The Economist
May 30, 2015
Local passion is flaring, but China’s fears of secessionism are overblown.
Every year on June 4th, thousands of people gather in Hong Kong’s Victoria Park to commemorate the crushing of the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989. The former British colony is the only place in China where large-scale mourning of the bloodshed is tolerated. This year crowds will gather as usual. But a growing number of people now criticise the event, arguing that Hong Kong should fight for its own causes, rather than marking the mainland’s struggles. The splintering of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong is a product of growing antipathy towards China. Other protest movements increasingly stress a separate identity in the territory too. The governments of Hong Kong and China are watching with alarm.
When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese rule in 1997, Chinese officials hoped that a gradual narrowing of the wealth gap between it and the mainland would help to overcome the misgivings of many Hong Kongers. There has been much evidence since then of the mainland’s growing success: millions of rich tourists have been pouring into Hong Kong to shop, China’s brightest students have been flocking to local universities and mainland professionals have been taking high-flying jobs in Hong Kong offices. Parts of the mainland increasingly resemble the territory at its southern tip that once glittered alone. Yet the more similar they become, the more that China and Hong Kong are growing apart—culturally, temperamentally and politically.
Hong Kongers increasingly prize their local identity. A poll last year by the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that just 9% of respondents identified themselves solely as “Chinese”, down from 32% in 1997. “Some people think we have gone from being a colony of one country to the colony of another,” says Bonbon Chow of City University Students Union.
The failure of Hong Kong’s campaign for greater democracy has helped fuel what is often described in the territory as a “localist”, or “nativist”, movement: a loose array of individuals and groups less rigidly focused on political reform. The deficiencies of the democracy movement became evident to many residents last year, when the Chinese government ruled out free elections for the territory’s leader in 2017. Thousands of protesters occupied several main streets for 79 days. But their sit-ins achieved little. The government did not budge. The student movement that led the demonstrations is crumbling.
The public’s longstanding qualms about the encroachment of Chinese influence are again becoming evident. Arguments over Hong Kong’s policies on housing, health care, education and even transport increasingly bring up questions over how the territory should interact with the mainland. Chan Shu-fai, a former leader of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, says “the China factor” has become a driving force in social movements.
The Chinese and Hong Kong governments are torn. They are reluctant to encourage nativists: for officials, fostering a common identity remains an important aim. But they do not want to appear insensitive to Hong Kongers’ concerns about issues that affect their daily lives.
In April, after violent protests in Hong Kong against “parallel trading” by mainlanders—buying goods for black-market resale in China—the government of Shenzhen, the mainland city that adjoins the territory, announced plans to curtail unlimited entries for its residents. In 2012 the Hong Kong government scaled back a plan it had to introduce “national education” to local schools after a student movement known as “scholarism” protested against it. Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, said in January that he still wanted to “reinforce students’ interest in and understanding of Chinese history and culture”.
The government frets particularly over the spread of localist sentiment on university campuses, where political movements often originate. Students now openly question whether reforming the existing system—the goal of last year’s protests—would be enough to protect their local values. A wall poster at the University of Hong Kong shows images of police violence under a slogan, “We decide our own destiny.” In February 2014, six months before the protests, the university’s student-union magazine Undergrad published a cover article titled “Hong Kong people deciding their own fate”.
Such words make officials worry that nativism might evolve into outright secessionism, an idea that is anathema to the Communist Party. In January Mr Leung, the chief executive, criticised Undergrad for advocating self-determination. He warned that such views could cause Hong Kong to “degenerate into anarchy”. Mainland newspapers are even more strident: the People’s Daily, a party mouthpiece, accused “separatists” in Hong Kong of “absurd rabble-rousing”.
On May 8th the Chinese government went a step further with the publication of a draft National Security Law. The proposed bill says that “safeguarding China’s sovereignty and territorial integrity” is a common obligation of all Chinese, including those in Hong Kong. The specific mention of the territory was a clear signal of China’s disquiet. Ironically, China itself promoted the idea of “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong” with a “high degree of autonomy” in an effort to win local support at the end of British rule. Now it regards those who trumpet such notions as secessionists.
Overt calls for Hong Kong’s independence remain rare. Supporters of it are commonly dismissed by mainstream commentators as belonging to a radical fringe. Most of them do. Members of the tiny Hong Kong Independence Party, which was formed in 2014, brandish the former colonial flag and accuse China of “reducing Hong Kongers to second-class citizens in their own land”. A group called Civic Passion disrupts political meetings chanting slogans like “Hong Kong [should] form a country.” Independence-leaning views are found on campuses too. “On the Hong Kong City-State”, a book by Chin Wan-kan, a professor at Hong Kong’s Lingnan University, was published in 2011. It called for a Chinese “confederation” of separate states including mainland China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. But he is an outlier.
Chinese officials are mindful of the long term. In Taiwan, a vigorous pro-independence movement evolved after almost half a century of colonial rule by Japan and partly in reaction to subsequent authoritarian rule by refugees from the mainland. The movement gave birth to the Democratic Progressive Party, which ruled the island from 2000 to 2008 and stands a good chance of coming back to power next year—much to China’s displeasure.
Branding demonstrators as separatists, even if wide of the mark, serves China’s political interests by discrediting moderates in the eyes of some Hong Kong residents. Portraying unrest in Hong Kong as a direct threat to national sovereignty and security may also help the mainland authorities to deter citizens there from drawing inspiration from the territory’s mostly polite and peaceful protests.
Some activists worry that China’s fears of secessionism could make it more inclined to put pressure on the Hong Kong government to revive plans to pass a law against sedition and subversion (as it is required to do by the territory’s post-colonial constitution, the Basic Law). These plans were shelved after protests in 2003. Claudia Mo Man-ching, a pro-democracy legislator, frets that merely talking about independence, except to condemn it, may one day be treated as sedition. Denunciation of a movement that barely exists, however, could backfire. Although few Hong Kongers support independence, many are angry at being told not to.
