n

How was democracy won?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Understanding how democracy has been achieved throughout history, as a result of mass revolutionary struggles in which workers\u2019 organisations such as trade unions and socialist parties have played the most important role for more than 100 years, with the capitalist class standing for counter-revolution and dictatorship, socialists were able to predict and warn that the Chinese regime\u2019s democracy \u2018pledge\u2019 was fake.<\/p>\n

This bottom-up view of how democratic rights have been won \u2013 the only historically accurate view \u2013 totally contradicts the ideas of the pan-democratic politicians and academics who hold to a top-down conception: that \u201cenlightened\u201d capitalist governments are somehow the guardians and promoters of democratic rights. Seeing the real historical picture allows us to point out the folly of calling upon right-wing (and far from \u201cenlightened\u201d) Western leaders like Trump, Johnson and Merkel, or the US Congress, to \u201csave Hong Kong\u201d.<\/p>\n

The CCP\u2019s political fraud was in turn what was used for almost three decades by the leaders of the pan-democratic parties in Hong Kong to justify their faith in political reform: seeking deals with the CCP dictatorship and its Hong Kong representatives and applying the brakes to one mass struggle after another, lest these become \u201ctoo radical\u201d, because this was supposedly the only \u201crealistic\u201d road to achieve democratic rights under a powerful dictatorial regime. \u2018831\u2019 put an end to this charade and stripped the pan-democrats of their \u201cpolitical reform\u201d clothing.<\/p>\n

Here we reprint Socialist Action\u2019s statement from five years ago analysing the meaning of the \u2018831\u2019 ruling:<\/p>\n

\u27b5 China\u2019s NPC \u2018closes the door\u2019 on Hong Kong democracy<\/a><\/h5>\n

This offers important insights into how events have subsequently developed in Hong Kong and not least the powerful explosion of protest we are now witnessing.<\/p>\n

<\/h5>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Carrie Lam\u2019s brutal \u201cno concessions\u201d line towards today\u2019s mass movement is in keeping with Beijing\u2019s tradition<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":33,"featured_media":21087,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[132,133,124],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-21086","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-china","8":"category-hong-kong","9":"category-news"},"yoast_head":"\nHong Kong: Five years since notorious \u2018831\u2019 ruling - China Worker<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/chinaworker.info\/en\/2019\/08\/27\/21086\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Hong Kong: Five years since notorious \u2018831\u2019 ruling - 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