Contact is taking a holiday!

[The Wall Street Journal]

By Andrew Browne

BEIJING—Distrust of the Chinese Communist Party runs deep in Hong Kong, a city built largely by refugees from famine and party-sponsored political violence in mainland China.

Deng Xiaoping understood this, and deftly worked around it. His formula for recovering Hong Kong from Britain in 1997—One Country, Two Systems—was an acknowledgment that the party’s credibility in Hong Kong was low and that if it simply moved in and took over it would destroy public confidence and likely wreck the economy.

Hence, Hong Kong was allowed to keep its British-style law courts and administration. And it was promised democratic elections for its future leaders.

Today’s Chinese leadership shows far less willingness to embrace such political pragmatism, or to employ subtlety and compromise in its dealings with the territory.

That’s the main conclusion to be drawn from Sunday’s decision of the Chinese National People’s Congress to adopt arrangements for the election of Hong Kong’s top leader that effectively give the party a veto. Candidates for the chief executive, according to China’s rubber-stamp parliament, must be prescreened. In the past, Beijing has made clear that only those who are “patriotic” will qualify. In party-speak, patriotism means “Love the Party.”

The upshot is that the party is likely to find itself in a protracted standoff with large sections of the Hong Kong population—the very situation that Deng tried so strenuously to avoid.

Public confidence in Hong Kong’s future will be damaged, certainly. There’s likely to be knock-on impacts on the economy amid civic unrest.

The pro-democracy group Occupy Central has threatened mass civil disobedience to paralyze the main business district if China doesn’t offer the city a real choice in the next election scheduled for 2017. It’s now all systems go for protests, as such choice has just been dramatically narrowed.

A recent article attacking Occupy Central in the People’s Daily, the flagship party newspaper, asked: “Why do people want to mess up their own homeland?” Of course, they don’t. And this is the paradox behind looming confrontation in Hong Kong. Few places on earth are less prone to civil disobedience, or show more responsibility and civic virtue.

The city’s people are famously orderly, even when they join protest marches. There have been hundreds of these in recent years, dominated by middle-class residents, some strolling along in family groups, and focused on practical issues like education and welfare reform. In fact, protests are common on the mainland, too. But there, tempers flare and riot police often wade in with tear gas and batons. By contrast, Hong Kong protests are overwhelmingly peaceful.

Instances of protests that turn ugly are so rare they are remembered, like devastating typhoons, as traumatic moments seared in history.

Hong Kong people still talk about the 1966 Star Ferry riots triggered by a small fare increase on the cross-harbor passenger boats.

All this reflects a moderate society that knows all about the dangers of political turmoil. The majority of Hong Kong people are either refugees, or the descendants of refugees, who fled man-made starvation in the 1950s and then the murderous decade of the Cultural Revolution.

It’s not lost on Hong Kong residents, even today, that the worst ever street violence in Hong Kong was in 1967 when Mao’s Red Guard fanatics brought the Cultural Revolution to Hong Kong, confronting riot police and scattering crude homemade bombs.

Now, however, politically edged violence is creeping back. Last year, a car rammed the home of Jimmy Lai, a media tycoon and prominent supporter of the Occupy Central movement: Its occupants left behind an ax, a knife and a threatening note. Last Thursday, Mr. Lai’s home was raided by Hong Kong’s Independent Commission Against Corruption in connection with his contributions to pro-democracy politicians.

In February, the former chief editor of the Ming Pao newspaper was gravely wounded in a mafia-style knife attack seen by some as an assault on press freedom.

Inevitably, the National People’s Congress decision will add to political tension, and further polarize society. More than a million people have marched in Hong Kong already this year, both for and against the aims of Occupy Central.

Hong Kong’s views of China have always mixed hope with fear: Hope that its rise will lift its own economic prospects; fear that Marxist-Leninist political controls will cross the border.

And now, it seems, both have come true. Chinese prosperity has enormously improved Hong Kong’s position as a trading entrepôt, and filled its emporiums with Mandarin-speaking shoppers from the mainland.

To be sure, it has also brought problems. The crowded territory has been swamped by too many Chinese day-trippers, creating social frictions. Urbane Hong Kong people are easily offended by earthy mainland habits, for instance allowing children to urinate in public. Wealthy mainlanders, meanwhile, have bid up the price of local property, making home ownership more difficult for the local middle classes. Expectant mothers coming from the mainland to give birth have put pressure on Hong Kong’s hospital system.

Mainlanders have got such a bad reputation they are popularly portrayed as “locusts.”

But these are irritants. Political meddling from Beijing stirs a more fundamental kind of anxiety.

In his book “East and West,” the last British governor of Hong Kong, Christopher Patten, mocks a former Hong Kong civil servant who asserted that Chinese authorities don’t want to rig elections—”they just want to know the result in advance.”

That’s certainly the longer-term effect of Sunday’s decision by China’s parliament. The most immediate outcome will be more civic strife.