Wall Street Journal: Examining Asia: Tung Chee Hwa, “Friend of Democracy”

By HUGO RESTALL

December 13, 2002

Beijing's promise to let "Hong Kong people run Hong Kong" after 1997 is running into difficulty. Not for the reason most observers anticipated five years ago, that Communist Party cadres wouldn't be able to resist tampering with the goose that laid the golden eggs. Rather, the home-grown tycoon Beijing picked to run the special administrative region hasn't been able to keep the goose healthy, and so has lost the confidence of his citizens.

The central government is stepping in to prop up Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa for now, but Chinese leaders must be worrying about what to do if the situation continues to deteriorate. The best lesson they could draw from their predicament is that Hong Kong needs a greater level of public participation in choosing its leaders so that the next government has a popular mandate.

Mr. Tung's leadership skills were called into question from the beginning. Early on, his government's botched opening of a new airport and chaotic response to an outbreak of bird flu was chalked up to inexperience. But the blunders continued. The secretary for justice refused to prosecute a Tung friend for her role in a serious fraud, citing the damage her disgrace would do to the economy. Mr. Tung suddenly revealed that a key housing policy had not been in force for more than a year, even though his own officials had still been referring to it days before.

Mr. Tung wasn't able to get along with the civil service, and brought in his own personal factotum, Andrew Lo, to handle sensitive tasks. This included asking Hong Kong University to rein in a professor who was conducting opinion polls measuring Mr. Tung's popularity. Another task was asking businesses to stop advertising with a newspaper critical of the government. Mr. Tung drove out the most competent civil servant, Chief Secretary Anson Chan, even as the budget deficit ballooned and unemployment soared.

Through all this, Beijing stood by its man, albeit with some griping about his indecisiveness. Last year, realising the need to make amends, Mr. Tung publicly ate humble pie about his less-than-stellar first term performance, and Chinese officials expressed approval of this attitude. They continued to urge Hong Kong's elites and common people alike to support Mr. Tung, and gave him the nod for a second term in office. Dissent among the businessmen and Beijing loyalists who choose the chief executive was hushed up by asking all 800 members of the election committee to sign the incumbents nomination, rather than allowing them to vote by secret ballot. Forced to biaotai, or show their loyalty to the party line, more than 700 of them went along, ensuring no challenger could get the needed 100 signatures needed for nomination.

Both in Beijing and Hong Kong there was some hope that Mr. Tung's new team in his second term would mark an improvement. Chinese leaders expressed sympathy that during the first five years it had been necessary for reasons of continuity to keep the officials left by the British. When Mr. Tung got a chance to select men and women loyal to him, they believed, things would go more smoothly. Meanwhile, Mr. Tung promoted his new "accountability system" to the Hong Kong public, claiming that the principle officials would soon be more politically accountable for their performance.

Sadly, nothing seems to have changed. Just days into the new system, a proposed change to the way Hong Kong's stock market is regulated caused panic selling of "penny" stocks. An enquiry into what went wrong was conducted by the financial secretary, one of the officials responsible for this policy area, and it concluded that no one was to blame! The accountability system, it is now clear, may have increased Mr. Tung's power, but it has not improved performance or satisfied the demands of the public for heads to roll when necessary.

As a result, the chief executive's popularity has continued to fall. Polling operations at Hong Kong's two main universities, the University of Hong Kong and Chinese University, both showed Mr. Tung's popularity hitting record lows of 47% and 47.8% respectively in August, and it has improved only fractionally since then. Hong Kong University found that 16% of Hong Kong residents were satisfied with the government, while 48.1% said they had no confidence in the city's future.

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Mr. Tung's weakness has created an opening for Beijing to exert more control over Hong Kong. Already a new representative of the central government stationed in Hong Kong, Gao Siren, has jumped into policy debates and even suggested that prosecutors should bring a case against protesters for desecrating a national flag. This is an ominous sign given the fact new anti-subversion laws are under consideration which will give the central government a mechanism to push the Hong Kong government to ban groups like the Falun Gong which are outlawed on the mainland. But this could also create a backlash effect as the public realises its civil liberties are threatened.

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The ultimate way out of this headache is to allow the next chief executive to be chosen using a significantly more democratic method. Mr. Tung disparages democracy and has sought to put off the debate over how quickly to increase public participation in government. Paradoxically his performance in office may do the most to convince Beijing that Hong Kong needs it quickly.