(With apologies to Alice Mak and Brian Tse)

From the SCMP, 23 June 2007

Hong Kong will not be ready for universal suffrage until its voters can be counted on to elect the right chief executive candidate, a leading mainland scholar said yesterday.

Until the “necessary conditions” were met, it was meaningless to talk about a timetable, Lian Xisheng said.

The “necessary conditions” involve removing the whole of Hong Kong’s human population to Northern Norway and replacing it with Artic Lemmings. Then, and only then, will Beijing grant Hong Kong universal suffrage.

I haven’t posted in a while, but that was because I was busy working on two new books. I co-wrote them with with the one and only Ms. Christine Loh. Look for them in the book stores, order directly from Civic Exchange, or buy them online from Paddyfield.com here and here.

The first book, Reflections of Leadership compares the leadership styles of Tung Chee Hwa and Donald Tsang. Who are they? What are they about? What were their beliefs, assumptions, and values? What visions did they set out to accomplish, and why did Tung’s go so horribly wrong? Is Donald Tsang that much different?

The second book, From Nowhere to Nowhere tells the action packed story of how absolutely nothing was accomplished in constitutional reform over the past decade. While the rest of Hong Kong has marched ahead, the political system has stood still, leaving it ill-equipped to deal with the challenges of a modern society.

They’re part of Civic Exchange’s Ten Years Since 1997 series. The other two books, Idling Engine and Still Holding Our Breath review the HKSAR’s environmental and air quality policies over the past decade. Buy all four, and get a discount.

And you’ll have my eternal gratitude.

I’ve just noticed that a few comments from people on my recent posts have gone missing. Either of two things might have happened.

1. Someone from Civic Express Admin was doing spam clearance maintenance, and accidentally deleted them.

2. I screwed up and wiped them out myself the last time I was doing spam clearance. In which case I’m a complete flake.

To Dai Tou Laam and others who commented recently on this site - sorry about that. There’s nothing nefarious going on here, we just get a whooooole lot of spam, and we’re so technologically incompetent that we have to delete it manually. With tippex. On our computer screens.

In this part, we’re going to look briefly at the membership list of the Commission on Strategic Development’s Governance and Political Development Panel. The government’s made my work easier by posting their members’ bios on their website here. So I’ll just give you the highlights.

The CSD’s Governance and Political Development Panel - the one that’s looking into models for constitutional development - has a total of 42 members.

The chairman is Donald Tsang himself.

Under him, there are two official members:
The head of the Central Policy Unit, the government’s official think tank - Prof. Lau Siu-kai. Prof. Lau is known principally as the man who predicted that there would be 30,000 marchers on July 1, 2003. This turned out to be wrong. He is known less as one of the big 1970s sociologists who built up the image of Hong Kongers as politically apathetic Confucians who who supposedly cared only about the economic well-being of their own families. This also turned out to be wrong.

The head of the Chief Executive’s Office, John Tsang Chun-wah. The Chief Executive’s Office, not to be confused with ExCo, is the CE’s personal office of assistants and political handlers. They do things like draft his speeches, manage his image, and liaison with community leaders when necessary. John Tsang used to be the the Secretary for Commerce, Industry and Technology, who is famous for managing the WTO conference in 2005 and his open letter in defence of Cyberport.

Then there are 39 lay members. In addition to the government’s bio list, I have googled them for political affiliations, positions on government bodies, and occupation.

There are 10 businesspeople, 6 lawyers, 8 academics, 8 full time politicians, 3 media commentators, an accountant, a social worker, and the ex-chairman of the Monetary Authority. Now let’s break it down.

Of the 10 businesspeople, there are 4 Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference members, 3 are current or former pro-government appointees to district councils, 1 represents Real Estate and Construction in LegCo, and 1 is James Tien. The remaining business person is the head of the California Association of China, which promotes Chinese businesses in America.

Of the 6 lawyers, there are 4 CPPPC members and 1 deputy to the National People’s Congress. 1 does not have any political affiliation that I can find.

Of the 8 academics, 2 are researchers attached to Citic Pacific and China Everbright Holdings, two state-owned companies that come directly under the Central Government’s State Council. 1 leads the pro-government think-tank, the One Country Two Systems Institute, 1 is a member of the Hong Kong Basic Law Committee, and 2 more sit on various government advisory and statutory bodies. 1 is Kuan Hsin-chi, the chairman of the Civic Party. The remaining one has no political affiliation.

Of the 8 full time politicians, there are 5 pan-democrats, 2 DAB members, and 1 person who was a Tung Chee Hwa appointee to the district councils. (She seems to be one of those people who Sits On Committees for a living, being head of the extremely vague Kowloon Federation of Associations. What associations? Who knows?)

Of the 3 media people, 1 is our friend Lau Nai-keung, he of the staunch conservatism and shaky logic. The other two sit on various government advisory boards.

The accountant also sits on various government advisory boards, and the social worker heads the HK Federation of Youth Groups. And then there’s the ex-chairman of the HK Monetary Authority.

And I think that’s it, at least in the simple version. A lot of these people have over-lapping memberships and political identifications - that is, they’re in the DAB, and they’re district council appointees and they’re on the CPPCC - but to keep it comprehensible I only listed one of each above. There’s a few who were currently or formerly on the Election Committee. One of the lawyers was ejected from it by legal subsector pan-democrats last December for being too pro-Government. One of the businessmen is one of the 33 tycoons who attended Tsang’s economic summit on China’s new Five-Year Plan last year. The summit where afterwards he announced the death of positive non-interventionism. There’s even a bronze bauhinia medalist.

For “balance”, there are 6 identifiably pro-democratic people on the CSD panel. But that’s compared to 11 members of the CPPCC. Balanced participation indeed.

Last time, I wrote about what the CSD’s been saying about elections for the Chief Executive.

LegCo is proving a whole lot trickier. So far, the CSD can’t agree on what to do with LegCo at all. The problem is the functional constituencies. As presently constituted, they are incompatible with the idea of universal suffrage. Currently, only about 160,000 registered voters elect the functional constituencies. This is not “one person, one vote”. Some people have two votes. Some of the voters aren’t even people. Some academics once calculated that Li Ka-shing and his family, through all the corporations they own, may have up to 36 votes. Shelf companies can vote. Foreign companies can vote. Offices of some foreign governments can vote. Everyone, including Regina Ip, agrees that something has to change. But how?

If you go read the CSD’s discussion papers here, here, and here, you’ll see they’ve been talking themselves in circles. Should the FCs be abolished or retained? If they are abolished, how should that be done? If they are retained, how should they be reformed? And even if you figure out how they should be reformed, could you possibly get 2/3 of LegCo to vote for it? And even if you could, would LegCo still represent enough ‘different sectors of society’ to satisfy Beijing? Because Beijing was really quite insistent on that. And if it represented ‘different sectors’, would that still count as universal suffrage? And even if it did, would it work? What if it causes the economy to spiral into recession, investors to flee, and a plague of boils to afflict the land? Oh dear, oh dear, whatever shall we do?

The problem is that the CSD has been ordered to figure out a way of transforming the current mess into some form of universal suffrage without:
a) annoying Beijing
b) annoying the business sectors
c) annoying all of Hong Kong

And if that sounds like an impossible task, that’s because it is. No wonder they can’t agree on anything.

The Constitutional Affairs Bureau was initially quite keen to press the idea of bicameralism onto the CSD - if the FCs were converted into an upper house that would fulfill at least two of the three requirements. Which is good enough for government work. (You guess which one is left out). At the very first meeting, the CAB went through the trouble of providing its members with this very useful digest of Bicameral Systems Around the World. Except that idea’s run into a problem. I mean apart from it not being democratic.

A while ago, I wrote an article on why bicameralism isn’t as dumb as it sounds. Well, the CSD seems to have figured out the same thing. Which is if you formally divide LegCo into two separate houses, then logically, government legislation will have to pass through both the lower and the upper house separately. Which removes the government’s current advantage in being able to steamroll bills through LegCo by relying almost entirely on the functional constituencies. Which means they’ll actually have to compromise with the democrats. So clearly, they have decided that bicameralism isn’t dumb enough.

There probably isn’t an idea in the entire world that’s dumb enough to fulfill all three requirements. It’s not for a lack of trying that the CSD has failed.

Of course, this is probably the point. After the election, Donald Tsang is just going to come out and say that we can’t make any progress towards universal suffrage because the CSD “was unable to come to a consensus.” “Views,” he’ll say with the expression of a doctor announcing the death of a patient to the relatives, “were just too diverse. I’m sorry.”