2014年10月22日星期三

NYT: Inequality in Hong Kong



The talks in Hong Kong between pro-Chinese government officials and pro-democracy student leaders are aimed mainly at easing tensions in the streets. Not on the agenda is fundamental reform of the conditions that provoked the unrest.

Chief among these conditions is China’s refusal to loosen its grip on the city’s political system by allowing full and open democratic elections for Hong Kong’s top public office, as it had promised to do. The protesters insist that it is their right to choose who runs Hong Kong, but Beijing-backed officials have supported only cosmetic changes to the city’s restrictive election law.

A related problem, as Neil Gough of The Times reported recently, is a persistent and widening wealth gap in Hong Kong. A small pro-Chinese government elite has profited greatly from the city’s role in the rise of China, while incomes and opportunities for the middle and working classes have been squeezed. This elite, which controls the most lucrative sectors of Hong Kong’s economy, fears that greater democracy — in the form of political participation and shared prosperity — would threaten the increasingly monopolistic crony capitalism from which they benefit.

The inequality that has helped to fuel the unrest in Hong Kong is reflected in the name the protesters took for their effort — Occupy Central, an allusion to the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations in the United States three years ago that elevated the issue of inequality in America’s political and economic debates.

Occupy Central, however, has a bigger challenge than its American namesake. It faces a totalitarian regime determined to deny its opponents the political means of changing their circumstances.
The problem in America is a dysfunctional political system that puts party ambitions and campaign donations above public needs. Still, elections and other established political processes, when used and protected, provide a way to identify and choose new and presumably more responsive leaders.
The worthy goal, in Hong Kong and the United States, is to link robust democracy to robust capitalism to broadly raise living standards. Like all worthy goals, it is not achievable or sustainable without struggle.