hell’s paving stones

(Photo by The Standard’s Simon Song. Image taken from the curbside collaborative blog about the 6th WTO ministerial conference by HK journo students)

HPS was a little bit sorry about the fact that we’d let the opportunity slip to post about the third (and now seemingly annual) big pro-democracy march in Hong Kong, which took place on December 4 last year, a little more than a month ago.

But strangely enough, the opportunity has come up again. Some extremely interesting developments have arisen in the fallout from the recent WTO ministerial conference, which took place December 13 - 18 in Hong Kong; about a fortnight after that pro-democracy march. In a nutshell, Korean rice farmers who jump into the sea may have a critical bearing on the future course of political protest in HK.

The conference itself predictably failed to resurrect the hopes of the Doha round, but we’ll leave that analysis to the experts. What was interesting to us were the confrontations between the anti-globalisation protesters and the Hong Kong riot police, the subsequent arrest of of about 1,001 people, the later release of all but 14 of them and the charge of unlawful assembly that was brought against these remaining individuals under Hong Kong’s Public Order ordinance.

If you belive the upstanding HK cops, on the night of the 17th the demonstrators began whaling on them with metal bars and bamboo rods after breaking through a cordon in Wan Chai near the jetsons-inspired conference centre where the talks had been taking place. If you believe the peacable protestors, the police responded with disproportionate force and fired rubber bullets into the crowd. We’re willing to take a little from column A and a little from column B, but the interesting part for us was when we realised that the charged protesters - 11 of whom were from the boisterous and large Korean contingent sent over by the Korean Confederation of Trade Unions - hadn’t been charged with assaulting a police officer, or even possessing an offensive weapon in a public place, but with unlawful assembly.

Which brings us back to Hong Kong’s home grown protests, namely the pro-democracy marches of 2003, 2004, and 2005. The political momentum of these marches owes a lot to the fear that the mainland model of repressive legal instruments will be imposed on the territory before time (HK’s “previous capitalist system and way of life” has been officially guaranteed for 50 under article 5 of the Basic Law, the ersatz constitution). Despite this the British-y legal system and judicial independence actually seems to be holding fairly well - most want it to stay that way, at least until the gig is officially up in 2046. But what most people don’t discuss much the fact is that the system that the democratic movement is so intent on protecting was inherited from a colonial government - the British Empire, people - and has its own problems. Although it is far more desirable compared to what the federales are running in the mainland, it has its own capacity for cracking down: hence the Public Order ordinance, which was first introduced in 1967 to deal with a spate of labour disputes and a Maoist bombing campaign. Our basic worry here at HPS is that the democracy movement in HK needs to pay more attention the potential of the existing system to be used repressively. What we say next may seem incongruous, but the most dangerous aspects of the ordinance in the current situation are the very checks and limitations that make it comparitively attractive. Because this law doesn’t have any teeth until protests get violent.

The Hong Kong government hasn’t dared to crack out the riot gear for the democracy demos yet - Hong Kongers had an especially traumatic response to the Tiananmen Square massacre, and we think that any pro-democratic confrontation with the state on home turf with even a drop of spilt blood would send the society in paroxysms of panic and instantly make the territory harder to govern. In any case, the government never had to call in the mounties: the democracy marches have been huge, but overwhelmingly peaceful, orderly and all the more expressive for it.

However, the WTO affair may have changed things. The case of the Korean protestors (plus the Taiwanese dude, the Chinese dude and the Japanese dude who made up the rest of the 14 charged) became something of a cause celebre back in Korea. The Korean Vice Foreign Minister went and made a polite case, the minority Democratic Labour Party sent a some delegates over to HK to ask for clemency, and various pop/film stars have also weighed in. The Korean Federation of Trade Unions was a little less subtle, promising to fly in 1,000 guys for a second wave of protests if they felt the 11 weren’t getting ‘fair treatment’.

But more importantly for this post, the case got a fair bit of publicity and support from some of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy activists. The grey eminence of the democratic movement in HK, Martin Lee, elected to be the protesters’ defence counsel, a Catholic bishop by the name of Joseph Zen has apparently employed God in the service of punishing the police for their decision to make the arrests, the Hong Kong People’s Alliance on the WTO have an identified their activism with that of the protestors.

And on Wednesday, stunningly, the charges against all three of the protestors were dropped. So now we have a situation where the democratic movement in Hong Kong have identified with a group of demonstrators who have used violence and have seemingly stared down the legal consequences. We also have an administration that publicly seems to back down from a firm line on public order prosecutions, as the Secretary for Justice did. Our sincere worry is that, at a time when the pro-democratic movement’s leaders are becoming more confident, and the mass support behind them seems to be holding steady, the temptation could arise to adopt more confrontational tactics, that could in turn be used as a pretext by the government to activate those colonial anti-riot laws and break the back of dissent, simultaneously avoiding the claim that the bosses in Beijing have changed anything in order to do it.

Hong Kong hasn’t seen Big Trouble since 1967. For the next 2 years, though, we’ll be holding our breath.

Any comments, especially from resident Hong Kongers, will be greatly appreciated.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 15th, 2006 at 1:41 am and is filed under Politics, Hong Kong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.