'Democracy in Hong Kong did not fail – it was killed by Beijing and its quislings', Benedict Rogers

Regina Ip, Hong Kong’s veteran pro-Beijing politician, says that Hong Kong’s “experiment with democracy failed”, and that “the political reality” is that Hong Kongers must now support the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Democracy, she adds, is alien to “Chinese tradition”, arguing that “people don’t vote for the common good. People vote for whatever serves their interests.”

On all counts, she is deeply, profoundly and utterly wrong. Democracy in Hong Kong did not “fail”. It was killed, by Beijing and its quislings like Ip.

Indeed, arguably democracy in Hong Kong was never fully tried. Although under British rule and the first two decades after the handover Hong Kong had the institutions of a democratic society – a free press, an independent judiciary, the rule of law and basic human rights – it was only ever a partial electoral democracy.

From the handover until 2020, while Hong Kong’s Legislative Council had directly-elected contested seats, they only ever amounted to half the overall seats in the legislature. The other half came from so-called ‘functional constituencies’ representing (overwhelmingly pro-Beijing) professional sectors. Even when the pro-democracy parties did well, they could never win a majority.

But in 2020 the pro-democracy camp was forced out of the legislature, and subsequently most pro-democracy legislators have been jailed. From the 2021 Legislative Council elections onwards, only pro-Beijing candidates have been permitted to run.

Or look at the district councils. The last genuine elections for these were in 2019, when turnout was 71 per cent and the pro-democracy camp won the biggest landslide victory in its history, gaining majorities in all 18 councils.

That was a remarkable display of people voting for the “common good” and not simply for “whatever serves their interests”. Despite months of protests that year – some of which were disruptive or violent – Hong Kongers turned out in large numbers to make it clear that, given the choice, they prefer the ballot to the bullet.

The response of Beijing’s henchmen? To ignore the elected councillors, reduce the number of directly-elected seats in district councils, impose a patriotism test to ensure only those loyal to the CCP can run, and strangle democracy in its infancy.

And Hong Kong never had universal suffrage in elections for the chief executive, chosen by an electoral college stacked with members handpicked by Beijing. That was why millions protested in 2014 in the ‘Umbrella Movement’, demanding this right that was promised in Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

When Beijing offered an apparent compromise, suggesting Hong Kongers could vote for the Chief Executive but the CCP would choose the candidates, people rightly saw through it. As Martin Lee, the father of Hong Kong’s democracy movement, said at the time: “what’s the difference between a rotten apple, a rotten orange and a rotten banana?”

In the last so-called election for this office, the winner – John Lee – made a virtue of the fact that he secured over 99 percent of the votes. He was the only candidate.

Today, all the architecture of a free society that previously existed even when full democracy didn’t has been dismantled, as hundreds of pro-democracy activists have been jailed and independent media and civil society shut down.

Entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, aged 76, a British citizen, has been in jail for over three and a half years and his trial drags on, and the authorities have taken to issuing arrest warrants and HK$1 million bounties against exiled pro-democracy activists abroad, including several in Britain, in a blatant campaign of transnational repression.

So don’t give me this nonsense about democracy having “failed” in Hong Kong, Regina. You and your regime killed it.

And this idea that democracy is alien to Chinese culture? Come on, Regina. Look at Taiwan, one of Asia’s most successful, vibrant democracies, which has just completed another successful presidential election and transition. Taiwan shows what China could be if the CCP loosened its grip and paved the way to democracy.

To be honest, Ip’s remarks come as little surprise, because she has long been not so much a cheerleader as a fog-horn for Beijing. Despite studying under democracy guru Larry Diamond at Stanford, ever since Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997 she aligned with the CCP. Diamond may have supervised her student dissertation, but she clearly didn’t learn much from him about democracy.

Ip and I go back a long way, and have clashed multiple times over the years, although we have never met. When she was Secretary for Security in the early years after the handover, I worked as a journalist in Hong Kong, and she complained to my editor about op-eds I wrote that were critical of her.

In those days, Hong Kong was still a comparatively free and open city, and the worst that happened was that she nobbled my editor at a cocktail party, wagged her finger about me, and he came back into the newsroom to tell me, laughing, that “Regina’s not happy with you”.

Today, if I was still in Hong Kong, I would be arrested and jailed for writing the kind of articles I wrote back then.

Since then, Ip has repeatedly attacked me on social media. In January 2022, after MI5 accused lawyer Christine Lee of infiltrating the British Parliament, Ip tweeted saying that: “Shouldn’t we file the same charges against the likes of Benedict Rogers of interfering in our politics?” – even though I had already been denied entry to Hong Kong in 2017.

Two months later I received received an official letter from the Hong Kong Police Force and the National Security Bureau, informing me that my work is a serious violation of Hong Kong’s National Security Law, that I pose a grave threat to China’s national security, and that unless my organisation ceases our activities within 72 hours, I could face a prison sentence in Hong Kong.

This despite the fact that our work is entirely outside Hong Kong – due to the draconian security law that has an extraterritoriality clause that extends the CCP’s tentacles well beyond China’s borders.

The only point on which Ip is right is that China is “a one-party state” and that is “the political reality”. That is unarguable. And the tragedy is that that political reality has now consumed Hong Kong, in flagrant breach of China’s promises made in an international treaty, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, with woefully inadequate reaction from the rest of the world – all facilitated by Ip and her ilk.

But that does not mean, as she suggests, that Hong Kongers must now accept and support the CCP. Those who stay will have to live with the reality, for sure, and be wise in how they conduct themselves if they don’t want to go to jail. But hundreds of thousands have already voted with their feet and left Hong Kong for the UK, Canada, Australia, and beyond.

More will do the same. Even for those who stay, they may have to keep their heads down, but they will never kowtow or embrace the CCP. It’s only a minority of Hong Kongers who, like Ip, have sold their souls.

Democracy didn’t fail in Hong Kong. It was murdered in its infancy. Ip-so facto.

This article was published in Conservative Home on 29 July 2024.