Recently the Hong Kong government has been gradually implementing the details finalized by Beijing for the Hong Kong elections. As the democratic process faces a major setback and the room for democrats to participate in politics shrinks significantly, some analysts believe that the ultimate winners may not be local business leaders or pro-Beijing politicians. Based on the past trajectory of the Chinese Communist Party, observers believe that Hong Kong’s native-born elites will be marginalized in the future, while non-Hong Kongers are expected to rise to the top of the governing team.
The future of the business elite is in doubt
The Hong Kong Executive Council passed a bill to amend the electoral system on Tuesday (April 13). Responsible for the selection of the Chief Executive and the election of 40 Legislative Council members of the Election Committee increased to 1,500 people, the Election Committee of the five sectors to add a large number of “patriotic and Hong Kong-loving groups” seats.
For example, in the third sector, “grassroots associations” and “hometown associations” are added, including associations from Guangdong, Fujian and other Chinese provinces and cities. In the fourth sector, “mainland Hong Kong people’s groups” are added. The fifth sector has 110 seats for Hong Kong representatives of national organizations, including the All-China Youth Federation and the All-China Women’s Federation.
In the past, Hong Kong’s real estate developers were considered sufficient to influence the outcome of the CE election. There is a public opinion that with the large number of EC members in groups that can be directly controlled by the Liaison Office, Beijing will have no need to ally with the Hong Kong business community in the future. Some have recently described Beijing’s attitude toward Hong Kong’s business elite as “throwing them away as soon as they are used up.
The Chinese Communist Party’s actions are well documented
Hong Kong commentator Tao Jie (Courtesy of Tao Jie)
According to Tao Jie, a Hong Kong commentator interviewed by Voice of America, this assumption is consistent with the CCP’s past trajectory. Tao Jie said, “From 1950 to 1954 Liu Shaoqi shouted at the Shanghai industrial and commercial capitalists, telling them to stay and contribute to the new democracy and to the new China. He even said, “We in the Communist Party don’t mind if you stay in the new China and exploit the workers, your exploitation is meritorious. By 1957, the intellectual elite was invited to express their views on the various grievances of the Communist Party in power, and (at that time) many intellectuals (were) saying that ‘outsiders leading insiders’ was a big drawback, without realizing that they were entering a dangerous situation and being led out of the hole by snakes.”
In the 1990s, the Hong Kong business community was full of expectations for “one country, two systems,” and Tao Jie remembers it vividly.
Tao Jie said: “For Hong Kong’s ‘one country, two systems’, thirty years ago, there are many Hong Kong elites are skeptical, but at that time more believe in Deng Xiaoping or Deng Xiaoping’s successor, with Shanghai style called Jiang Zemin, the results of the first ten years, China’s market economy capital and Hong Kong’s National capital elite, very able to play together.”
Ma Yun is so what about you?
Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba (file photo)
Tao Jie said the times have changed and now even Alibaba founder Jack Ma and others cannot gain the trust of the Chinese Communist Party, let alone these Hong Kong-born and bred elites.
In recent years, it seems that even private entrepreneurs in mainland China have not been treated very kindly, like Jack Ma, Wang Jianlin and Ma Huateng, who are not opposed to the Communist Party and are not involved in any subversive activities, but perhaps they are too rich, and because of the current system of the Communist Party, there has been no further reform in the system for 30 years, if It was the oil tycoon Hammer in the U.S. to today’s (‘Facebook’ founder) Zuckerberg, who were able to enjoy what (the late U.S. President) Roosevelt said, one of the four freedoms, freedom from fear, under the more perfect rule of law and tax system in the U.S.”
In Tao Jie’s eyes, Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing elite groups are divided into several camps, including real estate groups, foreign consortia, local small and medium-sized enterprises, and also organizations cultivated by the Communist Party in Hong Kong, including the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions.
Tao Jie said, “Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam took the initiative to submit the extradition law (Fugitive Offenders Ordinance), triggering a demonstration of one million people, two million people. Behind this demonstration, perhaps the Chinese Communist Party leaders received a small report from the leftists in Hong Kong, with Hong Kong consortia behind them, and even though they did not participate, they did not oppose it. The ignorance, brutality and misjudgment of Carrie Lam’s administration has caused the collapse of Hong Kong’s one country, two systems to happen early and at an accelerated pace.”
The pro-Beijing camp fears marginalization
Photo: Minxin Pei giving a speech on his new book at George Washington University in the US (October 2016)
Minxin Pei, a professor at Claremont McKenna College in the United States, shares Tao Jie’s views. In a recent article on the Nikkei English-language news website, Pei said that Beijing did not consult the Hong Kong government’s top brass when it enacted the “Hong Kong National Security Law” last year, and that the process of amending Hong Kong’s election law excluded the entire pro-Beijing camp from the process. He believes that Beijing will continue to ignore the pro-establishment camp and the business sector in Hong Kong.
Tao believes that the marginalization of Hong Kong’s business leaders is not empty talk, as evidenced by recent comments from grassroots organizations. The new election system has clearly thinned out and marginalized the representation of Hong Kong’s business and real estate interests again,” he said. Most important are some signs that have unsettled Hong Kong’s elite. China has mobilized grassroots organizations in Hong Kong, including the FTU, to verbally criticize Hong Kong’s consortia, saying that Hong Kong’s real estate is a ‘cancer’, which is tantamount to having defined several consortia in Hong Kong as hostile in nature. The elites in Hong Kong are not stupid. They know what it means to fry a fish over a slow fire or to boil a frog in warm water.”
Zheng Yushuo, a retired political science professor at City University of Hong Kong, told Voice of America that as the Chinese Communist Party’s control over Hong Kong becomes more direct, it is expected to appoint more loyal domestic Chinese elites as key members of the governing team in the future.
Zheng Yusuo said, “Before China (was founded), the Chinese Political Consultative Conference also went through a lot of centrists, a lot of democrats, and by the mid-1950s (of the last century) they were basically not used, and in the 50s and 60s and 57s there was even an anti-rightist movement and so on, and they became targets of struggle.”
The Chinese Communist Party does not trust the targets of the United Front
Cheng believes that the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong has never really been trusted by Beijing at all. He said, “The CCP itself demands a very high level of discipline and loyalty from its ruling team. Those on the outside are just used, and the local elite are to a certain extent the so-called United Front over well. Looking back at the old accounts, the top people now are actually the object of cultivation by the British Hong Kong authorities back then, only at the reunification juncture they left the British Hong Kong camp and ran to the pro-Chinese Communist camp, and their loyalty is actually very questionable.”
Zheng Yushuo said that the big capitalists in the pro-Beijing camp are also not an obedient group, and the specific manifestations include taking foreign passports, transferring assets to foreign countries and so on. This kind of so-called ‘capital-walking’ behavior is also not allowed by CCP discipline.
In an interview with the Voice of America, Mr. Luo, spokesman for the Los Angeles Hong Kong Forum, a group of Hong Kong residents in the U.S., said that the importance of Hong Kong capital to the CCP is not what it used to be, and that the CCP needs not only capital, but also high-tech and management talents, and that Hong Kong enterprises, which rely too much on real estate, need to It is more difficult than ever to “show loyalty”.
In the past (the definition of ‘loyalty’) might have been for Hong Kong people to go to the mainland to set up factories and do business there and bring in foreign businessmen, which is what Hong Kong is best at,” Mr. Law said. But in 2021 that’s no longer enough; you have to help ‘import’ technologies, even if they’re not your own. After the implementation of Hong Kong’s national security law, many values were re-defined by the Liaison Office. There are also whispers from the business community that this is not going to work, and they appreciate that their political future is very different from what they thought it would be two or three years ago.”
Mr. Law believes that the marginalization faced by the pro-Beijing camp in Hong Kong is related to the lack of youth in the leadership. He said, “There is not a single prominent member of the younger generation of the pro-Beijing camp, and I can’t even name one. Since the central government has provided so many resources and time, the result is like this. The central government will naturally have a plan B.”
Where do the elites go from here?
Facing the future, where exactly should these Hong Kong business elites who support the Chinese Communist regime go? One option, according to academic Cheng Yu-suk, is to take a cue from Hong Kong tycoon Li Ka-shing and diversify their capital around the world.
Zheng Yushuo said, “If they have this ability like Li Jiacheng, in infrastructure, oil, and even high-tech, communications to open up the situation of course better, if not, then at least in foreign countries to engage in real estate, they should also have some ability, but if you go to the capital in this way, the weight in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party will be even lower.”
For his part, time commentator Tao Jie believes that elites who choose to stay in Hong Kong must face reality. He said, “If you want to stay you can only work with the Chinese or red capital in Hong Kong for the time being, but their share of holdings will become more and more ‘faint’. The first is to avoid personal criticism, the second is to avoid individual corporate consortia being criticized, and the third is to avoid the entire local consortium class in Hong Kong being criticized. The meat is on the chopping block, or you don’t like it you go.”
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