For China, Limited Tools to Quell Unrest in Hong Kong

By EDWARD WONG and CHRIS BUCKLEYSEPT. 29, 2014

The New York Times

BEIJING — China’s Communist Party has ample experience extinguishing unrest. For years it has used a deft mix of censorship, arrests, armed force and, increasingly, money to repress or soften calls for political change.

But as he faces swelling street demonstrations in Hong Kong pressing for more democracy in the territory, the toolbox of President Xi Jinping of China appears remarkably empty of instruments that could lead to palatable long-term solutions for all involved.

Hong Kong is already a mature, prosperous enclave that has grown relatively immune to the blandishments of mutual prosperity that helped keep it stable during 16 years of Chinese rule. And because it is a former British colony with its own laws and traditions of liberty, a severe crackdown on mostly peaceful protests would almost certainly backfire, especially under the glare of international attention.

“On the mainland, as long as you can control the streets with enough soldiers and guns, you can kill a protest, because everywhere else is already controlled: the press, the Internet, the schools, every neighborhood and every community,” said Xiao Shu, a mainland writer who is a visiting scholar at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. “In Hong Kong, the streets are not the only battlefield, like on the mainland.”

After demonstrators defied a police crackdown on Monday and took over vast areas of the business districts of the city, the protests have become an epic standoff that Mr. Xi has few obvious ways of defusing.

Hong Kong has been under Beijing’s sovereignty for long enough now that even modest concessions could send signals across the border that mass protests bring results — a hint of weakness that Mr. Xi, a leader who exudes imperturbable self-assurance, seems determined to avoid, mainland analysts say. And small compromises are unlikely to placate a good many of the Hong Kong residents who have filled the streets.

Yet any attempt to remove protesters by force would inevitably raise parallels with the killing of democracy protesters in Beijing in 1989, an event that split the Communist Party and poisoned China’s relations with the outside world for years.

Hong Kong’s future, therefore, may rest heavily on whether Mr. Xi has the clout, skill and vision to figure out a solution that somehow keeps the territory stable without sparking copycat calls for change closer to home — and without dealing a heavy blow to his own prestige or his standing among the party elite.

“This is already much bigger than anything the Beijing or Hong Kong authorities expected,” said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who studies democratic development. “They have no strategy for peacefully defusing it, because that would require negotiations, and I don’t think President Xi Jinping will allow that. Now, if he yields, he will look weak, something he clearly detests.”

Mr. Xi’s record so far — unyielding opposition to political liberalization and public protests has been a hallmark of his rule — has suggested a politician who abhors making concessions. He has fashioned himself into a strongman unseen in China since the days of Deng Xiaoping and Mao Zedong, and few if any party insiders and political analysts expect him to give serious consideration to the demands for full democratic elections in Hong Kong.

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In fact, his strongman style may have helped create the crisis.

The protesters are demanding open elections for Hong Kong’s leader, the chief executive. China has agreed to allow the position to be elected by popular vote starting in 2017.

But China’s rubber-stamp Legislature last month rejected any change in election rules that would open the race to candidates not vetted by a committee that is reliably pro-Beijing. And while there still may have been room for compromise, Mr. Xi met with business leaders from Hong Kong in a closed-door session in Beijing last week to reiterate that the party will not allow political change in Hong Kong, the former British colony of 7.2 million people.

“If he had negotiated from a position of strength,” Mr. Diamond said, “and pursued a strategy of delivering ‘gradual and orderly progress’ toward democracy in Hong Kong, albeit at a more incremental timetable than democrats were hoping for, he could have pre-empted this storm.”

Instead, there are signs that Beijing may only harden its position. On Monday evening, a commentary on the website of People’s Daily, the party’s main newspaper, claimed the upheavals in Hong Kong were instigated by democratic radicals who had sought support from “anti-China forces” in Britain and the United States and had sought lessons from independent activists in Taiwan. It called them a “gang of people whose hearts belong to colonial rule and who are besotted with ‘Western democracy.’ ”

Such harsh words might, in the context of a mainland Chinese protest, point to an imminent use of major force on the part of officials, followed by arrests, show trials and long prison sentences.

But it is doubtful that that is a viable option in Hong Kong. Given the size of the crowd now in the city’s streets, perhaps only the use of force on the level of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre would suppress the protests, absent any political solution. Such bloodshed would greatly damage the party’s legitimacy and jeopardize the city’s standing as a global financial center. For now at least, a large majority of the protesters have focused their ire at the government leader in Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, leaving their complaints about Beijing in the background.

On mainland China, deployment of the green-uniformed People’s Armed Police — a paramilitary force that specializes in crowd control — is virtually guaranteed to quash a protest, and officials across the country, from the Tibet Autonomous Region to Guangdong Province, next to Hong Kong, often fall back on that game plan. But on Monday, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing leaders appeared to acknowledge their misstep in quickly resorting to force by pulling back the police, whose tactics are gentler than those of their mainland counterparts.

Mr. Xi has another reason not to give in to the protesters, said Deng Yuwen, a former editor at Study Times, a party newspaper: Any meaningful concessions could inspire rallies on the mainland around other causes.

Hong Kong activists and students “haven’t understood that the central government won’t deal with Hong Kong issues purely in terms of Hong Kong,” Mr. Deng said.

“They view Hong Kong in terms of China as a whole. They worry about the reaction in Hong Kong being replicated in the mainland. I don’t think that Occupy Central understands that,” he said, referring to Occupy Central With Love and Peace, a group that has spearheaded demands for democracy.

Yet options remain for compromise if Mr. Xi chooses to pursue them.

One is replacing Mr. Leung, a figure much loathed by the pro-democracy advocates. The call among the protesters for his ouster is almost universal. On one street on Monday, protesters had decorated a bus to resemble a coffin for Mr. Leung. Elsewhere, people denounced a cardboard effigy of his face.

Such a move might be enough to sap energy from the protesters, even though it would be unlikely to meet their demands. If Mr. Leung were ousted, Beijing would almost certainly install someone equally beholden to the party and equally illegitimate in the eyes of many in Hong Kong.

There could also be ways for Beijing to give Hong Kong voters more say in choosing members of the election committee, which it has said will select two or three candidates for chief executive. That could be done without truly relinquishing Beijing’s control, but even the appearance of compromise might be more than Mr. Xi can muster.

From the start of his tenure, he has spoken to party officials of the need to heed the lessons of the former Soviet Union, which crumbled for a variety of reasons, including what Chinese officials believe was lax control of the different ethnic regions far from Moscow and the satellite states of Eastern Europe.

“In the end, nobody was a real man, nobody came out to resist,” Mr. Xi has said of the disbanding of the Soviet Communist Party, according to a party summary of his comments.

Edward Wong reported from Beijing, and Chris Buckley from Hong Kong. Michael Forsythe contributed reporting from New Haven. Mia Li contributed research from Beijing.