Contact is taking a holiday!

By CHIN WAN, The New York Times Opinion Pages, 14 June 2015

HONG KONG — The debate over how Hong Kong’s leader should be elected in 2017 has flared up again. Later this week the local legislature is expected to vote on a controversial plan by the Chinese government — the one that triggered the Umbrella Movement and the lengthy occupation of several major neighborhoods in the city last fall.

The Chinese government proposes that candidates for the position of Hong Kong chief executive be preselected by a handpicked nomination committee. Democrats in Hong Kong argue that this vetting system guts Beijing’s promise to Hong Kongers that they would get to elect their top official by universal suffrage.

When Beijing invokes “one country-two systems” to justify its position, it is gesturing at Hong Kong’s uniqueness while pretending that the territory is just another subordinate municipality of the mainland. But these two systems are too different to belong to the same country, and their relationship must be redefined.

By the time the British handed Hong Kong over to Beijing in 1997, this territory hadn’t been a part of China for more than 150 years. In the interim, mainland China experienced a short republican rule and a longer Communist regime. In addition to undergoing many political changes, it abandoned orthodox religious customs, traditional written Chinese and the classical pronunciation of local Chinese languages like Cantonese. In Hong Kong, however, those things were preserved, even nurtured.

Almost two decades later, the cultural differences between Hong Kong and mainland China are more than quaint local variations; they represent competing claims to Chinese identity. Hong Kong’s culture today is both more modern and more authentically Chinese — or more rooted in ancient traditions — than the culture of mainland China.

This, combined with the relative autonomy Hong Kong already enjoys, has major political implications. While officially a special administrative region within the People’s Republic of China, Hong Kong really is more like a federate entity. And that is how Hong Kong and mainland China should treat each other in the future: as equal members of a formal Chinese confederation, also including Macau and Taiwan.

Hong Kong’s peculiarity owes much to British colonialism. When in 1925-1926 an extended workers strike in nearby Guangzhou drew more than 250,000 sympathetic Hong Kongers, Governor Cecil Clementi realized that a form of defensive patriotism risked pushing the colony’s subjects to associate with their Chinese compatriots on the mainland. To ward that off, he introduced policies fostering traditional local culture — for example, hiring former Manchu officials and scholars who had fallen out of favor in Republican China to teach Chinese classics in Hong Kong’s new government schools and universities.

This policy of cultural revivalism became even clearer after the Communist Party took over China in 1949. The colonial authorities in Hong Kong favored the use of Cantonese over Mandarin, Hakka and Chiu Chow in official contexts, elevating the language from the streets to the schools, then the courts and Parliament. They also preserved Chinese religions and folk customs, touting them to foreign tourists as representing Old China.

Meanwhile, a huge influx of mainlanders moved to Hong Kong: By some accounts the city’s population grew from about 600,000 to more than two million between 1945 and 1953, and it continued to increase as collectivization was implemented in Communist China. A significant number of refugees came from Shanghai, Ningbo, Beijing and Tianjin, cities that were avant-garde compared to Hong Kong in business, education, fine arts and mass entertainment. While they brought modernity to Hong Kong’s hyper-traditional Cantonese culture, they found in the territory’s free press and generally open culture a haven for self-expression. By the 1970s — after the economic shock caused by this massive exodus had largely been absorbed — this mixing of peoples was breeding idiosyncratic cultural products, like Kung Fu movies.

This distinctive cultural identity as well as the de facto autonomy Hong Kong had acquired under the British were recognized and protected in the 1984 treaty between Britain and China that defined the terms of Hong Kong’s handover in 1997 and the territory’s status for 50 years after that. The 1984 Joint Declaration called for the creation of a Basic Law, a quasi-constitution, for Hong Kong. The Basic Law formalized the “one country-two systems” concept, and stated as an “ultimate aim,” “the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.”

Only the concept of “one country-two systems” is a misnomer and a transparent ploy. The P.R.C., though officially recognized as a country — with a seat at the United Nations, and even a veto on the Security Council — falls short of the designation. It has no democracy, constitutional rule in name only, and human rights protections that are not enforced. Its attempt to create a national republic with a unitary Chinese culture has gone off track. The P.R.C. as a nation is a concept more aspirational than organic: a political construct peddled by the Chinese Communist Party as a means of control and a claim to legitimacy. The P.R.C. is a party-state rather than a nation-state.

Hong Kong, for its part, has some of the trappings of statehood. It has its own passport, its own currency, its own monetary reserve, its own customs regime, its own legal system. Some international bodies, like the World Trade Organization, treat it as a member in its own right, separately from China. Even Beijing sometimes lapses into treating Hong Kong like another country: The investment law of mainland China deems Hong Kong investors to be foreign; in its annual statistics the Chinese government counts investment from Hong Kong as foreign.

Much like the city-states of the Hanseatic League during the Renaissance were building blocks in the formation of modern European states, the quasi-state that is Hong Kong today is best understood as a precursor of a Chinese confederation to come.

This idea is not as fanciful as it may sound. Hong Kong is the first regional government in the history of China to have gained a significant measure of autonomy through a contractual arrangement with Beijing: the Basic Law. And though that deal is not set to expire until 2047, Hong Kong and China will have to renegotiate it very soon. Hong Kong’s economic viability hinges on the stability and predictability of its investment climate, and many mortgages and other financial instruments have 30-year terms, meaning that their basic parameters have to be known by 2017 at the latest.

Beijing will not simply renew the Basic Law: The text’s 50-year term was meant as a probation. On the other hand, the Chinese government cannot just take over Hong Kong in 2047. In recent years, it has increasingly exercised a semi-clandestine form of control over Hong Kong’s top officials, capital, real estate, mainstream media and university administration. But it cannot go all the way and jeopardize Hong Kong’s reputation as an international financial hub that operates smoothly and under the rule of law.

Beijing resists granting Hong Kong more democratic freedoms today because, at bottom, it fears that would encourage Hong Kongers to demand complete autonomy one day. So rather than continue deadlocking over the question of democracy, better to address head-on the underlying sovereignty issue — and creating a formal Chinese confederation would relieve Beijing from worrying that it may eventually lose Hong Kong to independence.

With the sovereignty matter resolved, a calmer discussion could be had about which political systems would govern each entity in the confederation. The stakes of that debate would be lower then, and Hong Kong’s chances at obtaining proper democracy would be greater.

Establishing a Chinese confederation would also be good for China. It would solve Beijing’s Hong Kong problem, and by the same token, could solve its Taiwan problem, too. And since each entity in the confederation could have its own system of governance, more democracy for Hong Kong would not necessarily mean more democracy for the mainland. Allowing Hong Kong to become what its people want it to be would also help the Chinese government keep mainland China as it is.

Chin Wan is assistant professor of Chinese at Lingnan University in Hong Kong and the founder of the Hong Kong Resurgence Order.