The Hong Kong Model: How China Can Democratize & Hold Together

30 December 2009 :: J.E. Robertson

China may be fast moving toward global superpower status, with rates of industrialization and wealth-creation nearly unprecedented in human history. But the ancient imperial state still faces pervasive problems of regional and ethnic disharmony and multiple separatist movements intent on breaking up the map of the modern political state. To hold together, Beijing will have to democratize public and private institutions at a rapid pace and in a credible way.

Hong Kong, once a British protectorate, has been granted special political freedoms —as part of the conditions for its return to Chinese rule, and not without significant amounts of public protest from locals demanding them—, including electoral representation and the right to demonstrate. It is a divergent political model within the still largely totalitarian system planned and managed from Beijing, and it may serve as a credible model for how to democratize Chinese institutions of government and enterprise.

In order to meet the social and political demands of coming decades, China will have to grapple with the very real problem of what impact the information revolution will have on Chinese society, which has allowed for a privileged class of central control to impose a strict authoritarian order for thousands of years. Chinese society is already democratizing in terms of information, in that the government has had to admit mistakes in attempts to reorganize and filter information of vital public interest.

The scandal surrounding attempts to cover up the outbreak of SARS in China angered governments and international bodies, and spurred a wave of dissent in China that gave more power to journalists in the state media who sought to put informational value ahead of Beijing politics. Pres. Hu’s “smokeless war” against the press and dissidents has been a questionable enterprise throughout, with limited practical success in promoting Beijing’s projection of power and apparently sparking a surge in dissent.

Authoritarian urges inherent in Beijing’s use of power, both within China and beyond, have generated a notable backlash. In March 2008, an effort to ‘Sino-ize’ the Tibetan economy and consolidate Beijing’s hold on the region led to an outbreak of violence, with ethnic clashes, street demonstrations and security forces attacking civilians in the streets. The demonstrations spread to other regions of China and to neighboring Nepal. As we reported on 31 March 2008:

Demonstrations against Chinese rule in Tibet turned violent in Nepal’s capital Kathmandu, yesterday, as police wielded bamboo clubs and beat demonstrators, including Buddhist monks and nuns. The UN has said Nepal’s harsh clampdown on Tibetan demonstrators violates international human rights law, including the right to peaceful assembly, as embodied in treaties signed by Nepal.

Demonstrations that began in Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, more nearly 3 weeks ago have now spread to neighboring provinces in China, and into Nepal and India. The Kathmandu clashes came as large crowds accusing China of human rights abuses in Tibet tried to approach the Chinese embassy grounds.

A similar outbreak of ethnic violence broke out in the western province of Xinjiang, when efforts to centralize political control of the region and marginalize the local ethnic majority led to violent street battles. The government accused Uighur separatists of stoking the violence, while Uighur muslims from the region accused ethnic Han immigrants of undermining the economic opportunity available to the locals.

For the occasion of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing, dissidents organized a high-profile petition for political reform, calling the document itself Charter ’08. The document, far from being an outright repudiation of China’s political establishment, calls for an incremental liberalization of the political process, and diversification of the one-party system. It opens with an explanation of the historical moment and the socio-political imperatives the regime will have to face, one way or another:

This year is the 100th year of China’s Constitution, the 60th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 30th anniversary of the birth of the Democracy Wall, and the 10th year since China signed the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. After experiencing a prolonged period of human rights disasters and a tortuous struggle and resistance, the awakening Chinese citizens are increasingly and more clearly recognizing that freedom, equality, and human rights are universal common values shared by all humankind, and that democracy, a republic, and constitutionalism constitute the basic structural framework of modern governance. A “modernization” bereft of these universal values and this basic political framework is a disastrous process that deprives humans of their rights, corrodes human nature, and destroys human dignity. Where will China head in the 21st century? Continue a “modernization” under this kind of authoritarian rule? Or recognize universal values, assimilate into the mainstream civilization, and build a democratic political system? This is a major decision that cannot be avoided.

The government’s response has been to suppress the very idea of a need for liberalization and to prosecute those responsible for the petition. Liu Xiaobo, a moderate dissident and respected literary figure, was detained this summer on charges linked to the Charter ’08 movement and has now been sentenced to 11 years in prison for “inciting subversion of state power”, a charge the very name of which is a virtual admission of China’s need to democratize. The trial was just two hours long and has been decried across the world as an unfair prosecution without adequate defense or due process for the accused.

Instead of recognizing the constructive role that responsible political reformists can play in crafting a viable future for China —in line with the international system to which China has signed up but whose values it consistently rejects—, those in power in Beijing are treating the very idea of broader political freedoms for the Chinese people as a threat to national security. As the LA Times has reported:

In the last two years, the Chinese government has cracked down on Internet sites, lawyers, consumer advocates and human rights activists, particularly after the collapse of poorly constructed schools in the Sichuan earthquake and the tainted milk scandal in 2008. Liu is a brave democracy advocate and no stranger to jail; he was sent to prison for 21 months after the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and to a labor camp in 1996 after demanding clemency for others still imprisoned.

This attack on universal values and persecution of the very dissident voices that could most ably and responsibly shepherd China through a period of needed democratic progress is dangerous in the extreme. Beijing’s hard-line tactics have radicalized and even popularized separatist movements across a number of regions, and efforts to disallow protests and even individual complaints about corruption has sown the seeds of deeper dissent across the country, at a time when tens of millions have lost work due to the global economic crisis.

China has also sought, along with its persecution of dissidents and its use of military force to impose political control over satellite regions, to create a hermetically controlled Chinese-language internet, where information can only be posted if approved by state censors. Instead of seizing the Olympics as an opportunity to plan, test and exhibit meaningful democratic liberalization, the government in Beijing has sought to block websites critical of its policies and control the flow of information across all communications networks in China.

But efforts to impose a blanket censorship-enabling spyware technology on all computers in the country were complicated this summer, when complaints about the substantial security risks and negative impact on business and foreign investment forced the government to back down. In July, we reported:

Amid a storm of protest from Chinese citizens, businesses, rights activists and foreign governments, China has suddenly halted its planned installation of a new enhancement to the ‘Great Firewall’ called ‘Green Dam’. In a statement the UK’s Guardian calls “terse”, the state-run news agency Xinhua reported “China will delay the mandatory installation of the ‘Green Dam-Youth Escort’ filtering software on new computers.”

The technology may still take effect, under the guise of an effort to block pornography in order to protect young people, but there is intense resistance from the international community, and from media and business interests in China. There are concerns that aside from a gross violation of fundamental rights to open information, the software could actually destroy intellectual property, impede the functioning of computer hardware altogether, and even subject users to added security risks.

According to the OpenNet Initiative:

The version of the Green Dam software that we tested, when operating under its default settings, is far more intrusive than any other content control software we have reviewed. Not only does it block access to a wide range of web sites based on keywords and image processing, including porn, gaming, gay content, religious sites and political themes, it actively monitors individual computer behavior, such that a wide range of programs including word processing and email can be suddenly terminated if content algorithm detects inappropriate speech. The program installs components deep into the kernel of the computer operating system in order to enable this application layer monitoring. The operation of the software is highly unpredictable and disrupts computer activity far beyond the blocking of websites.

Features that allow for intimate monitoring of keystrokes and usage logs could permit attacks either from within government monitoring or from non-government criminal enterprises, to access personal information, create extensive archives of data regarding individual lives and networks of people, and subject individuals to identity theft, harassment, and other kinds of computer-enabled endangerment. Such intrusive harvesting of personal data could even put children at far greater risk of exploitation via the Internet.

One of the most fundamental dangers inherent in this type of digital data-based persecution of dissent at all levels is that it first of all assists in the coverup of abusive or corrupt activity and secondly does nothing to reform areas of the political system itself that are causing anger and the spread of hostility to government policies. While the Green Dam spyware project may allow Beijing to conceal or disrupt the communication of dissent, it will do nothing to prevent the dissent-inducing abuses or systemic inadequacies from occurring.

The only practical way to ensure that government services meet the needs of real people, and thus fashion a more harmonious system, is for a freer flow of information among people and between the people and their government. Failing that, even the best-intentioned government programs will run into trouble and be a source of unrest or opposition. Persecution of dissent is an ancient tool of underdeveloped power structures; China has the wealth and technology to democratize peacefully, and can do so by liberalizing the process for selecting and evaluating party leaders, policy-makers and administrative bureaucrats.

The Hong Kong model is complicated, and has many critics, but for a nation as vast and diverse as China, facing all of the crises, political, economic and environmental, it now faces, the Hong Kong model provides a worthy example for how to usher in more permissive political processes, without giving up the integrity of the existing system or the territorial integrity of the nation.

There will need to be practical solutions that help keep long-simmering tensions in check, if China is to avoid further flare-ups of ethnic violence or the aggressive ramping up of separatist activity. Change is emerging organically, across China, and the current government will eventually have to choose between working with or against the driving forces of change. Addressing economic concerns —like quality of life, education, transport and energy— will be key to being able to shepherd the nation through the coming period of political transformation. The following are a few areas that may help ensure stability throughout:

Re-evaluate prosecutions like that of Liu Xiaobo, which cripple the political dynamism of the Chinese system and help ensure a sclerotic policy apparatus, unaware of the best competing ideas going forward;
Free political prisoners like Liu Xiaobo and other responsible dissenters, who use no methods of sabotage or violence, only words and ideas, to convey their message of liberalization;
Reward local officials who find creative ways to integrate citizens into the process of making and administering policy;
Encourage freer expression of critical views, in part to show tolerance of dissent, in part to allow for the discovery of sound ideas for making a better way for the nation;
Encourage local political organizing, even where dissenting views are more popular than Beijing policy: a system of competing views need not override established policy, but can allow for competing views to filter in and serve the public good;
Liberalize selection process for Communist party officials, as a first step toward general elections;
Recognize cultural and political autonomy of regional states, like Tibet and Xinjiang: a Spanish approach may work better than the militaristic all-or-nothing conquest-based approach favored until now;
Reform the justice system, so that low-level corruption cases and judgments benefitting ordinary citizens can gain prominence and foster a new respect for judicial process: this helps guarantee order, but also prevents corruption and abuse;
Take a leading role in championing fundamental political and civil rights in other nations: doing so does not violate anyone’s sovereignty, but failing to do so shows a reduced hold on domestic support for the exercise of it;
Prepare for an issue-based divergence of factions within the Communist party, and a credible legal process by which those factions can establish competing parties loyal to a central constitution.

Long-term stability is often cited by China’s authorities as the reason behind extremely hard-line actions. But as we are now seeing in Iran, and as we have seen in eastern Europe and the Philippines, hard-line oppression often sows unrest and brings about far more radical kinds of political change. China is too closely linked to the information technology revolution to not be affected by it, and its censoring-technology approach to manufacturing consensus is not viable; it will collapse under the weight of the challenge.

Planning for the period of liberalization that will follow is the only responsible way for the government in Beijing to move forward with long-term Chinese development and political planning. It is the only policy response that will build confidence among foreign investors and major enterprises, including banks, that wish to locate offices or factories in the country, and it will prove to be the only practical way to prevent sectarian conflict and the disintegration of political ties with the satellite states where unrest is already brewing.

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