To heal, the whole Hong Kong community needs to walk the long road of compromise

Hong Kong’s current political structure has none of the advantages of effective delivery through autocratic administrative means, but all the defects of democratic politics
A bipartisan consensus is the only realistic way forward, along with using social media to unite, not divide

Andrew Sheng

Published: 7:00pm, 16 Aug 2019

Why you can trust SCMP

The summer of 2019 will be remembered as the hottest in recorded history, but it will also be remembered as a summer of madness, with protests everywhere and violence seemingly on the boil.

Who would have expected South Korea to be quarrelling with Japan? Or India taking away the autonomy of Jammu and Kashmir to impose direct rule by Delhi? Or the Argentinian peso dropping 30 per cent in one day? Why did the US put every one of their major trading partners, including Singapore, Malaysia and Vietnam, on their watch list of “currency manipulators”?

But the biggest news nearer home is the protests in Hong Kong, shutting down the airport and hitting the economy.

When I was a young man, I had a wise mentor who told me that I was hopeless, helpless and useless. Of course I was very indignant, but, as I grew older, I realised that he was right. In the realities of life, most of us are but bystanders in the greater order of things, hopeless in the face of daunting change, helpless to make an impact, and useless as an individual to influence the complex evolution of local events that reverberate on a global scale.

The world looks like a total mess. Can anyone solve what is clearly a systemic problem?

The easiest thing to do is blame someone else. But the blame game gets us nowhere. Escalating the blame game polarises and hardens the position of both sides, which make compromise and a return to normalcy harder.

Cooler heads and warm hearts are required to get to the next stage. My old mentor, who was a hardened journalist, taught me that to understand the world, one has to read not what the news says, but what the news does not say. By doing so, you get a more balanced picture of what is going on.

With the rise of social media algorithms directing news, communities everywhere are being polarised because today’s news and social media are painting everything in terms of black and white. Each side sees what it likes, and shuts out what it does not.

We see this trend in the US, where the president openly calls the media that opposes him “fake news”. We have arrived at a global situation like the bad joke describing the 2008 banking crisis: on the right-hand side of the banks’ balance sheet, nothing is right, and on the left-hand side, nothing is left.

No one seems to be in charge in this escalating multilateral disorder, heated up by climate change and widespread local unrest.

Why have we arrived at this state of false binaries that life is only black or white, without understanding that reality is a million shades of grey?

In protesting for freedom, the Hong Kong protesters do not appreciate that the worst freedom may be to eventually destroy their own freedoms. This is like the apocryphal US major during the Vietnam war who famously said that “it became necessary to destroy the town to save it”.

Can we rationally arrive at a compromise with irrationality? A rational solution would be to take immediate action on addressing the social discontent that led to the protests, such as reduce inequality, increase public housing, lift up incomes, spend more on education and health care, raise real wages, upgrade infrastructure and communicate more.

All these are great ideas but, if they are so good, why weren’t they implemented before? The answer lies in the toxic nature of adversarial electoral politics. In the US, the Republicans decided to block everything proposed by the Clinton/Obama presidencies. So, when the Republicans come to power, the Democrats in turn decide to block everything the Republicans want to do. Adversarial politics blocks the execution of any good technical solutions.

Deliver what the citizens want in real terms. Legitimacy comes from outcomes, not promises

The same has happened in Hong Kong. Hong Kong has no shortage of land, has rich fiscal resources, an advanced economy and high income levels. Yet, since 1997, few public housing projects have been built because these were blocked by real estate interests and the opposition.

In short, a hard political solution will have to be made to determine whether the Hong Kong government can ever deliver on social housing. In other words, deliver what the citizens want in real terms. Legitimacy comes from outcomes, not promises.

Adversarial electoral politics means that, even if the pan-democrats win big in the next Legislative Council election, they will be blocked in the delivery of any electoral promises by the new opposition.

The outcome is that the public will continue to be unhappy, because the current political structure has none of the advantages of effective delivery through autocratic administrative means, but all the defects of democratic politics. For the good of Hong Kong, a bipartisan consensus is the only realistic way forward.

Why Hong Kong is not Singapore – it’s all about money and politics

We should not forget that the Hong Kong protests are fundamentally a family quarrel for which, unlike Brexit, there can be no divorce. No family quarrel is settled by breaking the family furniture and heirlooms, let alone through violence. Freedom to protest cannot be exercised at the expense of disrespecting other people’s economic and sovereign rights.

The first order of business is to cool the temperature and think through ways to fix the existing structure that does not have a good public feedback mechanism. That includes the role of social media in helping to shape a community consensus, not a break-up.

If the community itself will not compromise, then the hard decision will be made by the sovereign parent.

No one dreamt that the Hong Kong protests could reach this stage of looming uncertainty, in which even the future of Hong Kong’s rule of law is at stake. That is why I feel hopeless, helpless and useless, watching what I pray is not a tragedy unfolding.

In times of adversity, adversarial and emotional posturing gets us nowhere. A family is a community of individuals. Either every individual takes the long road together as a community, or there will only be a broken family.

Andrew Sheng writes on global issues from an Asian perspective

Post