26 BriefingHong Kong’s turmoil The EconomistNovember 23rd 2019
2 est have become haak ging—“black police”.
Police commanders blame Mrs Lam and
her administration for forcing them to deal
with the ever-worse symptoms of a pro-
blem which can only be sorted out politi-
cally. But Dennis Kwok, who represents the
legal profession in Legco, says the police
now take direct orders from central-gov-
ernment officials. Chris Tang Ping-keung,
who was installed as police commissioner
on November 19th, immediately changed
the force’s motto from serving with “Pride
and Care”—which aligned it with the citi-
zens to whom it is nominally account-
able—to serving with “Duty and Loyalty”.
That will play well in Beijing.Swirling waters
China’s official narrative about Hong Kong
is that Western “black hands” are training,
organising and even paying protesters to
destroy Hong Kong—part of a larger plot to
hold down a rising China. When America’s
Senate passed a bill supportive of the prot-
esters on November 20th Beijing reacted
with a fury that grew out of and fed that
narrative. Many mainlanders, bombarded
by state media with images of protesters
insulting China or waving foreign flags,
long to see the protests crushed.
The Chinese government is clear that it
wants things sorted. But it has held back
from sending in the People’s Liberation
Army (pla) and paramilitary police to quell
the disturbances—indeed, though one can
never know what a secretive leadership is
planning, it may never seriously have been
considered. In leaked comments from a
private meeting with businessmen, Mrs
Lam implied that China’s threats had been
so much bluster. One of her advisers says
that, although the protests represent a big
loss of face to China’s leadership, the loss of
face that would come with abandoning all
semblance of “one country, two systems”
would be worse.
For a government that makes much of
its decisiveness under the brilliant leader-
ship of Xi Jinping, the absence of anything
resembling a strategy to sort out Hong
Kong is striking. The best spin that officials
can put on it is that their leaders are playing
a long game, waiting for popular sentiment
to turn against the protesters and reconcile
itself to something like the status quo ante.
This seems unlikely—but possibly looks
more plausible if you sincerely believe, as
hardliners say they do, that Hong Kong
opinion polls cannot be trusted because
they are conducted by universities and
think-tanks that are hotbeds of Western
liberalism, and if your view of the territory
has long been coloured by reports from Li-
aison Office officials who tell you what you
want to hear.
A deeper problem is that the govern-
ment in Beijing has pre-emptively under-
cut the possibility of a satisfactory settle-ment. As the Hong Kong police argue in
private, the unrest needs a political sol-
ution. But the Communist Party has sys-
tematically constrained the space in which
the give and take of Hong Kong politics can
take place. Those constraints created the
dissatisfaction that led to the protests;
coming to some accommodation would re-
quire setting some of them aside. But Chi-
na’s leadership is unwilling to counte-
nance such action. An example: when
Hong Kong’s high court overturned a ban
on face coverings imposed by Mrs Lam, the
National People’s Congress in Beijing made
its disapproval clear.
If expecting politics to work in a place
where they have tried to remove that pos-
sibility fails, China’s leaders “have no Plan
B,” according to a senior adviser to Mrs Lam
with close links to Beijing. And so things
are left in the hands of Mrs Lam and her
paralysed, incompetent government. Mrs
Lam is showing the same intransigence in
the face of calls for an independent investi-
gation into the causes of the unrest and
into police behaviour as she originally did
over the extradition bill. When in an unac-
customed fit of good sense she acknowl-
edged the need to reach out to young peo-
ple, she did so at a youth camp organised by
the reviled pla—and in the Mandarin of the
overlord rather than Cantonese.
With no one in power taking the initia-
tive and violence ratcheting up, the out-
look appears grim. But the district-council
elections set for November 24th could pos-
sibly help move the action away from the
streets. These elections, mostly concerned
with rubbish collection and the manage-
ment of public housing estates, have never
previously been a big deal. This time demo-
crats see them as an opportunity to show
that the energy of the streets can be chan-
nelled into the ballot box.
With a democrat contesting every coun-
cil seat and 386,000 (mainly young) newvoters, the poll offers the chance for a sym-
bolic coup de théâtreand, indirectly, a shift
in the composition of Legco. Half of the
committee’s 70 members are directly elect-
ed—six of the others come from the district
councils. The election results will also af-
fect the make-up of the committees, tightly
circumscribed by Beijing, which every five
years choose the chief executive.
It might seem strange, in the current
circumstances, that the elections are going
ahead. But both sides want them. Mok, the
protester behind the barricades at PolyU,
says that though he views the elections as
part of the tainted system he is fighting, he
and his comrades are determined to vote.
The government, for its part, desperately
wants to show that some things are carry-
ing on as normal. And for the elections to
go ahead, it says it needs calm. This puts
democratic leaders in something of a spot.
They need the frontliners to leave the barri-
cades—yet saying so out loud would risk
splitting the protest movement.
When his pupil in “Longstreet” worries
that wateriness does not sound like the
way to beat his fearsome opponent, Bruce
Lee upbraids him: “You want to learn the
way to win, but never accept the way to
lose.” The Hong Kong protesters know that
they are not going to win a liberal democra-
cy any time soon. But nor do they necessar-
ily need to follow Lee’s last advice: that the
pupil must learn the art of dying. Some in
Beijing acknowledge that a fundamental
change has taken place in Hong Kong, and
suggest that the central government will be
“very cautious” about its next steps. In re-
sponse to the suggestion that the Commu-
nist Party had lost the hearts and minds of a
whole generation in Hong Kong, one
thoughtful person in the capital said: “Oh,
two.” That is the case for giving Hong Kong
the political space to start sorting out the
mess itself. It is not a case Mr Xi is likely to
take to. But some waters flow slowly. 7Going with the flow