Chris Patten: Hope for Hong Kong

LONDON –Hong Kong’s democracy movement has gained admiration worldwide. The principles,decency, and behavior of its youthful vanguard inspire confidence in the qualities of the generation that one day will run the great city. That said, it is time to move on to a sensible endgame.

The longer the standoff between Hong Kong’s Chief Executive and the demonstrators continues, the more likely it is that individual citizens – and Hong Kong itself – will be hurt. The Hong Kong government should demonstrate some statesmanship, which the so-called “Umbrella Movement” – occupying the moral high ground and not wishing to risk losing public support – would surely reciprocate. A substantive and successful dialogue with the government would not require the protesters to call off their campaign for democracy; it would simply end the current phase of a campaign that eventually will succeed.

Despite their protestations to the contrary, Hong Kong Chief Executive C. Y. Leung and his government have considerable room for maneuver. As many Hong Kong citizens have argued, the Chinese government’s current position is based on a report,submitted by Leung’s officials, which purported to reflect accurately the outcome of local consultations on constitutional development.

But the report plainly understated the degree of public support for change. Given what has happened in the last few weeks, Leung could quite properly give a new report to the authorities in Beijing focusing on two issues not proscribed by Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

The first issue concerns not just the immediate question of the terms on which the Chief Executive will be elected in 2017, but also how the Legislative Council should be elected in 2016 and after. The procedure is largely a matter for the Hong Kong government to decide.

It is surprising that 17 years after the handover of sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China, Hong Kong still does not have a directly elected legislature.In December 1992, Margaret Thatcher suggested in a speech in the House of Lords that, if all went well, Hong Kong could have universal suffrage by 2007.

Unfortunately,all has not gone well. The legislature today comprises a mix of directly elected members and those representing functional constituencies: corporate interests and groups of employees. Some civic groups have advocated increasing the number of directly elected legislators and opening up the functional constituencies to broader electorates. Moreover, the brake that the functional constituencies can put on legislation should be scrapped, leaving decisions to a simple majority. This could be accompanied by a pledge to create a legislature composed entirely of directly elected members in 2020.

The second issue concerns the composition and the voting rules of the handpicked1,200-member election committee that will choose the Chief Executive in the future. The current proposed arrangements would permit the Chinese government to veto any candidate that it did not like, prompting criticism that what is on offer is an Iranian-style election: “You can vote for anyone we choose.”

The Hong Kong government could call for changes to increase the openness and fairness by which the Chief Executive is chosen, without abandoning its current method in favor of universal suffrage. According to the Basic Law, the election committee should be “broadly representative” – a provision that the committee’s current composition violates. Its membership is chosen by only 7% of the total Hong Kong electorate, and its voting procedures seek to prevent the nomination of any candidates who may harbor democratic sympathies.

Since 1997,55-61% of voters have voted for democratic candidates in Legislative Council elections. The last time a slightly smaller election committee met (to choose Leung), less restrictive constraints on candidate selection were in place, and the leader of the Democratic Party was able to be nominated (though he still received less than 7% of the vote).

So Leung and his team should put forward proposals to broaden the electoral base of the election committee and open up the nominating process for candidates. There are plenty of recommendations from civil-society groups about how to accomplish these objectives. Both sides will need to give a little to prevent the confrontation in the streets from escalating, with the police forced to provide a substitute for a sensible policy.

The British government has said that it is important that “the people of Hong Kong have a genuine choice.” Leung and his colleagues can give them one. This would not be all that the Umbrella Movement has demanded, but it should encourage the protesters to reach a compromise without departing from their longer-term goal.
That is why Leung should embrace dialogue and compromise. Even a ruler whose mandate comes from heaven should heed the words of the Confucian sage Mencius: “Heaven sees with the eyes of its people. Heaven hears with the ears of its people.”

Chris Patten: Deng and the Transformation of China

When Chinese historians are able one day to ply their subversive trade without control or censorship, their judgment will surely be that their country should revere Deng Xiaoping way above his predecessor Mao Zedong. Mao led the Communist party to victory over the Kuomintang and the Japanese, and united China in the 1950s. He then plunged his country into the famine and bloody mayhem of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Deng carefully put the pieces of the smashed nation back together again and launched China on its recovery to become assuredly once again the world’s largest economy.

Ezra Vogel’s massive biography assembles the case for Deng (1904-97) with narrative skill and prodigious scholarship. Vogel, for many years a Harvard professor, published the bestselling Japan as Number One in 1979. His principal academic interest then turned to China and he spent some time in the late 1980s studying economic reform in Guangdong. The sources and acknowledgements he cites in this book indicate the breadth of his contacts and study, though when required to stray outside the world of conventional western Sinology he is less sure-footed. His knowledge of British and Hong Kong politics, for example, is pretty sketchy.

The book is not hagiographical but it does occasionally read a little like the Deng family’s authorised biography. Warts are mentioned from time to time but the overall picture presented usually discounts the blemishes. While we learn once again that Deng’s time as a young emigrant worker in France in the 1920s left him with a lifetime love of croissants, his later military exploits in the civil war are dealt with pretty summarily. Moreover, Deng’s rule in the south-west of China, including his native Sichuan from 1949-52, gets just a page and a half. It was sufficiently brutal to earn Mao’s approval. Larger landlords were attacked and killed. One day we will presumably learn more about Deng’s methods at this time; they were plainly not for the squeamish.

Deng’s role as Mao’s enforcer during the “anti-rightist campaign” of the 1950s is hardly mentioned. Half a million intellectuals were shipped to labour camps. His careful avoidance of personal trouble during the disastrous Great Leap Forward of 1958-61, which led to 45m or more deaths (he broke a leg playing billiards and used a sick note as an excuse for missing difficult meetings) was not heroic. Almost 10m of his fellow Sichuanese starved to death.

But it is Deng’s muddled view of the relationship between economic progress and political freedom that will always attract the most criticism. In his policy battles with the economic hardliner Chen Yun in the 1980s, he was always in the camp that contested the argument that if the party gave up control over the economy it would sooner or later lose control of the state. For Deng and his circle, stepping back from command economics was essential for growth and job creation, and without them the Communist party would certainly lose control of the state. Both propositions are probably true and China’s main existential challenge remains the issue of resolving this dilemma.

The problem was bloodily resolved in 1989 in and around Tiananmen Square, “a tragedy of enormous proportions”, in Vogel’s words. It is, maybe, unfair but inevitable that Deng’s life will be viewed by many through the prism of this catastrophe. Those of us who were in Beijing just before the crackdown should not have been carried away by the epic romance of what was happening in the streets. We should have listened more carefully to the seasoned hacks who told us it would all end in tears and that Deng’s whole career showed that he would never accept such a challenge to the authority of the Communist party.

One unnamed provincial first party secretary is quoted, by Vogel, as saying that Deng’s view of democracy was like Lord Ye’s view of dragons. “Lord Ye loved looking at a book with pretty pictures of dragons but when a real dragon appeared, he was terrified.” This well-known story about a mythical figure from China’s distant past is customarily told to draw attention to the inconsistency between words and actions.

Vogel chronicles very well Deng’s role in stabilising China after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76), in which he and his family had themselves suffered, literally getting the trains running again, making people work together without reprisals, and re-establishing schools and universities. His initial success in preventing China capsizing led to his second ousting by Mao in 1976. The paranoid Mao was suspicious that the younger man would not support unequivocally the case for the Cultural Revolution, was jealous of his growing popularity and feared that he might, on Mao’s own death, become the Khrushchev to his Stalin, denouncing the departed tyrant.

When Hua Guofeng succeeded Mao later that year, he was soon persuaded to reinstate Deng, China’s best pragmatic manager. But Hua, who had shown great resolve in arresting Mao’s widow and the other members of the Gang of Four, proved no match politically for his wily rival. Deng’s sidelining and despatch of Hua is a masterclass in ruthless, though not vindictive, politics. Hua was stripped of authority, humiliated but not imprisoned.

Intellectually, it was Deng’s bold pragmatism, learning truth from facts, that triumphed over what was ridiculed as the “whateveritis” of Hua – whatever Mao had said or done must be the correct way to act. This approach led to the opening of China to the world, the reform of agriculture and industrial management and the years of stupendous growth. In 1978, the year that really saw the beginnings of change, China exported about as much in 12 months as it now exports in a day.

The first experiments were in Fujian and Guangdong, where the father of the man tipped to be China’s next leader, Xi Jinping, was provinicial party secretary. Vogel has written before about the economic adjustments and rural reforms in China under Deng, starting with the creation of a Special Economic Zone around the hitherto sleepy fishing village of Shenzhen, just across the border from Hong Kong. Foreign investment was welcomed and foreign technology was brought in, copied and, of course, stolen. The commands of a controlled economy were partly replaced by markets and profits. Vogel tells this story authoritatively, culminating in Deng’s journey to the south in 1992 to give heart to the reformers and embolden his successor, Jiang Zemin.

Deng was never an ideologue and, as Vogel argues, it would be unfair to criticise him for failure to set out an overarching philosophy for what he was doing. Sometimes economic activity simply took off once central control was relaxed. Deng himself celebrated the spontaneous emergence of township and village enterprises.

How should we describe what has happened? It does not seem to have much to do with socialism, given for example that in the decade of fast growth after 1997, workers’ wages as a proportion of gross domestic product fell from 53 per cent to 40 per cent. Whatever the correct economic nomenclature, authoritarian party control was never abandoned. Perhaps it is best described as “market Leninism”.

Describing Deng’s art of governing, Vogel sets out a list of the principles that underpinned his rule. Several would have been embraced by other leaders, including his ruthless sacrifice of pawns to preserve the position of the king and his throne. First, he cut down the political reformer and party general secretary Hu Yaobang in 1987 for being too soft in dealing with student protests; then he destroyed Zhao Ziyang during the Tiananmen demonstration in 1989. Deng believed above all in preserving his own authority and that of the party. Whether that was essential to transform China will remain the subject of increasingly open debate. Whatever the answer, Vogel makes a strong case for according Deng the prize for lifting more people out of poverty than anyone else in history.

Lord Patten, chairman of the BBC Trust and chancellor of the University of Oxford, was the last governor of Hong Kong

Another Comprehensive Review

John Pomfret: Bookreview: ‘Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China,’ by Ezra F. Vogel