As the National People’s Congress opened there this week, Chinese spokesmen reiterated that 2017 is to be the year when China keeps a promise to Hong Kong made in the Basic Law, the constitution it adopted on its reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997: that Hong Kong’s chief executive will be chosen by “universal suffrage”. Today’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, was anointed by a 1,200-strong election committee dominated by interests sympathetic to the Chinese government.

Electoral reform, however, may not be as radical as that sounds. The Basic Law also stipulated that candidates will be nominated by “a broadly representative nominating committee”. Pro-democrats fear, with good reason, that any such body will simply replicate the rigged election committee, and that Hong Kong’s voters will be presented with a choice between a handful of candidates acceptable to China. If so, 2017 would not be very different from 2012, when Mr Leung, who was probably China’s second choice, won after the favoured candidate proved utterly hapless. The terms of the debate as set by China seem to portend endless wrangling over how the nominating committee might be expanded and become a bit more representative.
An alliance of pro-democracy parties wants to dodge this by adding new methods of nomination—by political parties and by the general public. The government and Chinese spokesmen insist this is just not on, since it would contravene the Basic Law. It is not only the “pro-democracy” camp that is gloomy. In an article this week to mark the halfway point of a five-month government consultation exercise on the election, the head of the civil service, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, wrote that the chances of “the successful implementation of universal suffrage” were “not very bright, though the prospect is not yet completely bleak.” It looks doubtful whether any compromise is possible that could win the two-thirds vote it would need in the Legislative Council, where pro-democracy politicians hold 27 out of 70 seats.
The campaign for “universal suffrage”—taken to mean the right to elect any candidate—resonates beyond the pro-democracy political parties. Last year it was joined by an “Occupy Central” movement, inspired by “Occupy Wall Street” and organised by some academics, including Benny Tai Yiu-ting, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong. It involves exhaustive “deliberative” open meetings and Occupy Central plans to hold an online “referendum” in June on the proposal these produce.
This is intended to influence the government’s own plans. If, when they are published, these are deemed unsatisfactory, the group threatens to deploy 10,000 people to occupy Hong Kong’s Central district, paralysing commerce. The threat has drawn dire warnings from the government and mainland-Chinese press. It has also prompted the formation of groups opposing the Occupy movement. Perhaps recalling what happened when protesters occupied the heart of Beijing in 1989, and how badly they underestimated the scale of a massive demonstration in Hong Kong in 2003, officials have foretold civil strife with a cataclysmic effect on Hong Kong’s reputation. Mr Tai says he hopes to make China more afraid of the consequences of the potential occupation than it is of the risk of having an open election.
The relative simplicity of the demand for the right to choose Hong Kong’s leader, after three decades of arcane haggling about obscure ways of rigging elections, brought a façade of unity to the fissiparous pro-democracy camp, at least for a while. That is now cracking, as the government drags out the process. Even some of Occupy’s backers concede that many ordinary people in Hong Kong are now as fed up with democracy activists as they are with the government in Beijing.
Street life
Yet, as is to be expected in a place that enjoys the freedom of association but limited democracy, Hong Kong is used to street protests. The biggest of these in recent weeks have been in defence of another freedom—that of the press. On March 2nd several thousand joined a march in response to a vicious knife attack on February 26th on Kevin Lau Chun-to, who was until early this year editor-in-chief of Ming Pao, a daily newspaper. Many journalists pointed to a handful of earlier violent incidents involving the press and saw the attack as intimidation of the profession as a whole. They also argue that, regardless of the threat of violence, press freedom is already circumscribed. Tycoon owners ensure self-censorship to protect their business interests in China. Awkward journalists seen as “anti-China” are sidelined.
Similarly, China might not need to rig an election to ensure that an acceptable figure wins it. Both Mr Tai and Joseph Cheng, convener of the pro-democracy alliance, believe that a candidate whom Chinese leaders excoriated as unacceptable would have little chance of winning an election. Even so the government seems not to want to set the rest of China an example of a free one. And, though Hong Kong’s people have long been lauded for their “pragmatism”, China seems not to trust them. The feeling is mutual. In fact, as people march in support of a free press, and take part in the annual vigil on June 4th to mark the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre, it may even be intensifying.