The New York Times International - 30.08.2019

THE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION FRIDAY, AUGUST 30, 2019 | 3

World

Boris Johnson hurtled to the top of
British politics with an air of charm and
disarrayed befuddlement. He slipped
into Latin and Greek, changed sides
when it suited his ambitions and oozed a
mischievous bravado, as when he put
his foot on a table at the French presi-
dent’s palace last week.
But Mr. Johnson’s decision this week
to cut short a session of Parliament re-
vealed another side: the ruthless tacti-
cian who took office as prime minister
this summer. With Brexit hanging in the
balance, Mr. Johnson marshaled all the
power of Downing Street to cut the legs
from under a wobbly opposition, risking
a crisis to get what he has promised.
Suddenly the man affectionately
known as BoJo was being rebranded by
some opponents a “tin-pot dictator.”
President Trump, known for his own
norm-smashing maneuvers, applauded
Mr. Johnson, calling him on Twitter “ex-
actly what the U.K. has been looking
for.”
Mr. Johnson’s opponents argue that
his policies could result in a disastrous
no-deal split from the European Union
with the potential to tear apart the
United Kingdom, cripple British agricul-
ture and some manufacturing sectors
and throw the economy into a recession,
while producing shortages of food and
medicines.
But those warnings have been filed
away under “Project Fear” by Mr. John-
son and his supporters.
And with his boldest move yet as
prime minister, Mr. Johnson showed
that he would be as pugnacious in
Downing Street as critics said his prede-
cessor, Theresa May, had been timid —
and a radically different politician than
he was as London’s mayor.
“It’s much more thought through,
more organized, in many ways more ag-
gressive, than the Boris Johnson people
thought they knew,” said Tony Travers,
a professor of government at the Lon-

don School of Economics.

With his “rabbit-out-of-a-hat deci-

sion” on Wednesday to suspend Parlia-

ment, Mr. Johnson knocked his oppo-

nents back on their feet and “conveyed

the sense of a government that’s in con-

trol,” Mr. Travers said.

By limiting the time available to Par-

liament to block a no-deal Brexit, Mr.

Johnson sought to undermine an oppo-

sition strategy announced on Tuesday,

analysts said.

After weeks of arguing about who

should take charge should they defeat

Mr. Johnson, opposition lawmakers had

changed their tune. They said they

would shelve the idea of trying to throw

Mr. Johnson out of office and instead

proceed more deliberately, focusing on

passing legislation that would stop a no-

deal Brexit.

For a fractured opposition, it was a

painfully considered strategy to band

together and confront Mr. Johnson on

their own schedule. It was also an ad-

mission that they did not yet have the

numbers to replace Mr. Johnson with a

caretaker prime minister, in large part

because the opposition is divided over

whether Jeremy Corbyn, the left-wing,

euroskeptic Labour Party leader, is a

suitable replacement.

But Mr. Johnson had other ideas.

By cutting short the session of Parlia-

ment, he blew a hole in the opposition’s

plan to take matters slowly and avert a

decision about whether to try unseating

him.

In effect, analysts said, he called their

bluff, giving anti-Brexit lawmakers only

a matter of days to decide whether they

felt strongly enough about stopping

Brexit to kick him out of office.

Divided on many policies besides

Brexit, and at odds over Mr. Corbyn, the

opposition may not be able to organize

quickly enough.

“His great advantage is that although

his opponents are agreed on wanting to

stop him, they can’t agree on anything

else, and any dramatic, unexpected

move which confuses them is likely to

divide them for the same reason,” said

Rob Ford, a professor of politics at the

University of Manchester. “They’ll

come to different conclusions about

what’s going on and what to do about it.”

In effect, Mr. Johnson invited the no-

holds-barred confrontation that the op-

position had only a day earlier tried to

put off.

They are “throwing down the gauntlet

to Corbyn and others to call a confidence

vote next week,” said Matthew Good-

win, a professor of politics at the Univer-

sity of Kent.

“Johnson and his team are ruthlessly

exploiting the divisions on the Remain

side,” he said.

Where Mrs. May paid heed to conven-

tions and shrank from major show-

downs, Mr. Johnson fulfilled the hopes of

hard-line Brexit backers by inching

Britain closer to a crisis.

“Today has confirmed what many had

suspected for so long about his leader-

ship style, that he is willing to be quite

ruthless in his pursuit of Brexit,” Mr.

Goodwin said of the prime minister. Mr.

Goodwin said the decision laid the

groundwork for “one of the most historic

and consequential weeks in postwar

British politics.”

For some analysts, it was evidence of

the influence of one of Mr. Johnson’s

most senior advisers, Dominic Cum-

mings, an aggressive tactician who

helped lead the referendum campaign in

2016.

Whoever is calling the shots, many

analysts believe Mr. Johnson is inviting

an early general election, and the prime

minister is bullish about his chances. He

has strong poll numbers and the opposi-

tion is divided.

And the image of lawmakers’ putting

their full weight behind undoing Brexit

would provide an ideal backdrop for the

“people versus Parliament” campaign

that Mr. Johnson seems eager to run.

British leader shows a ruthless side

LONDON

In cutting short a session

of Parliament, he directly

challenges the opposition

BY BENJAMIN MUELLER

Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, center, limited the time available to Parliament to block a no-deal Brexit, risking a crisis to get what he promised.

MARKUS SCHREIBER/ASSOCIATED PRESS

His move was “more organized,

in many ways more aggressive,

than the Boris Johnson people

thought they knew.”

Across the border from Hong Kong, the
Chinese Communist Party screams its
presence with banners and slogans on
nearly every street. Yet in the former
British colony, where China’s ruling
party confronts what it calls a “life and
death” struggle against a turbulent pro-
test movement, it is invisible: The party
is not registered and has no publicly de-
clared local members.
Nevertheless, this officially nonexist-
ent organization is in the vanguard of
defending Chinese rule in Hong Kong, in
the face of the biggest public resistance
since the authoritarian leader Xi Jinping
came to power in 2012. The party, oper-
ating in the shadows through individu-
als and organizations, is driving an in-
creasingly firm pushback against the
antigovernment protests, now in their
12th week.
Parroting slogans scripted by the
Communist Party in the mainland, ac-
tivists in a host of local pro-China orga-
nizations have mobilized to discredit the
protesters as violent hooligans bent on
wrecking the city. It is a message sup-
ported by the party’s main proxy in the
territory, the Central Liaison Office in
Hong Kong, which formally represents
the Chinese government.

They mostly ignore the huge peaceful
protests and focus instead on the peri-
odic clashes between small bands of
protesters and police officers, who last
weekend fired rounds of tear gas and
used water cannon trucks for the first
time against demonstrators who were
throwing bricks.
Representatives of 15 pro-Beijing
business groups and associations linked
to Chinese provinces gathered recently
in a Hong Kong office tower to take
turns reciting pledges of support for
China. They then stood together, pump-
ing their fists and chanting in unison:
“Stop the violence! End the turmoil!”
The event was organized by the Fu-
jian Hometown Association, which rep-
resents immigrants to Hong Kong from
Fujian, an eastern Chinese province,
and their descendants. The association
has no formal links to the Communist
Party.
The party has operated covertly in
Hong Kong since it put down roots with
just seven members nearly a century
ago, under British rule. The colonial au-
thorities outlawed the party, which took

power in Beijing in 1949, but tolerated its

existence, so long as it stayed out of

sight.

By the time China took back the city in

1997, the underground party apparatus

had grown to include thousands of mem-

bers and many thousands of supporters

outside its formal ranks. Mobilization ef-

forts have increased since, reaching a

fever pitch in recent days as groups like

the Fujian association have plunged into

politics, rallying members to denounce

the protest movement.

That the party itself has stayed in the

background reflects China’s effort to re-

solve a fundamental question at the

heart of “one country, two systems,” the

formula under which Hong Kong re-

turned to Chinese rule: How does a

highly authoritarian one-party state as-

sert its influence in a politically diverse,

freewheeling city without making it

“one country, one system”?

The party’s answer has been to oper-

ate out of the Central Liaison Office. Its

director, Wang Zhimin, and his deputy

are both former party officials in Fujian.

The office’s most important, and least

known, duties include supervising a

covert network of Communist Party

members and coordinating the activi-

ties of groups involved in what the party

calls the United Front. The United Front

effort in Hong Kong began during Chi-

na’s civil war in the 1930s, with the aim

of attracting as many Hong Kongers as

possible to the party’s camp.

Individuals and organizations in this

loose alliance, while not necessarily pro-

Communist, have rallied to the party’s

side out of opportunism or a shared pa-

triotic commitment to making China

prosperous and powerful. It has also at

times included gangsters, who attacked

protesters and passengers with metal

bars at a railway station on the Kowloon

Peninsula late last month.

The Fujian association’s chairman,

the 60-year-old businessman Chau On

Ta Yuen, denied being a member of

Hong Kong’s underground Communist

Party — an organization he insisted had

never existed.

All the same, Mr. Chau said: “Of

course I love the Communist Party. It

has done so many good things.” Particu-

larly good, he said, is the latitude it has

given Hong Kong to make money. With-

out stability, he added, “there is no way

to do business.”

Mr. Chau does, however, sit on the

standing committee of a top body in

mainland China that advises the central

government — seats on which are often

given out as political rewards.

Early this month, Mr. Chau was one of

more than 400 prominent pro-China fig-

ures in Hong Kong summoned to Shen-

zhen, a city across the border. At the

meeting, Chinese officials including the

director of the liaison office, who is a

member of the party’s Central Commit-

tee, said that Beijing wanted its allies in

the city to help resist “the turmoil.”

Ten days after the meeting in Shen-

zhen, Mr. Chau’s Fujian association and

other groups that formed the Great Alli-

ance to Protect Hong Kong, a new um-

brella organization, responded to Bei-

jing’s calls by holding a counterprotest.

Its rally in mid-August drew tens of

thousands of people to a park near the

headquarters of China’s military garri-

son.

“It is a massive P.R. exercise to bring

people on side,” said Christine Loh, a for-

mer Hong Kong government official and

the author of “Underground Front,” a

book on the party’s methods in Hong

Kong.

The pro-China camp had a single, in-

sistent message: The protests must

stop.

Most of those taking part in the rally,

unlike the young and far more numer-

ous protesters they want silenced, were

middle-aged or older. Many waved Chi-

na’s red national flag.

“I’m not a member of the party but

support the party. Without the party

there is no new China,” said Song Huil-

ing, 60, a member of the Hong Kong Res-

idents Association of Tianjin, her fam-

ily’s hometown in northern China. She

and her husband, a member of the Fu-

jian association, said they had joined the

protest of their own accord.

A clutch of billionaire property mo-

guls also attended. Tycoons, easily in-

duced into the pro-China camp because

they want to protect their investments

on the mainland, have been the main pil-

lar of China’s support in Hong Kong

since the 1980s.

In recent days, many businesspeople

have mastered a party-dictated script,

issuing statements filled with Commu-

nist-style phrases about the need to

“resolutely” oppose disorder.

Ta Kung Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper

controlled by the party, on Tuesday sent

out a shrill call to arms, warning in an

editorial that “as terrorism raises its

head, only with an iron hand to calm the

chaos will there be good times.”

Edmund W. Cheng, a scholar at Hong

Kong Baptist University who has stud-

ied the party’s operations in the city, said

efforts to shift public opinion against the

protests have been crimped by wide-

spread distrust of the party. Many nomi-

nally independent “patriotic” groups in

Hong Kong, for instance, are regarded

with suspicion and thought of as front

organizations controlled by Beijing.

Much of this suspicion dates to the co-

lonial period, when the underground

party orchestrated a campaign of riot-

ing and bombings in 1967. The violence

so revolted the public, already wary of

Mao Zedong’s revolution, that even

many who considered themselves patri-

ots came to see the Communist Party as

sinister and dangerous.

The British authorities stepped up

surveillance of China’s state-run Xinhua

News Agency in Hong Kong, which was

the liaison office’s predecessor as party

coordinator and Beijing’s de facto con-

sulate, and raided the homes of sus-

pected party members.

In the half-century since, the party

has slowly repaired the damage and re-

started the work of its United Front,

while remaining hidden.

Lee Yee, the 83-year-old founding edi-

tor of two magazines focused on Chinese

politics, said he had been approached in

the 1970s by a covert party member who

asked: “Do you really want to stay just

an ordinary civilian?”

He declined what he said was a coded

invitation to join the underground net-

work.

Sympathetic to the party in his earlier

years, Mr. Lee has long crossed paths

with undeclared members.

He said that the party’s hidden status

allowed its members to pass themselves

off as regular residents. If they declared

their membership, he said, “other peo-

ple would be afraid” of them.

Xu Jiatun, a former Xinhua chief in

Hong Kong and its party secretary from

1983 to 1990, wrote in his memoirs that

there were more than 6,000 secret party

members during his time.

As the handover to China approached,

some Chinese officials, including Mr. Xu,

recommended that the party break

cover after 1997 and compete openly

with registered parties. But this idea

was quashed amid worries that it would

undermine the authority of the postcolo-

nial local government and risk party

candidates being crushed in elections.

By choosing continued secrecy, how-

ever, the party merely transferred sus-

picions onto China’s liaison office and

prominent pro-China figures that it sup-

ports, like Leung Chun-ying, once the

city’s top official, who has denied accu-

sations that he is a covert member.

The office was besieged at least once

this summer by protesters, who see it as

a symbol of the mainland’s hidden influ-

ence.

“The United Front has never been

very useful in getting real organic sup-

port in Hong Kong,” said Samson Yuen,

a scholar at Lingnan University who

studies Hong Kong social movements.

Hong Kong Communists support Beijing in stealth mode

HONG KONG

BY ANDREW HIGGINS

Elsie Chen contributed reporting.

PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAM YIK FEI FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

Above, a rally in support of the police and

government in Hong Kong; right, a news

broadcast showing the picture of Wang

Zhimin, the director of the Central Liaison

Office of the mainland China government

in Hong Kong, at a mall in Hong Kong.

The British colonial authorities

outlawed the Communist Party

but tolerated its existence, so

long as it stayed out of sight.

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