China's 10th birthday present to Hong Kong: A lesson in obedience

By Hazel Parry Jun 30, 2007, 12:35 GMT

Hong Kong - Ten can be a difficult age, as any parent will tell you. It's a time when children can be unpredictable and defiant, and when going out in public with them as they teeter bad-temperedly on the brink of their surly teens can be an embarrassing and provoking experience.

So it may prove for China on July 1 as president Hu Jintao pays a paternalistic visit to Hong Kong to join in the celebrations marking the 10th anniversary of the former British colony's return to Chinese rule.

It is a birthday that, on the face of it, offers many reasons to be cheerful. The wealthy city of 6.9 million, which many predicted investors would flee as soon as China marched in, is now more prosperous than ever before. Property prices are sky high and the Hang Seng Index is at an all-time high.

Hong Kong people feel spiritually and economically closer to China as well, it appears. Patriotism is on the rise as China's economic power soars and a survey earlier this month showed that for the first time, people in the city prefer to call themselves Chinese rather than Hong Kongers.

As fireworks explode over Victoria Harbour to mark the anniversary, President Hu and his comrades can congratulate themselves on a successful decade of gradual economic and political integration that sends a powerful message to Taiwan, the 'renegade province' China would like to absorb in a similar way.

But 10-year-olds are not always as grateful as they should be. While President Hu might reasonably expect childlike affection from some, he would do well to prepare for equal measures of rudeness, tantrums and downright defiance during his visit to the city that Beijing has never been able to fully control.

Noisy protests decrying China's human rights record are being planned to coincide with the early-morning flag-raising ceremony on the waterfront on July 1. Thousands are expected to join an annual pro-democracy march later in the day, an event which in 2003 and 2004 drew crowds of more than 500,000.

A decade after Hong Kong's return to China, the city still has the ability to be a thorn in the side of Beijing. Mass protests in 2003 and 2004 effectively forced the Beijing-appointed chief executive Tung Chee-hwa out of office and pro-democracy legislators derailed his successor Donald Tsang's conservative constitutional reform package later the same year.

This year, to Beijing's consternation, a pro-democracy candidate garnered enough nominations to stand against Tsang in the chief executive election. Although he had no chance of winning a majority of the votes of the largely pro-Beijing election committee, he forced Tsang into a public debate over Hong Kong's political future.

That debate remains an uncomfortable one for Tsang and for Beijing which clearly does not want to allow universal suffrage in Hong Kong in the short-term, even though the city's post-handover mini-constitution, the Basic Law, technically allows for it from 2007 onwards.

Rising prosperity in Hong Kong in the four years since the first mass protest has eased political tension but failed to completely quell anti-China sentiment in Hong Kong. An estimated 55,000 took part in this year's annual candlelight vigil commemorating the June 4 Tiananmen Square massacre, a 15,000 increase on the 2006 figure.

Beijing's unspoken hope was that such blatantly anti-China demonstrations would have run their course 10 years after the handover. They haven't, and in response, the past year has seen a change of emphasis in the official Chinese approach to dealing with Hong Kong.

The approach Beijing has chosen is similar to the one a parent tries when a spoilt and wilful child is repeatedly disobedient - it has put its foot down and asserted its authority. China has gone to lengths to make it clear that absolutely no political evolution can take place in the city without its consent.

That message is being sent out by some of its most powerful officials, people like Wu Bangguo, head of China's National People's Congress, who warned in June that there were limits to Hong Kong's political autonomy and said the city should not attempt to undermine Beijing's 'absolute power.'

The message was later echoed by the head of the Hong Kong-based Central Policy Unit, Professor Lau Siu-kai, who at a seminar to mark the handover anniversary said the city had to 'fully accept Beijing's authority.'

'People must accept that our high degree of autonomy comes from the delegation of power from Beijing and does not originate from Hong Kong people,' he said, with the underlying message that if Beijing chose to roll back that autonomy it could easily do so at any time it wants.

Whether the clever, accomplished but infuriatingly unruly 10-year-old that is Hong Kong heeds that warning or takes it as an invitation to provoke, annoy and defy Beijing with more mischief may become apparent when the eyes of the world turn on the city's anniversary celebrations on July 1.