Reg, again

Hong Kong’s number-one glutton for punishment does an interview with a not-very-sympathetic London Times. It’s paywalled, but I’m going to force you to see the worst bits anyway…

Regina Ip, convenor of the executive council, Hong Kong’s de facto cabinet, said democracy had failed in the territory and was alien to “Chinese tradition”. She spoke during the trials of democracy campaigners who have been prosecuted under national ­security laws that have criminalised many peaceful expressions of political opposition.

…“Your model, the western model … you have to have competition, you have to have pluralism, you have to have ­diversity. That’s never the Chinese concept. That’s never part of the Chinese tradition.”

First, democracy never ‘failed’ in Hong Kong – because it never existed. Beijing vetoed any moves to self-rule during colonial times. It then hand-picked every post-1997 Chief Executive, while the legislature was packed with an unrepresentative majority of pro-Beijing lawmakers. These leaderships’ inability to meet public expectations led to the discontent that ultimately came to a head in 2019.

Second, to say that democracy is alien to the ‘Chinese tradition’ is simply to point out that ever since the overthrow of its Manchu rulers in 1911, China has been run by dictators, regardless of what the population might have wanted. It is not a cultural preference or lifestyle choice. If Reg is hinting that Confucian societies are unsuited or unfit for representative government, she should ask the people of South Korea and Taiwan if they want to go back to the pre-1990s police-state days.

(We could also add that, according to the official line, Hong Kong’s new all-patriots system is ‘more democratic’ than its predecessor.)

Her apparent hostility to competition/pluralism is bewildering. How else can good policy be decided except through debate about different ideas? If Reg is saying that competition should take place only among an elite, behind closed doors, that reduces the population to sheep with no control over their lives. Is she saying that’s their ideal function? That any who speak up should be jailed for ‘subverting state power’?

“People don’t vote for the common good,” Ip told The Times, in her office in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council ­(LegCo), a parliament from which all opponents of the government are excluded. “People vote for whatever serves their interests. Just following the popular will is dangerous.”

This is a dumb argument, much beloved of Hong Kong establishment ‘elites’ like property tycoons, who have never considered anyone’s interests except their own. When the UK was expanding the franchise beyond the wealthy in the 19th Century, Lord Acton, of ‘power corrupts’ fame, said: ‘The danger is not that a particular class is unfit to govern. Every class is unfit to govern.’ In other words, there is no noble caste of unelected wise and impartial men who will decree what’s best for everyone else; only by letting everyone vote can you get a government that serves the overall good. (Usual disclaimers about messy processes, safeguards against ‘tyranny of the majority’, that Churchill quote, etc).

It is not a coincidence that the richest societies in the world are nearly all democracies. Even if democracy is an effect rather than cause of wealth, it doesn’t help the Reg argument.

And if people vote only for their own interests, look at the US, where a shocking number of gullible people will vote for tax cuts for billionaires provided you wrap that policy in a load of hogwash about guns, Jesus, abortion, ‘woke’ and thinly-veiled racism.

Ip indicated that there would be no return by those she dismissed as “directly elected rabble-rousers … the long hair and mad dog of our council”.

She added: “You cannot have a one-size-fits-all model, and our experiment with democracy failed in the past 20 years. It’s in China’s constitution that they are a one-party state. We were never asked to support the CCP. But as the ruling party, it’s a … political reality that you have to accept and support the CCP.

OK, whatever!

Brief videos by political scientist and ‘compulsive talker’ Huey Li on the superiority of China’s system, here, here and here. (Whole thread of them.)

Another interview: RFA with former US Consul General in Hong Kong Hanscom Smith…

Everyone was taken by surprise at the scope and vehemence of the protest movement. The Hong Kong government, and, I believe, Beijing [and] also Washington. No one knew that this was going to happen. It became clear that Hong Kongers were very frustrated. And I don’t think that you can necessarily paint the protest movement with a single brush. It was not, in my experience, an organized movement with a single leader…

…It’s an interesting question, the extent to which Beijing believed its [own] propaganda that in fact the protests were orchestrated by the United States. I believe that there are probably some senior people in Beijing who do believe that, and acted accordingly, because you’ve seen this since 2020, this rhetorical obsession with national security and this idea of instilling “stability” in Hong Kong, and an emphasis on “patriots governing Hong Kong.” I think there are probably other people certainly in Hong Kong and on the mainland who understand the true nature of what was happening in Hong Kong.

Including Reg, no doubt.