Richard Bush

On March 26, Hong Kong’s Election Committee officially selected the Special Administrative Region’s next chief executive. The winner, former Chief Secretary Carrie Lam, came as no surprise; she was widely viewed as Beijing’s favored candidate in the race, though her close ties to her former boss, current Chief Executive CY Leung, did not endear her to Hong Kongers. With tensions in Hong Kong growing over the SAR’s treasured autonomy (or lack thereof, as many critics see it), Lam will have her work cut out for her over her five year term. 

The Diplomat’s Shannon Tiezzi spoke with Richard Bush, director of the Center for East Asia Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and author of the book Hong Kong in the Shadow of China, about what lies ahead for Lam and Hong Kong.

Hong Kong’s new chief executive Carrie Lam, already has an image problem: she’s seen as too close to both her unpopular predecessor, CY Leung, and to Beijing. Yet she has promised to “heal the divide” in Hong Kong’s society during her term. Do you think she can succeed?

Carrie Lam will have to move on several fronts at one time. In no particular order, she must jump-start a policy effort to address both economic growth and social and inequality at the same time; ensure that she has the confidence of the business community even though it may not like all her policies; engage young people in a listening tour; and cultivate support among moderate democrats. Most of all, at the proper time and with Beijing’s concurrence, she should restart the process of electoral reform that ran aground in June 2015.

CY Leung leaves office as a divisive figure. Over the long term, what do you think his legacy will be in Hong Kong? 

For better or for worse, history will remember him as being the chief executive during a time when Hong Kong’s culture of protest really became embedded in the city’s political system and popular resentment over social and economic inequality became a central political force. He became trapped between Beijing’s desire to enhance control and the public’s growing preference for street protest. Counterintuitively, the way to reduce protest was for Beijing to reduce, rather than increase, control.

How much of a role can Hong Kong’s pan-democrats and even localists play in the SAR’s politics moving forward, especially considering the National People’s Congress Standing Committee’s interpretation of the Basic Law’s requirements for swearing allegiance among Hong Kong officeholders?

Beijing seriously miscalculated by having the NPCSC preempt Hong Kong courts regarding the requirements for oath-taking. The HKSAR government would likely have won that case on its own, and thus strengthened rather than undermined confidence in the rule of law. At the end of the day, however, the Central Government is Hong Kong’s sovereign. Hong Kong people must “live with the Leviathan” and be strategic in how they do so. If swearing the established oath is what it takes to preserve the autonomy Hong Kong has and to avoid giving Beijing an issue, the benefits outweigh the costs. Similarly, the democrats’ position on electoral reform reflect a desire to win tactically but lose strategically.

It’s been over two years since the “Occupy Central” protests demanded “true universal suffrage” in Hong Kong. What are the chances that the controversial NPCSC proposal for electoral reform will be revisited (or even adopted) before the next chief executive election in 2022?

When Beijing has taken initiatives on political reform for Hong Kong, it has done so around the time of or just after a CCP [Chinese Communist Party] National Party Congress. So if Carrie Lam and Beijing can agree on reviving electoral reform, as I hope they do, I would expect that to happen in late 2017 or early 2018. To be successful, however, each will have to seek to cultivate understanding and support from moderate democrats in order to ensure the two-thirds majority  in LegCo [Hong Kong’s Legislative Council] that will likely be needed.

Recent events, from the 2014 NPCSC blueprint for Hong Kong elections to the arrest of Hong Kong residents by mainland Chinese security forces, have called into question Hong Kong’s actual level of autonomy. How would you evaluate the health of the “one country, two systems” framework at the current moment?

I actually believe that the proposal that the HKSAR government submitted to LegCo in April 2015 created a narrow path for the election of a democrat chief executive under universal suffrage, despite the parameters that Beijing set in August 2014 for the nominating committee (for the details, see my book). It would have required the democrats to be strategic in who they put forward as a candidate: i.e. a moderate who didn’t create fear in Beijing. But to win a majority of voters, the democrats would have had to put forward that sort of candidate anyway. So it was a missed opportunity.

The real threat to “one country, two systems” are actions by Beijing that suggest that it is losing confidence in the rule of law and in the protection of civil and political rights, which it granted in the Basic Law.