tim's experiment

The curious thing about attitudes to democracy in Hong Kong is the number of butters it attracts. Butters are the people who say “of course I believe in democracy but…” They are closely related — indeed in some cases they are the same people — as the freedom of expression butters, who believe in “freedom of the press but…” It then turns out that freedom of the press is not an absolute right (platitudes, platitudes) and the butter throughly approves of whatever new restriction is now being proposed. Things are a bit easier for the freedom of expression butters because every reputable modern Bill of Rights notes that there are some restrictions necessary for the protection of other rights, like the right to a fair trial or the right to an unblemished reputation. Interestingly, though the relevant international covenants have no similar exceptions to the right to have elections.

So the democracy butters do not come up with some conflicting right. They chide the pan-democrats for disunity and including some disreputable banana-throwers, and then they announce that democracy is an unreasonable ambition because the central government “will never allow it”. This is, you will notice, pretty much what they used to say about democracy in Czechoslovakia and Hungary, with the Russians filling in for the central government. For a while it was true, and then it wasn’t. I do not know what the central government will like or dislike in 2017. Most of the time you can get pretty accurate predictions by saying tomorrow will be the same as today. But history does not flow smoothly. It lurches. All we can know with certainty about the future of democracy in Hong Kong is that we won’t get it unless we ask for it.

There are some weird things about the democracy butters. One is that so many of them have US passports. You would think this might be a problem. Urging surrender if we are all in this together is one thing. Urging a policy which you can avoid by leaving is another. It would be nice to have some local Henry V to sort this out: “He that hath no stomach for this fight, let him depart … We would not die in that man’s company which fears his fellowship to die in ours.”

Then there is the curious addiction for phrasing their comments in the form of advice to the democrats. Nobody offers advice to the DAB. But everyone has an opinion on what the democrats should be doing. This is a harmless rhetorical trope when it is used by people like Nau Lai-keung. No sane democrat will suppose that advice from such a source is intended to help. Butters need to consider that the first requirement for successful advice is a shared objective. People who want democracy at any cost and people who want it only if it is cheap do not have a shared objective. One wants democracy; the other wants a quiet life.

The butters are also rather naive. What is wrong, they wonder, with the Chinese government wishing to ensure that the next Chief Executive does not want to “confront the central government”. This displays a distressing failure to understand the way these things work. First we are told we must have a CE who loves Hong Kong and loves China. This is a nice thought, but totally impractical. How do you know what a politician loves? Or to put it another way, of how many of them can you say confidently that they love their wives? But having admitted one requirement, we are then entertained with another. The CE must not confront the central government. In other words the democratic process must produce someone who either warmly admires or is prepared to grovel to a regime dependent on a million secret policemen to keep it in power. The hard fact is that if there is a selection mechanism then we will finish up with what we have now: a creep chosen by the Liaison Office. The objection is not to having no chance to elect a CE who confronts. Few people would vote for such a programme. The objection is to having a vetting mechanism, however justified, because it will be abused to fix the whole election.

I wonder if they are also naive in believing that this whole matter will be decided by public discussion. According to today’s papers 30 pro-government thugs turned up at a democracy forum in City U and forced its abandonment by shouting at the speakers. Whether the disruptors were wearing brown shirts was not specified. Police refused to take action on the grounds that the event was on university premises. I must remember that next time I am tempted to murder a student. Acting in a disorderly manner to disrupt a public gathering is an offence under the Public Order Ordinance. I suppose all gatherings are equal, but some are more equal than others.