Hong Kong appeared on Larry Diamond’s radar in the ’80s when he was pursuing his interest in global democratization. Here was this highly developed, educated, wealthy economy that couldn’t choose its own leader. He did the rounds, meeting democracy activists like Martin Lee, Christine Loh, Margaret Ng and Emily Lau in the course of his work with the National Endowment for Democracy.
In the middle of this came the showdown at Tiananmen Square—on June 4, 1989, barely five years after Hong Kong’s return to China had been sorted out by the British and Chinese. Suddenly, queues were snaking around the U.S., Canadian and other missions in Hong Kong, as people planned their exits. (Many left, only to return later to undemocratic Hong Kong, eager to get back into the swing of its bubbling economy. Compared to Hong Kong, Canada was Sleepy Hollow.) But the handover came, despite mounting tensions between China and Britain.
Spending the 1997-98 year at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica only heightened Diamond’s fascination. “It all gradually accumulated,” he says.
Last September, Diamond, ’73, MA ’78, PhD ’80, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, returned to Hong Kong to give a presentation on institutional options for democratic development. “Would it be better for Hong Kong to have a directly elected chief executive or a democratically chosen CE who is indirectly elected? In other words, should the system be parliamentary or presidential?” he asked.
Diamond also put up proportional representation for consideration. Would that be the best basis for legislative elections, or should they be based on the first-past-the-post system, by which the candidate with the most votes, not necessarily a majority, wins? And how, he asked, “do you replace the functional constituencies in a way that will induce good representation of different interests in Hong Kong but also some disposition towards consensus?”
As Diamond pointed out, there were lots of ways to structure democracy.
But how would all these ideas play out with Hong Kong’s Basic Law? That requiresHong Kong to have an executive-led government, ruling out his parliamentary option. “A number of options would require amendment of the Basic Law,” Diamond concedes. “Some people say it’s impossible, and that you should go with whatever option wouldn’t require it.
“This is why I say Hong Kong has to decide what it wants before it can really fully consider when it’s possible to get democracy, because all of this is going to require negotiation with Beijing,” he reasons. “If you’re going to negotiate with Beijing on when, you can also negotiate with Beijing on what.”
Diamond calls Hong Kong’s current system a halfway house between democracy and authoritarianism. “Halfway houses tend not to be very stable, and this one is less stable than many because the elements of democracy it has are very vibrant and democratic,” he contends. “You look at the half of the [Legislative Council] seats that are coming from direct elections and you see there’s a lot of democratic juice there, a lot of democratic energy and momentum—and resentment of the undemocratic half of things.
Diamond calls Hong Kong’s current institutional arrangement dysfunctional, disarticulated and unsustainable.
Jianying Zha, writing in the April 23 New Yorker about the travails of her imprisoned activist brother, recalls how the noted literary critic Liu Zaifu mapped out four phases of development for China: economic freedom, then personal freedom, then social justice and, finally, political democracy. As Hong Kong has struggled to clear that last hurdle, it’s arguable whether that effort has resonated in China, whose rich coastal provinces are consumed with exploring the boundaries of the first two development phases—without much regard for either history or the political future.
Despite these preoccupations, isn’t Beijing going slow on democracy for Hong Kong for fear of it stirring democratic undercurrents on the mainland? “To the extent that the leadership worries about this,” Diamond says, “they have to worry about balancing off the diffusion effect with the concern they have about growing frustration among a kind of sullen and alienated Hong Kong population.”
There’s another feature to this, not a small one. “To the extent that Beijing ever wants to see progress toward peaceful resolution of the conflict with Taiwan, it will only be possible when they have shown they allow democracy in that second system of “one country, two systems,” Diamond says.
“Until then they’re not even going to get the time of day from Taiwan,” he adds. “If they were to allow democracy in Hong Kong, I think it would change the attitudes of a lot of people in Taiwan, at least to the point of beginning the process of serious political dialogue.”
