Re-posted to test comments system.
A week is a long time in politics. Since the last Gunboat Diplomat on electoral reform, much of the political terrain has changed. Mere hours before Audrey Eu went toe-to-toe with Donald Tsang in Thursday night’s debate, former Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung made a swift volte-face in support of the Democratic Party’s variant of the Government’s reform proposal, with other Royalists soon following suit. This morning, in a meeting with Democratic legislators, Li Gang of the Central Government’s Liaison Office all but confirmed Beijing’s endorsement.
Why the sudden (and unpredicted - at least by your correspondent) change of heart? Reports are emerging (on which see Sunday’s Now TV News and Saturday’s South China Morning Post, among others) which suggest that intense lobbying efforts by Elsie Leung, Donald Tsang and others prompted Beijing to reconsider its previous opposition of the Democratic Party’s proposal. The SCMP, in particular, alleges that Tsang wrote to Xi Jinping to the effect that a rejection of the proposal would ultimately have the effect of making Hong Kong ungovernable. One can safely assume that the letter referred to the risk that a rejection of the proposal would marginalise the “moderate” Democratic Party at the expense of the Civic Party, League of Social Democrats and other “radical” elements.
In short, the Royalists were against the Democratic Party variant before they were for it. But what of the current state of play (as of Sunday evening, before subsequent events overtake your correspondent’s prognostications)?
At this point, Beijing’s concessions appear to have been a massive tactical success. The support of the Democratic Party currently seems likely (subject to an 11th-hour turnaround at the all-hands party meeting tomorrow) - which will be sufficient to secure the passage of the modified proposal. Perhaps more importantly from the Royalist perspective, the internecine warfare between pan-Democrats has further intensified, with the rift between the Democrats and the other pan-Democrats growing ever wider.
In the longer term, however, this Royalist feat of jujitsu may prove to have been a case of “too little, too late”. This is for the simple reason that, no matter what the fate of the modified proposal is, the Democratic Party will fare badly.
If the reform passes, the Democratic Party loses credibility with the broader pan-Democratic movement - credibility which has already been on short supply after the party backed out of the by-election campaign. (Not forgetting the failed effort in 2004 to coordinate electoral strategies with what later became the Civic Party.) Today’s protests against the Democratic Party (link in Chinese) - largely spearheaded by the League of Social Democrats - arguably represent pan-Democratic sentiments that will persist long after the proposal is passed.
On the other hand, if the modified proposal is voted down at the all-hands Democratic Party meeting tomorrow (as unlikely as this might seem), the party loses all credibility in the eyes of the public - and, crucially, Beijing. A party with no public political legitimacy to speak of, and which is known to turn on a dime, will have absolutely no leverage with Beijing. (In this context it is also worth noting how the Liberal Party fell from grace after rapidly resiling from its support of Article 23 national-security legislation in 2003.)
In either case, however, the internal differences within the Democratic Party (link in Chinese) have now become a matter of public record. It is entirely possible that tomorrow’s party meeting - or the debate of the proposal on Wednesday - may blow these rifts wide open, spelling the end of the Democratic Party as a viable political entity.
The upshot is that, even if the Government’s proposal (as modified by the Democratic Party) is approved, the broader political landscape may shift in favour of the Civic Party and the League of Social Democrats - precisely the outcome the SAR and Central Governments have sought to avoid.
