BANKERS TRUST SECURITIES RESEARCH
Hong Kong has never
been a democracy
Britain did not intend
democracy
Hong Kong's elite did
not seek democracy
will not be practiced in Hong Kong. For this leadership, in this particular period, such attitudes showed considerable restraint and willingness to honor promises under pressure.
DEMOCRACY
One thing Beijing did not promise was Western democracy. It made promises of "a high degree of autonomy” and of Hong Kong being ruled by Hong Kong people, promises subject to many degrees of interpretation short of treachery, and it committed itself to Hong Kong's “stability and prosperity." Never did it promise a thoroughgoing Western democratic
system.
More interestingly, neither did the British negotiators, whose view was that future Hong Kong should be as much like present Hong Kong as possible. Present Hong Kong is not a democracy. It is a consultative colony. It is an admirable, successful, prosperous and reasonably free consultative colony, but not a democracy.
Hong Kong is ruled from London through a Governor. The Governor consults a variety of elite local bodies, some of whose members are elected via suffrage comprising 17,000 people out of a population of 5.8 million7 The virtues of this system are that it is politically benign, allowing broad personal freedom, a free press and an independent judiciary, and that it is enormously prosperous due to a free-wheeling capitalism that no populist democracy would ever tolerate.
In order to perpetuate this system insofar as possible, Britain believed that it would be dangerous to create a political vacuum and that it was therefore essential to mobilize public support through a broader system of elections-9 But the effect of elections on policy was to continue being buffered by indirect election of the Governor and Councillors. The British did not intend to incur any risk of populism.
Not to put too fine a point on it, there is a certain convergence between the British theory of how to govern a colony by consultative colonialism and the Chinese theory of how to govern a country by democratic centralism. The difference is not in the structure but in the use of the structure: the British use the structure for liberalism and capitalism, while the Chinese use it in China proper for communism and socialism. In Hong Kong, the Chinese are promising to use the structure for capitalism, and to throw in whatever elements of liberalism (such as free movement of people and capital) are essential to making capitalism work.
It is noteworthy that the Chinese business elite, which serves as the consultative fulcrum of consultative colonialism, largely shies away from
6
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