‘Occupy’ Hong Kong, for Universal Suffrage

BEIJING â€" A civil disobedience movement to push for democratic elections in Hong Kong in 2017 was launched last week, dubbed the “Let Love and Peace Occupy Central” movement. (Central is the core downtown district of Hong Kong.)

No question, this is politically sensitive - China doesn’t welcome civil disobedience, nor universal suffrage, having often said that what it terms “western-style democracy” is unsuited to China, though it has appeared to promise it for Hong Kong.

But if the push succeeds, Hong Kong would become the second Chinese place, after Taiwan, to hold democratic elections for leaders. In recent years, calls for universal suffrage have grown increasingly strong in Hong Kong, which was handed back to China in 1997 after 155 years of British rule.

The disobedience plan, to roll out over about a year starting this summer and culminating in July 2014, will be “absolutely non-violent,” the initiators announced last week, giving details at a church in Kowloon, the South China Morning Post reported.

“Civic awakening will determine the success of the movement,” the newspaper quoted an initiator, Benny Tai, a law professor at Hong Kong University, as saying.

“We shall be like preachers communicating enthusiastically with different communities to convey universal values such as democracy, universal and equal suffrage, justice and righteousness,” he said, adding that protest leaders hope Hong Kong residents “will be willing to pay the price.”

It’s hardly brick-throwing stuff, but it has still annoyed China.

As I wrote today in a Letter from China and companion post here on Rendezvous, that looked at the spread of democracy in Taiwan after 1987 when martial law was lifted there, China doesn’t permit the development of an organized civil society of the kind that Taiwan had and Hong Kong has, and which Mr. Tai and his co-founders of Occupy are working on strengthening further.

In late March, a senior Chinese official, Qiao Xiaoyang, chairman of the legal committee of the National People’s Congress, warned that Beijing “would not accept a chief executive candidate who adopted a confrontational attitude towards the central government,” the newspaper reported. (Hong Kong’s top leader is known as a “chief executive.” Currently, that person is Leung Chun-ying.)

No one is entirely sure what that means, but it seems to suggest Beijing wants to retain full control of the situation. Beijing has seemed to promise universal suffrage for the 2017 election, but has given few hints of what the democratic process leading to it will look like, the South China Morning Post wrote.

“Hong Kongers need genuine democracy - of that there can be no debate,” the city’s leading English-language newspaper wrote in an editorial. But it then came out against the civil disobedience plan, in a reflection of the tensions it has stirred in Hong Kong, where some fear that Beijing will view it as provocative and others warn it will disrupt business.

So what exactly might happen in the runup to the summer of 2014, when the civil disobedience part - Occupy Central - is due to take place

In an article, Mr. Tai explained the four steps.

â€" People who want to join will take an oath this July, to be drafted as a legal document, guaranteeing the movement’s nonviolent nature.

â€" A “deliberation day” will be held, probably early in 2014, in a concept borrowed from the American political scientists Bruce Ackerman and James Fishkin, the South China Morning Post reported. In groups of up to 15 people, Occupiers will discuss political reform. “The key point of the movement is about developing a democratic culture of rational discussion and consensus building by the people themselves,” Mr. Tai told the newspaper.

â€" A Hong Kong-wide ballot will be held on what people want reform to look like and how it should happen.

â€" Lastly, Occupy: a “last resort” tactic to achieve results. It will most likely take the form of sit-ins in the Central district, Hong Kong’s core downtown. How many might join Estimates vary from several hundreds to several hundreds of thousands (Hong Kong has a population of about seven million.) Mr. Tai is talking of 10,000 people.

Is China the New Taiwan

BEIJING â€" The date says it all: the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation, a leading women’s rights group, was formally registered in September 1987, just two months after Taiwan’s leader, Chiang Ching-kuo, lifted martial law, legalizing the political opposition. Many civil society groups that had long been gathering ideas and forces sprang into action.

In today’s Letter from China, I ask whether a leader in China might do something similar.

Living in China, it’s easy to see a pre-1987 Taiwan, in some ways. Under the mantle of one-party rule, decades of fast economic growth has produced wealth, social ferment, and a far more sophisticated, better-informed, better-off population with higher expectations than their parents and grandparents.

It’s creating pressure for change. In an interview in Taipei, Justine Wang of the Taipei Women’s Rescue Foundation said: “I feel there’s a lot happening in China, but they have started late.”

Today, a quarter of a century after the changes in Taiwan, women’s rights are mainstreamed in society and politics, said Ms. Wang.

“1987 was the important moment when we could set up social NGOs. It wasn’t possible before that,” she said. “There’s been big progress in the last two decades. People can’t openly discriminate any more, though of course they can use less obvious methods.”

And in China

In one example of the differences, this week the Chinese Human Rights Defenders, a NGO based outside the Chinese mainland, called on the government to stop “harassing and persecuting” civil society activists who want to contribute to the country’s reporting on human rights to the United Nations. Instead, it should “allow members of civil society to play an important role in the process,” the group said. China does have civil society or quasi-civil society organizations but they are often subject to significant pressures from the state.

Mainland Chinese human rights activists have tried many times to have a say in the content of the reports China makes to the U.N. as part of the Universal Periodic Review, as it’s known, Chinese Human Rights Defenders said.

But many who have submitted suggestions, or requests to be included in the drafting process, have been harassed or detained, with at least one, Peng Lanlan, incarcerated since August last year for organizing efforts to press the government to disclose information it says is a “state secret,” the group said.

“By blocking citizens’ participation back home, the government has made UPR largely a pointless exercise in China,” the group said.

What would have to happen in China to bring about similar changes to Taiwan’s Can a strongman like Chiang Ching-kuo step forward Or will a strong group, such as the one that runs China and which Michael Hsiao, director of the Institute of Sociology at the Academia Sinica in Taipei, talks about, do that Is no one interested, leaving China somehow stuck in limbo, outside the current of world history