Hong Kong....Occupy Central Demonstrations....

xiabonan said:

Students movements EVERYWHERE on earth tend to become some kind of a cult movement, especially after prolonged period of time.

Click to expand...

Equation said:

I agreed, but that still does not gave them the right to pursue to push their beliefs upon others they view as "universal" value there fore can not be challenge.

Click to expand...

ancestral said:

Seriously, the political landscape in HK is extremely complicated. If you want I can give a clear outline of what parties are involved in the HK landscape and what their agendas are.

Click to expand...

SampanViking said:

When you have a "political" problem, there is really a process that should be followed

1) You should be able to correctly identify the problem and its root causes

2) You should have a proposal for a remedy to the problem

3) You should be able to make an effective argument for how your remedy will achieve the desired result.

This leads me inevitably to the question as too which problems have been identified as being the root for which the change to the vetting process would be able to remedy and how exactly this would work.
Without this, it starts to look all too much like a power grab for its own sake.

Hopefully two things will come out of all this. That ordinary HKers will finally find their voice and simply start to talk seriously about the things that really concern them and that a home grown talent; able to seriously address those problems and still not give concern to Beijing, should be able to be put forward and enjoy a significant consensus across the general population and major vested interests.

I have said before and will say again. Changing a political system and changing the politics are two very fundamental societal changes and that it is difficult to change one or the other without having major challenges to order and stability. Trying to change both simultaneously is reckless and most likely to lead only to very serious problems, confusion and social dislocation and people lose there anchors and reference points.

To Airsuperiority
I am sorry to learn that you feel you need a break, but I can understand why.
Thank you for your last PM and I did try to reply, but alas I was to late.
Suffice to say thank you and none taken and I hope you will be able to rejoin us before too very long.

Click to expand...

Third_Echelon said:

That's b/s. The anti-OC radicals can't stand that people don't share their views and this guy dared to speak out. Now, they will make an example out of him.

Watch the news clip and the raw video here:

[video=youtube;0Vsm7x6Q_Zc]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Vsm7x6Q_Zc#t=344[/video]

Clearly this guy tried to push the crowd, then fell onto the ground near a girl's feet and the girl started screaming "molester!" Any honest person would not say that he had the intention of molesting someone. That picture is so out of context.

That clip will never be shown in any western MSM even though there was a western news agency on the scene.

Just shameful behavior from the radicals. I went on Openrice and the restaurant's facebook page and noticed a lot of outrageous fake reviews, clearly trying to defame this man and his business.

Click to expand...

The umbrella revolution won’t give Hong Kong democracy. Protesters should stop calling for it.

This is about inequality, not politics, so democracy can't fix the problem.

HONG KONG — The prevailing media narrative about the Hong Kong protest — namely that the citizens are politically dissatisfied and are fighting for democracy against the tyranny of Beijing — is false. What’s actually happening is this: A fringe of radical (or sometimes, more charitably, merely naive) ideologues are recasting the real and legitimate economic grievances of people here as a fight about Hong Kong’s autonomy. The movement is part of a global trend you might call maidancracy (rule of the square, from the infamous Maidan in central Kiev where the Ukrainian protests began). If carried out to its full extent, it will not end well for Hong Kong.

Maidancracy is an increasingly common post-Cold-War phenomenon. From the former Soviet Union to Southeast Asia, from the Arab world to Ukraine, it has affected the lives and futures of hundreds of millions of people. Hong Kong’s iteration shares certain characteristics with the ones in Cairo and Kiev: First, there is general popular discontent over the prevailing state of affairs and the region’s probable future. Second, while the foot soldiers are largely well-intentioned people with genuine concerns for their own welfare and that of the Hong Kong society, they are led by activists with a strong ideological agenda. As a result, their aim becomes the overthrow of the government or sometimes the entire political system. Third, the press relentlessly cheers them on and thereby amplifies the movement and turns it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Fourth, democracy is always the banner.

These movements generally fail when they are put down violently, with tragic loss of life (think of Syria). In the rare cases in which they succeed, they lead to long periods of suffering and destruction (think of Ukraine, where more than a decade of continuous color revolutions have torn the country apart and now threaten the nation’s very survival). Some maidan movements seem to run on a perpetual cycle: get on the square to remove a government, only to return to the square to remove the next one (think of Egypt). In the meantime, paralysis, chaos and even violence reign.

Those trends have already developed in Hong Kong. Tens of thousands of protesters are occupying the central city district of one of the world’s largest financial centers demanding a particular method for electing the city’s future chief executives. They even set a deadline for the current chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, to resign, or else. (In accord with the typical maidan arc, violent skirmishes have begun between protesters and residents frustrated by the inconvenience and fearful of long-term threats to their livelihoods.)

But the protest message, as described by the loudest activists, is problematic, because its central theme of democracy for Hong Kong is all wrong. The degree of political participation in Hong Kong is actually at its highest in history. Before 1997, Hong Kong was a British colony for 155 years, during which it was ruled by 28 governors — all of them directly appointed by London. For Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, to now brand himself as the champion of democracy is hypocrisy of the highest order.

Only after the return of sovereignty to China 17 years ago did Hong Kong gain real public participation in governance. Today, half of the legislature is directly elected by the public and the other half by what are called functional constituencies. The chief executive, a native Hong Konger, is selected by a committee of 1,200 other Hong Kongers.

Further, Beijing has now devised a plan for voters to elect the next chief executive directly, rather than by committee, in 2017 among candidates fielded by a nominating committee — also made up of Hong Kongers. The proximate cause for today’s upheaval is the protesters’ demand for direct public nomination of candidates, too.

But the context matters: General discontent has provided fertile soil for this movement, and the sources of that dissatisfaction have nothing to do with imaginary diktats from Beijing. Hong Kong is going through a tough period of economic and social dislocation. Its unique advantage as the only port into and out of China has largely disappeared as the mainland’s own market economy scales up. Its manufacturing base, which provided ample employment, has been moved to cheaper locations. Globalization and the expanding Chinese economy have elevated the city’s position as an international financial center, but the economic benefits have mainly accrued to landowners and those who are engaged in financial intermediation and deployment of capital. Median income has been stagnant and is dropping, but costs of living, especially housing, have been rising. The wealth gap is among the highest in the world.

Empirical data demonstrates the nature of public discontent, and it is fundamentally different from what is being portrayed by the protesting activists. Over the past several years, polling conducted by the Public Opinion Program at the University of Hong Kong has consistently shown that well over 80 percent of Hong Kongers’ top concerns are livelihood and economic issues, with those who are concerned with political problems in the low double digits at the most.

When the Occupy Central movement was gathering steam over the summer, the protesters garnered 800,000 votes in an unofficial poll supporting the movement. Yet less than two months later an anti-Occupy campaign collected 1.3 million signatures (from Hong Kong’s 7 million population) opposing the movement. The same University of Hong Kong program has conducted five public opinion surveys since April 2013, when protesters first began to create the movement. All but one showed that more than half of Hong Kongers opposed it, and support was in the low double digits.

Hong Kong’s economic issues are daunting challenges for any government. But they have been made even more difficult by protesters attempting, successfully it seems, to manufacture a narrative that Beijing is the cause of Hong Kong’s troubles. By misdirecting the frustration and anxiety of Hong Kongers to Beijing, the maidancracy ideology has overtaken rational discourse about the root causes of Hong Kong’s problems and their solutions.

Given all this, the future of Hong Kong is not nearly as bleak as it looks on the streets at the moment. Hong Kong is fundamentally different from the likes of Egypt and Ukraine. The economy is largely prosperous. Rule of law still prevails. Resources are abundant and can be directed and allocated in the right ways to address the structural challenges. The vast majority of Hong Kongers want to solve problems and are not ideological. And most of all, Hong Kong remains an integral part of an economically vibrant and politically stable China. As Martin Jacques wrote in Britain’s Guardian newspaper, “China is Hong Kong’s future – not its enemy.”

At the moment, the situation is tense. If either side makes the mistake of escalating, we know that maidancracy can be destructive. Hong Kong’s current conditions do not call for such destruction. Let calm return to the City by the Harbor. Hong Kong needs problem solvers, not revolutionaries.

Click to expand...

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

Read the Anti-Hong Kong Rant That's Going Viral in China

"A muddle-headed toddler leading a blindfolded donkey."

BY Anonymous, Translated by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian

It's the article that many in the Chinese mainland are reading to help them understand -- or, depending on one's viewpoint, misunderstand -- what Hong Kong is all about. As pro-democracy protests court worldwide attention, this screed, which purports to be written by an anonymous member of the Hong Kong legislature and can be found on the Internet as early as July 6, is helping shape the mainland Chinese discourse about what the protests mean. The avowedly anti-democratic article, which at one point refers to Hong Kongers as "peasant farmers," has been repeatedly re-titled, re-published, and re-circulated on the Chinese web since its publication. FP translates.


To understand why Hong Kong is in decline, we must first understand why it rose in the first place: its longstanding role as a transit station for trade and communication between the mainland and the West. Yet in the 1990s, and especially after Hong Kong returned to mainland Chinese sovereignty in 1997, Hong Kong's favorable status began to fade.


Many Hong Kong residents blame this on Hong Kong government incompetence, but this explanation does not hold water. The true reason is that direct ties between mainland China and the Western world as well as Taiwan have strengthened. Hong Kong's position as a center for trade arose only because of the difficulties that foreign countries faced in trading directly with China. As these difficulties have now dissipated, why is there any need to take a Hong Kong detour?

But Hong Kong isn't necessarily doomed; it can still rebrand itself by selectively developing emerging and low-end industries. As Hong Kong has a population of several million, it should choose to develop industries in which many people can grow rich, not just a small business elite. It should also choose to expand industries that cannot easily relocate to other regions. Take Hong Kong's formerly dazzling film scene, for example. Today its big movie stars are still technically from Hong Kong, but they spend more than half the year filming in mainland China. The reason today's Hong Kong-made movies are a far cry from the city's many cinema hits in the 1990s is that the mainland has drained its talent.

Hong Kong's real problem is that most people have no awareness of changing patterns of development, and thus are not psychologically prepared for economic restructuring. The attitudes of many in Hong Kong could even be described as "reckless."

In the last two years, conflict between Hong Kong residents and mainland tourists has repeatedly made the news, with one Hong Kong resident notoriously calling mainlanders "locusts," and a Hong Kong tour guide verbally abusing mainland tourists. That's odd, considering that in recent years tourism has been one of Hong Kong's few flourishing industries; you could even say that tourism is the hope of Hong Kong's industrial restructuring. But from looking at the news, people might think that Hong Kong is actually a terrible tourist destination. Allowing one's own home to develop such a wayward reputation -- what kind of attitude is this?

That's just another example of Hong Kong residents not understanding how Hong Kong developed in the first place. On the surface, Hong Kongers seem to be outstanding representatives of the ascendancy of market capitalism. But in their bones, they remain peasant farmers unable to see beyond their tiny tract of land. They give lip service to international trade, but they don't understand that Hong Kong's rise relies on the Chinese market. Thus, the people of Hong Kong have experienced that city's development with muddle-headed confusion. Today, they stagnate in muddle-headed confusion. I can thus predict that in the future, they will decline in muddle-headed confusion.

Of course, many in Hong Kong refuse to acknowledge this. They prefer to blame Hong Kong's current stagnation upon the Special Administrative Region's government, claiming that things are worse than they were under the British. That is absurd. In fact, there is no difference between today's SAR government and Hong Kong's British government. They are both "colonial governments." In order to maintain stability when Hong Kong returned to Chinese sovereignty, Beijing promised that Hong Kong's political system would remain unchanged for 50 years. This means that Hong Kong's current government is the same as the one it had under the British, and is still a colonial government.

So who is making the decisions then? No one. Hong Kong is incapable of making adjustments in the face of economic change, because it is like a car that has lost its steering wheel. Naturally, it is bumping into everything, and the further it goes, the worse it gets.


And as a car without a steering wheel, which direction the wheels turn depends on which potholes the car hits. In Hong Kong, those potholes are public sentiment. Public opinion is like the face of a toddler, constantly changing. Without a steady direction for policymaking, blindly following public opinion means that policy will constantly flip-flop.

Some in Hong Kong say that the city's economy is tepid because its government doesn't obey public opinion. But Hong Kong's prosperity has nothing to do with popular will. Did the British colonial government care about Hong Kong public opinion? Besides, the SAR government does not ignore public opinion -- like a blindfolded donkey, it allows itself to be led around the millstone of public opinion.

Consequently, lawmaking has been dominated by the establishment faction, which is rigid and unable to reform, while the pro-democracy faction has hijacked policymaking in the name of meaningless trivia. These two factions have completely overwhelmed Hong Kong residents with political farce.

Now, if the Chinese government were to intervene in Hong Kong's affairs, would it be able to reverse this trend and guide Hong Kong's economy toward successful transition? The outlook is not optimistic. The real problem is Hong Kongers' sense of superiority towards mainlanders: "We are a wealthy, advanced, open-minded superior class; you are a poor, ignorant, closed-minded inferior class. How can we compromise for you? Naturally, it should be you who change your song for us." As long as people in Hong Kong maintain this attitude, any attempt by the Chinese government to intervene in Hong Kong affairs will only result in even stronger backlashes. Healthy, sustainable reform must be built upon the foundation of rational political strategizing. But with one side completely lacking the ability to make rational decisions, how can discussion of reform even begin? For this attitude to change, Hong Kong's economic situation must first fall far below that of China's coastal cities. Without this, nothing will overcome Hong Kongers' sense of superiority.

Potential for reform exists, but the people of Hong Kong are incapable of taking this road, and yet refuse to accept Chinese government guidance. This is one true deadlock.

Translated by Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian.

Click to expand...

Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement is about inequality. The elite knows it

What prominent tycoons really fear is a pro-democracy movement which will convert demands for increasing suffrage into robust demands for redistribution

Popular analyses of burgeoning political agitation around universal suffrage in Hong Kong often side-step an inconvenient reality – that the underlying story is not simply about relations with the mainland or concerns over its authoritarian ways, but rather about massive social inequality and the diminishing opportunities available to many Hong Kongers.

On 4 June, Hong Kong’s Victoria Park filled with people to commemorate the Tiananmen Massacre in 1989. Less than a month later, massive numbers of Hong Kongers – many of them young – once again turned out on 1 July for the annual pro-democracy march throughout Hong Kong's financial hub. Both of these events exhibited the excitement and tension associated with increasing levels of political activity which has all too often been characterised as stemming from democratic deficits currently built into the region’s governance.

It's true that in recent years, anti-mainland sentiment has increased, with popular targets being Beijing’s influence on the special autonomous region (created subsequently to the 1997 “handover” from British colonial rule), high profile stories about the behaviour of mainland tourists, and the ostensible impact of mainland investors on inflating property prices.

Beijing asserting its authority over Hong Kong, although possibly part of its broader geo-strategic posturing rather than simply a discrete attempt to curtail political freedom, has undoubtedly contributed to simplistic narratives to explain the large mobilisations recently seen. Moreover, the increased presence of mainlanders in the autonomous region has quite likely contributed to exacerbating inequality in certain sectors.

Mainland tourists have of course been an important customer base for retailers, a reality painfully evident when Xi Jingping’s anti-corruption drive was highlighted last month – in a city that prides itself on the rule of law and lack of corruption – as having a drastic impact upon watch and jewellery sales, reported to be down by as much as 40%. Having largely shed its once famous manufacturing base to the mainland and beyond, retail matters a great deal to employers. Furthermore, anyone familiar with Hong Kong also knows that real estate agencies, in a city with very limited employment options, also play a big role in terms of employment.

But to unmask the real reasons behind dissent, it is also important to look at the city’s sky-high inequality rates, which are more about market dominance and governance than simply mainland influence.

In 2013, around 1.3m people (19.6%) were deemed to be living below the official poverty line in Hong Kong. In 2011, the income distribution Gini coefficient hovered above a startling 0.53 (up on previous years and regularly cited as the highest of any developed economy in the world). The city is also famous for its painful delays to access to public housing (up to 10 years). And the mention last weekend of a new release of miserably-sized private apartments (just over 170 square feet) for under HKD$2m would hardly calm the nerves of those already at breaking point.

Indeed, such announcements likely only add to popular anger, highlighting unattractive living spaces on offer in a city where many are forced to live in what are bleakly known as “cage homes” and informal housing in former warehouses.

For the last couple of months, we have seen a steady who’s who of elite financial and economic figures instilling fear with respect to political mobilisations, one of which (Occupy Central) is yet to actually occupy any public space. The stunning stream of paranoid predictions has been revealing, although not nearly enough has been made of what this vocalising of concern reflects in terms of an irreconcilable division of interests.

Li Ka-Shing – Hong Kong’s most prominent tycoon, apparently worth over $USD31 billion and whose every word is treated with the veneration normally accorded to oracles – barked that Occupy Central would contribute to eroding Hong Kong’s prospects. Peter Woo Kwong-ching, a prominent property developer, also came out to dissuade protesters from taking action in relation to demanding greater representation.

Add to this the world’s four largest accounting firms – Ernst & Young, KPMG, Deloitte and PricewaterhouseCoopers Hong Kong – which collectively issued a statement published in a local newspaper to the effect that if Occupy Central were to proceed, it could hurt the attractiveness of Hong Kong as a location for multinational corporations and investors. Also contributing to the alarm was HSBC – the Hong Kong-based bank – which released a report downgrading its projections for Hong Kong, initially levelling the blame at Occupy Central and later, after receiving considerable criticism, adding a whole raft of other non-related concerns as more important, including the anti-corruption drive in China.

But what, really, is the positive impact on most people of Hong Kong’s status as a financial centre? Are the interests of people facing high property prices, high costs of living and diminished social mobility really aligned with a system centred upon low taxation of corporate interests, rather than a redistribution system which could be channelled into better public education, healthcare and housing?

Elite interests and the interests of most Hong Kongers are perhaps more diametrically opposed now than ever before. The real concern of many of these elite figures is that people in Hong Kong will convert demands for increasing suffrage into robust demands for redistribution; that in the face of plenty, those with little or no positive prospects won’t stand for obscenely concentrated wealth, power and privilege anymore.

In this last respect, the alignment of Beijing’s political aspirations and those of a tiny but very powerful elite may prove a formidable pairing. However, given Hong Kong’s material conditions, political dissent will not easily be contained.

Click to expand...