The Failure of the Democracy Movement in Hong Kong: 1984–2020

抄録

The Hong Kong democracy movement began with the Sino-UK Joint Declaration of 1984 on the future of the city after 1997. Among other things, the declaration defined for Hong Kong citizens a limited democracy to be put in place at some unspecified point in the post-1997 period. The scheme promised one-person-one-vote to elect all legislators and the chief executive, which sounded fine until one read the fine print. Described in broad terms with lots of discretionary power for Beijing to maneuver, the scheme reserved the privilege to introduce bills for the chief executive only. Elections for the latter would involve only a small number of candidates hand-picked by Beijing, rubber-stamped by a small electoral committee whose membership system was structured in strong favor of the government. Yet moving towards even this limited democracy proved to be a total failure. For all the 25 years after 1997, the government gave not one inch, even though the movement had impressive records of regularly turning out gigantic crowds—up to some 20% of the city’s population for a four-to-six-hour protest event, drawing from a 60% pro-democracy majority among the Hong Kong people. A major problem of this failure lay in the movement itself, which almost since its inception had adopted and held fast to the strategy of pressure politics, while basically remaining within the system as “loyal opposition”. That strategy involved garnering public opinion based on sheer supporter turnout in strictly peaceful, open and legal protests to force the government to grant concessions. That was a strategy that may well work in already democratic countries or even in non-democratic ones which had weak ruling classes. But in the case of the post-1997 Hong Kong, for the government—a highly capable one now backed by a strong, totalitarian government in Beijing, such pressure politics backed by public opinion no matter how strong could simply be ignored if the government still practiced some restraint. And when it had no more patience for those restraints, the whole movement could be wiped out in a short time, as actually happened after the proclamation of the National Security Law in 2020. The movement developed alternative strategies and approaches after the Umbrella Movement of 2014, but even though it gained incredible strength in the run-up to the explosive events of 2019, it was already too late.