Hong Kong-Beijing showdown 25 years in the making

The district of Wan Chai bustles in the boiling heat of the Hong Kong day. Small businesses and bath fixture shops jostling with dentist offices and noodle restaurants. Visitors attend the convention centre or trudge over to the visa office in Immigration Tower.

By night, Wan Chai’s neon- fronted bars and discos are packed out with migrant workers, be they the rich expatriate financial services workers from Britain, Australia and the US, or the poor bar girls and waiters from the Philippines, Thailand and Indonesia.

Last week there was teargas in the streets of Wan Chai, as police took a tough stand against democracy demonstrators who occupied sections of downtown Hong Kong.

They were protesting against a ruling from Beijing that instead of allowing full universal suffrage in 2017, as envisaged in the Basic Law (Hong Kong’s mini-constitution), the candidates would instead be vetted by the ruling Communist Party 2,000 kilometres away.

Protesters raised their umbrellas to protect themselves against the teargas, and these quickly became emblematic of the demonstrations.

Mixed with the palpable sense of excitement and pride among the demonstrators, there was also a feeling of disbelief. Teargas? In Wan Chai, near the heart of one of the world’s riches cities and most vital financial nerve centres?

This was a highly sophisticated group of protesters – they are led, after all, by a group called Occupy Central With Peace and Love. Their anthem over the week was Do You Hear the People Sing? from Les Misérables, a call for citizens to take arms. The scene in the musical is of a student-led revolution that ends in tragedy.

Despite that song’s tragic tone, the atmosphere was generally upbeat in Hong Kong over the week of the protests. People tied yellow ribbons around lampposts and wore them in their hair.

It has become normal now for major protests to be carried on Twitter and other online platforms, but so popular were the photographs posted on Instagram that the Chinese government moved to ban it on the mainland.

Democracy denied

When I first arrived in Hong Kong in July 1989, in pursuit of the woman who is now my wife, there was a general horror at the way the democracy demonstrators on Tiananmen Square had been run over by tanks on June 4th. People wore T-shirts bearing the faces of the student leaders, built replica Goddess of Democracy statues, and thronged Victoria Park in their thousands to protest against the horrific future they saw for themselves.

There has been much debate about the conflict between pragmatism and idealism in Hong Kong, about whether the demonstrators on the streets are dreamy and naive, and whether the city’s famous drive and fondness for doing business will outweigh sentiment.

In truth, Hong Kong has always reflected all these aspects. People like to make money and do business, but they also are fiercely proud of being from Hong Kong.

When I covered the handover of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, I was assigned to report on the mood in the bars of Wan Chai. It was striking how people felt abandoned by Britain and anxious about what China would do once it was in control.

At the same convention centre, which was opened in time for the handover, senior figures arrived in black limos as the British leaders departed on the Royal yacht.

Since then Hong Kong has had an uneasy and ferociously complicated relationship with China. Beijing sees Hong Kong as an ungrateful, complaining province despite profiting heavily from its position as a gateway to the world’s second biggest economy.

The Closer Economic Partnership Agreement, signed in 2003, gives Hong Kong unique treatment and a powerful advantage over other regional centres seeking access to the booming China market.

People in Beijing think that the southern enclave is ungrateful for all the help they receive from the central government.

It is striking how Cantonese the protests are. Since the handover, people in Hong Kong have been under mostly low- level but definite pressure to learn Mandarin Chinese, the standardised language of the northern rulers, largely based on the Beijing dialect.

The sing-song tones of Cantonese ring out across the Admiralty business district, with the linguistic differences somehow highlighting the political gulf.

One of the young women I spoke to this week was a Pilates trainer. In 20 years covering demonstrations, I can honestly say that I have never met a fitness consultant manning the barricades. “I hope Hong Kong can stand up for the future,” she declared.

There were signs yesterday that dialogue, at least, was taking place. Hong Kong's chief executive, CY Leung, said he had assigned chief secretary Carrie Lam, who is more popular than him, to meet representatives of the Federation of Students.

“I hope the chief secretary’s dialogue with the federation’s representatives will herald further communication with various sectors on political reform,” Leung said.

According to government sources, students had dropped calls for Leung to resign and abandoned calls for Beijing to retract the White Paper on limiting electoral reform.

All kinds of protestors

As well as the fitness consultants and students, there are plenty of taxi drivers, waiters and other blue-collar workers, if that term is still relevant, in evidence on the streets.

In quiet moments, protesters take time to gather up the rubbish and prepare it for recycling. People play music – there are DJs, string quartets, all kinds of music. What’s also noticeable is how young the protesters are; many were schoolchildren.

Deciding how to deal with a school boycott divided two of Hong Kong’s biggest education providers, the Catholic Church and the Anglicans. The Catholic diocese, which runs 87 schools with more than 70,000 pupils, told its schools not to penalise pupils for taking part. The Anglican Church, with 30 schools, has said students will get lower marks for conduct if they take part.

Won’t back down

But there were no signs at any stage of mainland China backing down.

One of the boldest signs of support from Beijing came in a front-page editorial in the Communist Party's official organ, the People's Daily, pledging "full confidence" in Leung and warning against any moves that might bring "chaos" to Hong Kong.

However, just as it seemed that dialogue was about to take place, chaos was exactly what the residents of the city got last night when scuffles broke out between government supporters and pro-democracy protesters.

In the gritty, bustling district of Mong Kok, police formed a human chain to separate the two groups as about 1,000 Beijing supporters – spitting and throwing water bottles – clashed with some 100 protesters. Hong Kong’s RTHK radio station reported that 131 people were taken to hospital with injuries of varying severity sustained during protests across the city.

Numbers had dwindled at some other protest sites in and around the central financial district as rain fell and people returned to work after a two-day holiday. But the crowds built up again from hundreds to thousands late at night in the Admiralty, where government offices are concentrated.

Nevertheless, the protesters did not carry out their threat to storm government buildings after organisers urged them not to. Leung also promised that police would exercise the “greatest restraint” towards protesters as long as they didn’t try to breach police lines.

Perhaps the protesters will keep their yellow ribbons and umbrellas for another day.