HK Observer |Rights are not given; they are fought for

Robert Carroll

How can the government expect people here to accept the fake findings of their consultations on political reform as true when 90% of responses came from groups, block opinions and worse from anonymous groups?
Isn’t it because our leaders believe we have to accept the reality of greater power, that Beijing will try to bulldoze through the next political stage of development regardless of public opinion?
How can officials in Beijing say they are willing to fulfill the Basic Law’s promise of universal suffrage when their version of that is a joke. 1,200 voters who they alone select will then choose (probably only) two or three candidates, with much behind the scenes intense lobbying from Beijing. At the end of this process of inter-elite trade-offs, we then can vote for one of two or three safe candidates.
It’s easy to point at the corruption of two-party Western parliamentary democracy by lobbies, big money industries and populist policies and say that isn’t a model to be repeated here, isn’t it? However despite the downfalls those societies have much more social justice and transparency. Very many Hong Kongers know that and aspire to live under similar circumstances, as witnessed by the huge crowds at demonstrations here and the huge numbers who send their kids to school or University in the the US, the UK Canada or Australia or have have emigrated or spent time there to gain residence.
Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai, the only National People’s Congress representative on the NPC committee responsible for interpreting the Basic Law, and now in Beijing to help decide our political future, was once famous in the mid 1990s for quitting a very senior political post in Hong Kong saying that she did not understand politics. She said that she would go to the United States to study for a political degree. She didn’t but another of her ilk, at one moment part of the colonial political elite, the next in the arms of the motherland, Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee. How ridiculous to spend many years at the top level of government then say I have to get a University degree in politics. They have been both very welcome in pro-
establishment circles.
Universal suffrage in the West, also democracy, is accredited to the Athenian Greeks 2500 years ago. Leaving aside the fact that non-citizens, slaves did not have the vote, the citizen voters from a quarter of the population were able to vote in their leaders in a meaningful way. Here 2500 years later we may be able, via the 1,200 chosen ones, to vote here for two, or several very carefully selected, candidates. Why complain; why not go with the flow? Because history shows clearly that rights and freedoms are not given; they are fought for. Since we are in China, let me clarify that by fighting, I am not advocating soldiery but civic action.