Chinese students in India repeatedly tell their audiences not to be surprised by the Chinese scale of operations: it has always been so, they say. As evidence, they cite the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. They talk of their ancient civilisation and their 24 dynasties.
Then they inevitably speak of how Deng Xiaoping began to create modern China in 1978, bring prosperity to his poor country through Special Economic Zones, household contract responsibility system and rural transformation. For years, the Communist Party of China has used this patriotic curriculum as a tranquiliser against politics to retain the monopoly of political power.
But now, it is being challenged from a location and a demography that has always been a bridgehead for democracy. Ever since 1997, when Hong Kong became an administrative unit of China, retaining its Basic Law of politics, its currency and customs, the Chinese government quarantined the Hong Kong way of life from Mainland China. Visitors from the Mainland need entry permits for Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is a tax haven, and a financial hub with a global stock exchange. Its companies produce goods in factories in Chinese provinces that are exported from the city’s port, one of the busiest in Asia. Hong Kong is aware of that its laissez faire ancestry inspires the confidence of global finance.
That is why the Hong Kong have got the Chinese government all alarmed. The protesters are leveraging this balance of power and have run a very successful campaign against Beijing’s approved-list variety of democracy. Even if this protest is squashed, it could still achieve its prime objective: the students and other pro-democracy activists on the streets could yet force Beijing to allow Hong Kong residents to choose their own chief executive, when the moment of reckoning comes in 2017.
But it isn’t just the way the protests are playing out in Hong Kong that worries Beijing. It is probably contemplating the effect these demonstrations could be having across the Mainland, especially on shop floors in provinces where workers are complaining of unfair treatment and of provincial communist bosses luxuriating in corruption.
For years, Chinese labour activists have been campaigning for the right to form independent unions. The authorities probably dread a repetition of the Lech Walesa moment from Poland in the 1990s.
“How do you fight against communist monsters?” the ship workers’ leader Walesa had asked when headed the Solidarity movement for independent unions in the 1980s. “Because they [the communists] present themselves as a people’s system, you have to organise around bread and butter issues.”
For years, the Communist Party of China has worked hard to convince young Chinese that economics is more important than democracy. But the Hong Kong protestors have forced them to face the dilemma right on their doorstep. Beijing has learnt to its peril that for many people, politics isn’t merely a waste of time.
Rashmi Singh is the chairperson of the World Organisation of Students and Youth.
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Then they inevitably speak of how Deng Xiaoping began to create modern China in 1978, bring prosperity to his poor country through Special Economic Zones, household contract responsibility system and rural transformation. For years, the Communist Party of China has used this patriotic curriculum as a tranquiliser against politics to retain the monopoly of political power.
But now, it is being challenged from a location and a demography that has always been a bridgehead for democracy. Ever since 1997, when Hong Kong became an administrative unit of China, retaining its Basic Law of politics, its currency and customs, the Chinese government quarantined the Hong Kong way of life from Mainland China. Visitors from the Mainland need entry permits for Hong Kong.
Hong Kong is a tax haven, and a financial hub with a global stock exchange. Its companies produce goods in factories in Chinese provinces that are exported from the city’s port, one of the busiest in Asia. Hong Kong is aware of that its laissez faire ancestry inspires the confidence of global finance.
That is why the Hong Kong have got the Chinese government all alarmed. The protesters are leveraging this balance of power and have run a very successful campaign against Beijing’s approved-list variety of democracy. Even if this protest is squashed, it could still achieve its prime objective: the students and other pro-democracy activists on the streets could yet force Beijing to allow Hong Kong residents to choose their own chief executive, when the moment of reckoning comes in 2017.
But it isn’t just the way the protests are playing out in Hong Kong that worries Beijing. It is probably contemplating the effect these demonstrations could be having across the Mainland, especially on shop floors in provinces where workers are complaining of unfair treatment and of provincial communist bosses luxuriating in corruption.
For years, Chinese labour activists have been campaigning for the right to form independent unions. The authorities probably dread a repetition of the Lech Walesa moment from Poland in the 1990s.
“How do you fight against communist monsters?” the ship workers’ leader Walesa had asked when headed the Solidarity movement for independent unions in the 1980s. “Because they [the communists] present themselves as a people’s system, you have to organise around bread and butter issues.”
For years, the Communist Party of China has worked hard to convince young Chinese that economics is more important than democracy. But the Hong Kong protestors have forced them to face the dilemma right on their doorstep. Beijing has learnt to its peril that for many people, politics isn’t merely a waste of time.
Rashmi Singh is the chairperson of the World Organisation of Students and Youth.