Placards, chanting and a tussle with security guards greeted the speech of Li Fei, the secretary- general of China’s national people’s congress standing committee, about the political future of Hong Kong. It merited all of these thing and something else too — a scratching of heads in perplexity. For China’s attitude to civil society is not only wrong-headed. It is also muddle-headed.
The decision to restrict candidacy for Hong Kong’s chief executive election to those approved by a pro-Beijing committee was accompanied by a warning that a deviation from socialist values “will not have a political future”. Unsurprisingly, this has prompted protest and will spur on activists planning to occupy the financial district.
What is baffling is that the warning comes less than a year since the third plenum of China’s 18th party congress agreed what by any common sense definition is a deviation from socialist values. The conference agreed that free market exchange, which was previously merely described as basic, should now be considered “decisive”. This was accompanied by the announcement of a major programme of liberalisation, which will substantially reduce the role of government.
The reason for these reforms, risky as they are, is that the Chinese leadership believes that economic growth is essential to their hold on power and that liberalisation will accelerate market growth. Yet this is internally inconsistent. In the short run, such liberalisation may help authoritarians hold to on to power. In the longer term it simply creates many individuals with the power and resources to challenge authoritarianism.
For this reason the policy announced in Hong Kong is not sustainable. A vibrant, liberalised market economy cannot live for long beside political suppression. In the end the policy will collapse.