Donald Tsang hides HK problems from Li Keqiang official visit

HK police blocked 10 demonstrators from Lehman Sage to hand letters to Vice Premier for banks mis-selling frauds that Donald Tsang cannot solve for three years with inquiry from reporter of pro-China newspaper of this action, Wang Guangya also blames Donald Tsang after receiving letters from these victims before.

Beijing's Hong Kong Problem


Chinese Vice Premier Li Keqiang's official visit to Hong Kong this week strongly suggests that he is set to succeed Wen Jiabao next year as the country's premier. As Willy Lam writes nearby, Beijing often uses state visits to announce ascendant leaders. When he was vice president, Hu Jintao took a coming-out trip to the U.S. in April 2002, just a few months before becoming Party Secretary.

But the choice of Hong Kong for Mr. Li's debut as the lead contender indicates how seriously Beijing is taking the present tense state of politics within the special administrative region. Despite the territory's continuing economic prosperity, the local political scene looks increasingly unstable amid rising public anger.

It seems that Hong Kong's government of mostly Beijing-appointed officials can make no decision—on dealing with stratospheric property prices, on carrying out big infrastructure projects, on letting go of some of its budget surplus—without stoking public ire. Polls show local residents giving leaders record-low approval ratings. Public protests, a fixture of political life in the territory, are becoming less peaceful; demonstrators at one rally this year dubbed it a "Bauhinia Revolution," a nod to people power movements in the Arab world. Hong Kong's leaders are starting to look more like hapless small-town councilmen than the administrators of a global city. This has Beijing nervous.

What's behind the mess? Wang Guangya, Beijing's top diplomat in the SAR, blames Britain. He told a group of Hong Kong students last month that as a result of colonial rule, the territory's civil servants "don't know how to be their own bosses and masters." Fourteen years after the handover to China, Mr. Wang said, Hong Kong's bureaucrats are stuck in an "I'll do what you tell me what to do" mentality. "Hong Kong was made and marred by Britain," Mr. Wang said.

The remarks touched a nerve. Chief Executive Donald Tsang, himself a former bureaucrat, declared that Hong Kong's civil service was "one of the finest in the world." Others, mostly in the pro-Beijing faction of local politicians, cheered Mr. Wang's forthrightness in decrying the incompetence of Hong Kong's many civil-servants-turned-ministers.

But to blame Hong Kong's governance woes on colonial aftereffects is wrong. Britain did much to transfer power to local bodies over the course of the colonial period. After 1913, London made no attempts to disallow locally enacted ordinances despite constitutional arrangements that gave it clear power to do so. From 1958 on, Hong Kong's annual budget was not referred to London; Britain managed only the territory's foreign policy. Advisory committees for making policy on certain issues made colonial governance consultative, if still far from democratic.

Colonial administrators took initiative on broad policy direction, too—which suggests the opposite of Mr. Wang's charge that Hong Kong's civil servants don't know how to think long-term. On many issues, the local administration governed in open defiance of trends in London. In the 1960s, as Finance Secretary John Cowperthwaite was refashioning Hong Kong as a laboratory for laissez-faire economic policies, planners in both Labour and Tory governments were busy trying to pick winners in British industry.

The real problem is that Hong Kong's society has developed while its rulers remain undemocratic and unaccountable. SAR residents' dissatisfaction will only increase until their territory has a system of government that can win and keep public trust because that government is fully accountable to the public.

Beijing worries about unrest in Hong Kong, but here as elsewhere its hands-on approach can at best buy short-term stability, and then only at the expense of longer-term legitimacy. Mr. Li has a reputation as a reformer, as Willy Lam writes. Hong Kong's people will be watching to see if he is willing to trust them with a bigger role in government—the only way to repair the deficiencies truly at the heart of the territory's unhappiness.

WSJ