Saturday, September 14, 2019

Hong Kong: No Police Solution, No Military Solution, Only A Political Solution

The leadership(s) in Hong Kong and Beijing are engaging in fantasy if they think there is some kind of a police solution or a military solution to the protests in Hong Kong. There is only a political solution. Engage the protest leaders in political dialogue. Basically, accept their five demands. That's it. That will make the whole thing go away.



Carrie Lam can defuse the Hong Kong protests by taking on the property tycoons The Chief Executive can break the stranglehold of property moguls by increasing land supply and providing more affordable housing ....... There is no question that Hong Kong has messed up big time. But a cloud of questions hangs over how to defuse the city’s biggest political crisis in decades........ Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po cited the gloomy economic outlook and downplayed the political crisis, he seems to have resorted to the tried-and-tested trick of “handing out candies” to assuage public discontent at a time of upheaval........the “grey rhino” risks long associated with Hong Kong – sky-high property prices, worsening inequality, lack of social mobility for youth, and woefully underfunded social security ...... every time a crisis has broken out – the crisis of governance in 2003, the national education controversy in 2012, the Occupy Movement in 2014 ....... From half a million protesters in 2003 to about 2 million in June ........ Lam, with the support of Beijing, must break the stranglehold of local property tycoons on the real estate market and curb their political influence by greatly increasing land supply for development and providing more affordable housing for low-income families.......

Hong Kong may pride itself as one of the freest economies in the world but, in fact, the property tycoons are calling the shots on the economy.

....... Hong Kong is short of space for property development – but perhaps not as short as one may think. Just seven per cent of the land is used for residential purposes. ..... In the two months since the anti-government protests started in June, Chinese officials have reportedly expressed dismay over some property tycoons’ reluctance to support Lam’s government and Hong Kong police. ...... the government could take back the 1,300 hectares of brownfield sites currently occupied by operators of open-air storage facilities, warehouses and car parks. ...... To speed up construction and reduce costs, the government should consider introducing

factory-built modular homes

into Hong Kong. ........ about seven per cent of land in Hong Kong is used for residential purposes while about 65 per cent is in green areas and country parks. Shrinking a few per cent of that land would ensure years of housing supply........ take back the 170-hectare Fanling golf course for residential development..... Greater land supply by the government would also have the added benefit of forcing the property tycoons to speed up development using their own land banks. ...... the government should also raise the minimum wage and create more middle-class jobs to improve social mobility for youth. To achieve that end, it should invest more in training health-care professionals and build more polytechnic colleges to equip the city’s youth for the information age ..... the government can also consider raising taxes on those making HK$2 million a year or more, and increasing taxes on property transactions valued at HK$10 million or more.



Hong Kong protests will not fizzle out on their own – Beijing needs to rethink its approach Hong Kong protesters’ resolve should not be unfamiliar to the Communist Party with its history of struggle against the Kuomintang. A more draconian policy will only harden that resolve, but what can be achieved if the grip is loosened? .......... Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has achieved little with her wilted olive branch of withdrawing an extradition bill previously pronounced “dead”. The mass protests she helped to spark, now in their fourth month, rage on. ........

Hong Kong’s administrators and others who advise Beijing are clueless about public sentiment.

....... Demosisto leader Joshua Wong Chi-fung, and founder of Hong Kong National Party Andy Chan Ho-tin ........ Wong, who seeks not independence but Hongkongers’ right to self-determination and the election of lawmakers and the chief executive by universal suffrage, said that “for Hong Kong to gain real democracy, it may have to wait until Xi Jinping steps down”. ........ The ball is in Beijing’s court and how it tackles it will determine if Hong Kong caves in or becomes the tail that wags the dog........

They can be happy with Chinese sovereignty if the freedoms promised in the Basic Law are implemented so they can elect their lawmakers and chief executive by universal suffrage.

Meaningful universal suffrage would include voters’ right to nominate candidates, including themselves, to stand for election, rather than voting for candidates put up by their rulers.





‘West can’t solve your problems,’ China’s Communist Party tells Hong Kong protesters Western nations ‘can’t even solve their domestic problems … it is a fantasy to ask them to help people thousands of miles away’, it says ........ The commentary, by the Central Political and Legal Affairs Commission, highlights socioeconomic factors such as the lack of affordable housing in the city as a root cause of the Hong Kong protests, signalling a shift in Beijing’s propaganda efforts in relation to the unrest......... “It is not easy to be a young person in this international metropolis. They face fierce competition and a heavy homework burden. After they get into university they have to shoulder big loans and even after they graduate ... [they still face] difficulties finding a job, low salaries, high property prices and an uncertain future.” ........

“The places ‘helped’ by Western countries to usher in ‘democracy and freedom’ are all in trouble. Western countries can’t even solve their domestic problems ...

it is a fantasy to ask them to help people thousands of miles away.” ........ The commentary came just a day after the commission published a similar article criticising Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing for condoning crime after he had urged those in power to “provide a way out” for the young demonstrators, describing them as the “masters of our future”.........It also suggested the 91-year-old, as a major property developer in the city, should be the one providing the way out by building more affordable homes.......... Li said it was regrettable that his remarks had been misinterpreted, but that he had become “accustomed to unwarranted accusations for many years”.



Hong Kong police target high-profile activists Joshua Wong, Andy Chan and Agnes Chow in wave of arrests amid anti-government protests

Joshua Wong, Andy Chan and Agnes Chow

....... Sha Tin District Council member

Rick Hui Yui-yu

was also arrested...... independence campaigner Andy Chan Ho-tin ...... He was stopped from boarding a plane leaving for Tokyo at Hong Kong airport....... Wong and Chow were key figures during the Occupy protests of 2014 while Chan, also an Occupy activist, led the banned Hong Kong National Party. ........ Wong and Chow are leaders of the pro-democracy outfit Demosisto, which has been campaigning for democratic self-determination in Hong Kong. Chow was disqualified last year from taking part in a Legislative Council election........ A third member of the party,

Ivan Lam Long-yin

........ In a statement on Friday, Demosisto insisted the recent protests were leaderless and the party was not spearheading them. ....... August 31 marks the fifth anniversary of Beijing’s stringent “831 Decision” on Hong Kong’s democratic reforms. ......... Seen as one of the leaders of the 2014 movement, Wong was jailed in August 2017 for six months for storming the government ­headquarters compound in Admiralty, which sparked the 79-day protest......... The anti-government movement has five main demands, including the bill’s complete withdrawal, the establishment of an independent inquiry into police’s handling of protests and genuine universal suffrage.



Can Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam issue an emergency edict? Yes, but the legislature needs to approve it the legislature is back in session in mid-October. ...... as the city entered the 81st day of unrest, surpassing the 79 days of the Occupy protests in 2014....... Local authorities could have the power to arrest, detain, censor media and amend or suspend any laws in operation......... Andrew Wong Wang-fat, a former president of Legco, said any emergency regulations could take effect immediately when gazetted, but lawmakers could later scrutinise or even repeal the order. ....... “Could the government be creating yet another crisis?” Wong asked. “Lawmakers will only have chance to scrutinise the bill on the second meeting in October, by which time the order may have already been in place for months. This will be a challenge to the legislature.”

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Hong Kong: Let The Dragon Grow Up

Adjusted for Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), China is now the largest economy in the world. Measured by per capita income it is still quite a distance behind the United States, but it can no longer argue that it needs more time before it can usher in political reforms. Just like Guangdong was the experiment for economic reforms, let Hong Kong be the experiment for political reforms across China. Start in Hong Kong.

The Chinese Communist Party should also open up a branch in Hong Kong. Compete in the local elections. Why does the CCP not have an organizational presence in Hong Kong? Spies and paid infiltrators don't count. If you are so good, if your policies are so good, if your thinking for the future of Hong Kong is so much better, you should be able to attract members.

Instead of trying to squash the political waves in Hong Kong, the CCP should attempt to ride the waves. These waves will go to New York. These waves will go to Mumbai, and London. They will go to Sydney. Johannesburg.

Hong Kong could take the lead on how big cities should be governed globally.

Marxists are supposed to be scientists, not dogmatists. You are supposed to collect data. And make sense of the data. What are the material conditions in Hong Kong? What are the social and economic forces that are in play? The communists in Beijing prop up Hong Kong tycoons in the Hong Kong legislature. What is the irony in that? Tycoons should also contest elections just like everybody else.

The only way, the best way for China to avoid the middle-income trap is by realizing it is now time for political reforms. The trade war has shown China lacks truly cutting edge technologies. It needs to open up and make space for cutting edge stuff. You have to move from potato chips to computer chips.

The Chinese constitution actually promises free speech. You can't do cutting edge research and innovation in a no free speech environment. That is the number one precondition.

China could stagnate. China could collapse. Or China could soar to new heights. If it "wins" the trade war, it stagnates. If it squashes the political waves in Hong Kong, it stagnates. If it is defeated by the trade war and the political waves in Hong Kong, it collapses like the Soviet Union. But if the CCP updates itself and engages in bold scientific thought processes, China sees new heights of prosperity and power.

Hong Kong will show the way, not only to China, but to the world. There is immense dissatisfaction in the democracies of the west. There is a hunger for a new kind of political system, a new kind of economy. There is a hunger for a more plentiful democracy, a more humane economy, a more just economy. And Hong Kong will show the way.

Hong Kong will form the nucleus for a consortium of the 100 biggest cities in the world. One country, two systems is essentially a form of federalism. Beijing can worry about defence and foreign policy. Elected Hong Kong leaders take care of everything domestic. Reaching out to the 100 biggest cities in the world is domestic. It is comparing notes. The 100 biggest cities have more in common with each other than with their own countries.







China says Hong Kong’s protesters have the mainland in their sights In the neighbouring province of Guangdong, many people have surprisingly little sympathy for them ......... “I can sympathise with the protesters in Hong Kong,” says a young saleswoman from Guangdong province, which borders on the territory. “The rule of law, greater democracy—these are good things to be demanding,” she adds, attributing her views to an “open mind” and software that allows her to bypass China’s censorship apparatus. ...... Since the protests broke out in Hong Kong three months ago, officials on the Chinese mainland have been working hard to prevent views like hers from circulating openly. China’s state-controlled media have focused only on the more chaotic aspects of the unrest, portraying participants as a small number of violent separatists in cahoots with foreign “black hands”...... They have ignored the record numbers who have joined peaceful demonstrations and dismissed their pleas for democracy as merely a ruse to achieve independence. So it is hardly surprising that many people echo the government’s line. They often argue that the “rioters” in Hong Kong deserve to be crushed. ......... The saleswoman is a rarity. ........... In an article published last month on the website of Newsweek, Cui Tiankai, China’s ambassador to America, said the biggest threat to China’s “one country, two systems” arrangement for Hong Kong was posed by “ill-intentioned forces” trying to turn Hong Kong “into a bridgehead to attack the mainland’s system and spark chaos across China.”........ On August 19th Xinhua, a government news agency, accused “anti-Chinese Western powers” of trying to unleash a “colour revolution” in Hong Kong that would “penetrate” the mainland. ...... A week later China’s public-security minister visited Guangdong and urged local police to “resolutely defend the great southern gate of China’s political security” by combating “all kinds of infiltration, sabotage and subversion”. ....... Guangdong—the country’s most populous province, with as many residents as France and Spain combined ........ shared culture and language. Many Hong Kongers are refugees from Guangdong, or their descendants. Hundreds of thousands fled from the province to the then British-ruled territory to escape famine or persecution during Mao Zedong’s rule. Inhabitants of both places commonly speak Cantonese, which sounds very different from the mainland’s official tongue, Mandarin. They take pride in the region’s distinct traditions. Many travel back and forth frequently.......... in interviews across the province, few people express sympathy for Hong Kong’s protesters. This is partly the result of the censorship that prevails across China. ........ In 2013, not long after Mr Xi took power, hundreds of people gathered outside the headquarters of Southern Weekend, a newspaper in Guangzhou with a national reputation for its investigative reports. They were protesting against the party’s ban on the publication of an editorial calling on China to uphold its constitution, which notionally enshrines wide-ranging freedoms. Incensed readers gave speeches at the gate. One even called for a competitive multiparty system. But the authorities tightened control over Southern Weekend. A former journalist there says that what was once China’s “boldest” newspaper has been completely tamed.............. In the five years leading up to Mr Xi’s accession, Guangdong’s party chief was

Wang Yang

, a relatively liberal official who was linked with what admiring academics in China called the “Guangdong model”. (Mr Wang is now one of the seven members of the party’s most powerful organ, the Politburo Standing Committee, but shows fewer signs of liberal thinking.) The model included innovations such as making government budgets public—in 2010 Guangdong became the first province to do so—and making it easier for ngos to register. Mr Wang emphasised the need for “thought emancipation” among officials, reviving a slogan promoted by Deng and the then party chief in Guangdong, Xi Zhongxun (Mr Xi’s father, ironically)........ It was on Mr Wang’s watch that thousands of residents of the fishing village of Wukan, in south-eastern Guangdong, rose up in 2011 against local officials who had illegally sold large tracts of collectively owned land to developers.

The protesters demanded, and were granted, a free election by secret ballot for the village leadership—a rarity in China.

The villagers’ extraordinary pluck made headlines around the world......... Wukan, meanwhile, has long since reverted to the grip of the local officials whom the villagers had once defied. The leaders they elected were turfed out in 2016....... Reporters who visit Wukan risk detention. On a recent, entirely legal, trip, your correspondent and a colleague were interrogated for hours by plainclothes police. ........ The chill is also evident among ngos. ....... Guangdong’s many Christians are feeling the impact, too. In the past year numerous house churches (informal congregations which often meet in people’s homes) have been shut. One of China’s biggest and best known, Rongguili Church in Guangzhou, which had a congregation of several thousand, was closed last December.

A former pastor at the church says the local government cited “fire-safety regulations”.

........... A commentator from Guangdong with more than 3m followers on Weibo, a microblog platform, said last year that more than 90% of Guangdong natives cannot stand to watch even five minutes of China’s annual televised Spring Festival gala. He said people preferred shows from Hong Kong......... Lao Zhenyu, the founder of a popular local news website, writes that when he was at primary school in Guangzhou in the 1980s, he was taught in his native Cantonese. Now, he notes, some schools in the city ban the use of it even during breaks............ A young native of Guangzhou admits to feeling “more culturally at home in Hong Kong than Beijing”. But he says education in China, which stresses patriotism, has “completely inoculated us” against even thinking about siding with Hong Kong’s protesters. Others are less diplomatic. Asked about the demonstrators, an old man strolling outside Jinan University in Guangzhou huffs, in broken Mandarin, that the army should “just kill them all”............. If Guangdong is resistant to contagion from Hong Kong, it is likely that the rest of the country is immune, too. China’s liberals have never drawn much inspiration from the territory’s democratic aspirations. Its politics have not exerted the same fascination as that of Taiwan, where democratisation in the 1980s and 1990s offered hope to some observers on the mainland that the same might happen in China..........

The 70th anniversary on October 1st of the founding of the People’s Republic is fast approaching.

Hong Kongers are widely expected to spoil the occasion by holding a mass pro-democracy demonstration that day. Short of unleashing the army in Hong Kong with a mandate to use extreme force—which the party now seems reluctant to do—it is hard to see how the central government can stop it. It can, however, step up efforts to prevent copycats in the mainland.



Wang Yang – the ‘joker’ and reformer in Xi Jinping’s new pack The former Guangdong party chief is known for being a committed economic reformer as well as his loyalty to the president ........ best known outside the country for the unlikely image of a senior Chinese politician cracking jokes at a Sino-US summit......... Wang broke the stereotype of the humourless and bland Chinese Communist Party technocrat by jesting that China and America’s relationship was like a marriage, but then quipping that this did not mean that he and the then US treasury secretary Jack Lew would be entering into a same-sex relationship......... “We cannot go for a divorce like Wendi Deng and Rupert Murdoch have done,” he joked. “It would be too big a price to pay.”.......... Wang’s remarks at the US-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington four years ago had some members of the Chinese delegation squirming in their seats ....... Inside China, Wang is best known as a committed economic reformer ......... has been promoted to a seat among the nation’s top leaders – the seven members of the Politburo Standing Committee......... was particularly high profile when he served as party chief in China’s industrial powerhouse Guangdong province from 2007 to 2012. ........ Guangzhou becoming the first city in China to publicly publish its budget and making it easier for people from poorer areas to migrate to the big cities for work......... His pro-market, more liberal approach become known as the “Guangdong model” and it was contrasted at the time with the “Chongqing model” promoted by the megacity’s former party chief Bo Xilai who favoured state-owned enterprises and traditional socialist values. Bo was later jailed for life for corruption. ........ Wang’s catchphrase during the initiative to refocus Guangdong’s economy was: “Empty the cage and let the right birds in”. ...... It was during his tenure in Guangdong that Wang also attracted international attention by ending the protests over land seizures by officials in the village of Wukan. The three-month stand-off against the local government in 2011 ended peacefully with Wang’s unusual decision to dismiss officials, redistribute land and allow a village election......... More than 55 million people were lifted out of poverty in Chinese rural areas from 2013 to 2016 ....... Wang, 62, comes from Suzhou in Anhui province and quit school at 17 to work in a food processing plant.
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