Severo Portela
Zhang Dejiang’s recent visit to Hong Kong was, as the saying goes, one of sticks and carrots, but with a twist: the stick sounded loud and clear and ready to serve… the carrot came so vague that we do have to mention it to justify the quote.
Speaking during a banquet in his honor, the chairman of China’s National People’s Congress, number three in the Beijing political hierarchy and the highest official to climb down to the HKSAR since the 2014 Occupy Movement, Zhang underlined how inappropriate it will be to misinterpret and misguide or be misguided by localism. This is soft speaking to warn that independence (preparatory acts) will not be tolerated.
On the carrot-giving side, Zhang Dejiang stated that when the SAR is over, Hong Kong will not be absorbed by the mainland. That is to say it will not lose its autonomy.
However, we should not interpret an equivalence between the degrees of autonomy and complacency. Zhang Dejiang used his comments on the perversion or corruption of localism as something unacceptable, as an equivocal and somewhat redundant call to the SAR government and the Judiciary to safeguard the rule of law. Some observers believe Zhang was speaking to discredit certain court rulings favoring some pro-democracy activists. Directing the law?
Less paradoxical and more carrot-like was the visiting member of the Politburo Standing Committee openness to incorporate (or allowing room to take advantage of) Hong Kong in the One Belt, One Road development strategy as the means to give a boost to the sluggish local economy. This is the call the Central Government is making to the SARs of Hong Kong and Macau.
China’s economy is facing enormous – even by China’s standards – challenges, described by the Economist magazine as The Coming Debt Bust. “China requires more and more credit to generate less and less growth”. Indeed, China will do better with the integration of HK and Macau in the PRD. The other way is not a matter of autonomy but of complacency.
Perhaps with an alternate formulation the issue becomes easier to grasp: Beijing has too much on its hands to be troubled by any nuisance – political, social, or other – coming from its special regions; on the other hand, it provides tickets to ride the One Belt, One Road.
To be troubled, as mentioned above, is to be prodded by the occurrence of any event that scratches the political statute, the autonomy granted by the Basic law, and good governance, generally speaking. The Jinan University donation episode got good marks in all sections.
Like a perfect storm, the MOP123 million donation raised questions of transparency (somebody failed to recall that the CE rules over the Macau Foundation), probably rising from the inertia, not of being checked as it is not the case in the MSAR but of always moving along no matter what and who may be in the way. Just to give an example, what is the point of trying to protect Coloane from the construction greed?! Or how should we evaluate an Urban Renewal Council that rules in absence of Environmental Bureau representatives?!
From the angle of the nuisance, who came and how did they come up with the idea of a non-humanitarian donation, totally outside the framework of the cooperation within the PRD? It looked like an arbitrary premium gift. Article 104 of the Basic Law reads: “All the financial revenues of the MSAR shall be managed and controlled by the Region itself and shall not be handed over to the Central People’s Government.”
Anyway, it is too late to control the damage a single donation brought to the Executive: demonstrators once again find a space in the streets to call for the resignation of Chui Sai On.
Finally, if not the worse at least the most compelling, the justification of the donation for reasons of the reasonability of its amount… our reason was disgusted.
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