By Su-Mei Ooi and Megan Day
A year on, what can we learn from Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement?
It has been a year since Hong Kong’s “Umbrella Movement” first fanned hopes that we were witnessing a people power movement capable of pressuring the Central Peoples’ Government into fulfilling the democratic promise of Article 45 of the Basic Law. The Umbrella movement has now all but fizzled out, of course. Public support for the movement waned as the protests caused economic disruption, and activists were eventually cleared out of the streets by December.
Indeed, Beijing’s reaction to the largest public demonstration since 1989 revealed a decided unwillingness to concede to demands for democratic reform. When in June this year, pan-Democrats in Hong Kong’s Legislative Council voted down Beijing’s original electoral reform plan, genuine implementation of Article 45 looked even more remote in the short term. At the time the electoral reform plan was voted down, pan-Democrat Alan Leong remained hopeful, however. He is quoted as saying that “today is not the end of the democratic movement. Quite the contrary, this is the starting point of another wave of the democratic movement.” In light of any future push for the establishment of universal suffrage and a more representative Hong Kong government, it may be instructive to reflect on some of the possible reasons for current stalemate.
Let us remind ourselves of what the major point of contention was. Article 45 of the Basic Law provides that Hong Kong’s people should be able to achieve the “ultimate aim” of selecting their Chief Executive “by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures.” After extended public debate over electoral reform, the Central Peoples’ Government finally affirmed in 2012 that Hong Kong would indeed elect its Chief Executive by universal suffrage in 2017. However, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress announced later that the nomination process would remain under Beijing’s control by insisting that the nominating committee – modeled on the old pro-Beijing election committee – would have the power to select the running candidates. With more than 50 percent of nominating committee members needed for a candidate’s approval, the chances of getting a candidate without Beijing’s blessing nominated is extremely slim. Thus, the nomination process would still remain highly restrictive, allowing Beijing to control who ultimately takes the highest executive office in the Special Administration Region. The bitterness of the Standing Committee’s pill has to be understood in the context of the building resentment among many that Hong Kong is largely governed by pro-business elite that the umbrella movement’s leaders have called a “heartless government.”
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