Dissatisfaction
with China in Hong Kong and Taiwan shows up on the streets and at the polls.
The causes are strikingly similar
THE Communist Party’s strategy for bringing
the self-governing people of Taiwan into its fold has long been tricky
seduction. Ply them with money and favours (and tourists from the mainland) if
they play along, and with threats of cutting them off if they don’t. Let them
see how happy and prosperous the people of nearby Hong Kong are under Chinese
rule.
That strategy is faltering. China is not
winning hearts and minds in either Taiwan or Hong Kong. On November 29th voters
in regional and municipal elections in Taiwan delivered a drubbing to the ruling
Kuomintang party (KMT), which under President Ma Ying-jeou has forged closer
economic links with Communist leaders in Beijing but has failed to soothe
widespread dissatisfaction with the economy. More than 60% of the 23m people of
Taiwan will now be governed by mayors who belong to or are supported by the
Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which opposes union with China. Mr Ma is
now an unpopular lame duck serving his second (and final) four-year term, and
the DPP has the early advantage in the presidential election due to be held in
early 2016.
The electoral rout of the KMT is even more
worrying to Chinese leaders seen in the context of Hong Kong, where protesters
have been demanding more democratic elections than promised for 2017, when the
position of chief executive comes up for a popular vote. After two months of
huge demonstrations, the protests seem to be near an end following violent
clashes between police and demonstrators. Leaders of one protest group, Occupy
Central with Love and Peace, have called for protesters to go home. Two
encampments, one of them outside the government’s headquarters, remain. But
Hong Kong’s leaders have wisely waited for public opinion to sour. On December
1st Joshua Wong, an 18-year-old from the student group Scholarism, turned to a
new tactic: a hunger strike. Three founders of the protest movement, however,
turned themselves in to the police. They were released without charge.
Anti-mainland sentiments still run high. A
poll in October by Chinese University of Hong Kong found just 8.9% of
respondents identifying themselves solely as “Chinese”, the lowest figure
recorded in the survey—and way down on 32.1% in 1997, the year of Hong Kong’s
handover. Nearly two-thirds identified themselves as a combination of Hong
Konger and Chinese, but another 26.8% said they were just Hong Kongers, the
highest share since 1998.
Polling tells a similar story in Taiwan. In a
survey in June by National Chengchi University, 60.4% of respondents said they
identified as Taiwanese, a record high and up from less than 50% when Mr Ma was
first elected in 2008. Only 32.7% identified themselves as “both Taiwanese and
Chinese”, a new low.
China insists the problems posed by Hong Kong
and Taiwan are separate. There is some truth in this. Voters in Taiwan,
dissatisfied with the economy, have been aching to repudiate Mr Ma’s party at
the polls. In Hong Kong young people have been increasingly chafing over
Chinese rule. There have been bits of cross-pollination between youth movements
in both places, but with little impact on events in either. (Chinese officials,
for their part, blame “hostile foreign forces” from America and Britain for
fomenting unrest; a committee of British parliamentarians has been denied entry
to Hong Kong on the grounds that they had unfriendly intentions.)
Yet many grievances of young people in both
places are strikingly similar. They are unhappy with growing inequality of
wealth and are wary of integration with the mainland. Well-connected
mainlanders are increasingly seen as interloping competitors for jobs.
Investors from the mainland (and, in the case of Taiwan, rich Taiwanese who
live on the mainland) bid up property prices. Rising numbers of tourists from
the mainland have raised consumer prices (the torrent continued to increase in
Hong Kong even during the protests, to 4m visitors from the mainland in
October, up from 3.4m in the same month a year ago).
And in both Hong Kong and Taiwan there is a
sense that the economic embrace of the mainland has enriched only the elite—the
tycoons who are seen to be controlling Hong Kong and rich Taiwanese
entrepreneurs who back eventual unification. Young people find it difficult to
find work in either place: unemployment for 20-24-year-olds in Taiwan is around
14%, and the jobs they find pay little, as wages have stagnated.
A turning point in Taiwan came early this
year, when young Taiwanese were at the forefront of an occupation of the
legislature that lasted for more than three weeks. The protest, known as the
“Sunflower Movement”, aimed to stop the legislature ratifying a cross-strait
deal that would have allowed greater liberalisation of trade in services. The pact
ignited fears that an influx of Chinese businesses would overwhelm Taiwanese
competitors and flood Taiwan with cheap Chinese labour. It has since been stuck
in Taiwan’s legislature without being ratified.
There seems little hope of more cross-strait
dealmaking now. The results in the elections for 11,130 mayors, councillors and
town chiefs represented “a total collapse of people’s confidence in the
government and the ruling party”, says Jason Hu, who was voted out as mayor of
the central city of Taichung. The KMT, which controlled four of the six main
municipalities of Taiwan before the polls, emerged as victor in just one—losing
even the capital, Taipei, long a KMT stronghold.
China’s president, Xi Jinping, will not have
been too shocked. He knew after the Sunflower debacle that he had work to do to
build better relations with Taiwan. In June Zhang Zhijun, the director of
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office, became the first ministerial-level Communist
official to visit Taiwan since 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island at
the end of the Chinese civil war. Mr Zhang also took the unusual step of
meeting a prominent member of the typically despised DPP. There was an air of
magnanimity not seen in cross-strait relations in years.
But will China adjust its approach to Taiwan,
or to Hong Kong? In the wake of the election even KMT supporters seem less keen
on economic co-operation with the mainland. Media in China shrug off Taiwan’s
elections as “the chaos of democratic politics”, but have no suggestions for making
voters happier. Perhaps it would help if citizens in both places got more of
what they wanted. In Taiwan the DPP plans to deliver just that, with such
things as virtually free health care for the elderly, welfare for the
underprivileged and lots of social housing. (Hong Kong’s leader, Leung
Chun-ying, won no sympathy for fretting aloud that “numerical” democracy would
tilt policies towards the poor.)
There are signs of recognition in Beijing
that the roots of discontent in Hong Kong must be addressed. On December 2nd an
editorial in Global Times, a newspaper in Beijing, said that Hong Kong
should manage its own problems. “The mainland shouldn’t be tempted to quell the
unrest with troops too easily,” the newspaper said. “It can only bring
temporary peace, but the deep-rooted cause will still linger.”