Remarks by Yok Sing Tsang

Yok Sing Tsang

Asia Society
Hong Kong One Year After Transition:
Business Opportunities and Policy Challenges
Asia Society Policy and Business Conference
Seattle, June15–16, 1998

Good morning. When David was checking my CV, he asked me if I would mind being called pro-Beijing. I’m so used to this label that I sometimes feel uncomfortable without it. But since I came, when I listened to the speakers yesterday, I realized that there are many at this conference who deserve the label better than I do.

I also went through the article Christine referred to in her speech, this publication of the Asia Society. I was interested in an appendix to the article which described the various political parties in Hong Kong. Naturally, I looked at my party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong first. It is described under the column “Political Identity” as conservative, supportive of PRC authorities during transition. Well, I did not feel uncomfortable with that until I read that the Liberal Party had exactly the same description. I didn’t realize we were as conservative as the Liberal Party and I think we support, we’re more supportive of PRC authorities during transition than they do. Little comfort when I saw that under Hong Kong Progressive Alliance, the other pro-Beijing party, are very conservative. So we’re a little bit better off.

Yesterday, Frank Ching from the Far Eastern Economic Review asked me what I was going to say today. I said I’m going to play the devil’s advocate, as usual. He asked with apparent innocence, who is the devil? Well, he should know I believe that throughout the transition in any political debate about Hong Kong, there was only one devil, the Chinese government. Who else could it be?

The American Consulate in Hong Kong liked to organize the round table. They put together representatives from various parties in Hong Kong and let them debate in front of the guest of honor. And he always invited me. I never suspected that they were especially fond of me but I think they needed me. Imagine if it had only been a Christine Loh, and Emily Lau and a Martin Lee at the table. The guests would not have been able to say at the end of the meeting, “I’m very pleased to hear people with some different views debating each other. This is democracy. I hope this will continue after 1997.” They all have said this, every one of them. They could only say this because I was there.

But after going through the speeches and debate yesterday, I think I have to change my plan. I have intended to tell this conference how well the Chinese government has performed since the transition. I have planned to tell you the significance of the very prudent move by Beijing to change the heads of both the Xinhua, the new China news agency in Hong Kong and the Hong Kong office in Beijing right after the handover. The new heads, they’re more or less unknown to the common people in Hong Kong. Very different from their predecessors. Lu Ping and Zhou Nan where very well known names in Hong Kong. They would speak out on whatever important issues came to the people’s concern in Hong Kong. They were very well known, they were known to almost everybody in Hong Kong. They were not liked by many but I think most Hong Kong people appreciate the change after the handover. The new heads of the two departments have remained almost in invisible.

I had planned to talk about China’s response to some of the rather tricky, rather sensitive political happenings in Hong Kong including the display of the Taiwan flag, the Taiwanese flag in public places; an old man’s attack on the Radio and Television of Hong Kong, on the public broadcast on Hong Kong and also street demonstrations with slogans against the Chinese leader in Hong Kong. I think most people appreciate the way the Chinese leaders responded or refrained from responding to these situations.

I had also intended to talk about China’s change in its position—perhaps the change came as a surprise to many people in Hong Kong—concerning its stands on the Civil and Political Rights Covenant. Before the handover, some Chinese officials insisted that China had no obligation to submit human rights reports to the United Nations after the special administrative region was set up because China was not a signatory to the international covenant. But shortly after the handover, the Chinese government spontaneously promised to submit reports to the United Nations, reports to be written by the Hong Kong government after public consultation. Also, China announced that it was going to become a party to the international covenant on the economic, social and cultural rights. And also it is seriously considering signing the other covenant, as well, the Civil and Legal Rights Covenant.

Well, I had intended to talk about this, to tell you how well the Chinese government has performed since the handover. And then I realized yesterday that you already know this, that it makes no sense to repeat to you what you already have accepted. We all agree—most people in Hong Kong would agree—that during the eleven months, more than eleven months since the handover, there has been no evidence at all of any interference from Beijing into Hong Kong affairs or any intention, any apparent intention on the part of the Chinese government to interfere into our affairs. But this is already, I think, so apparent that no apologist for Beijing has to worry about it.

So let me turn instead to talk about the recent elections. I must say I find it much easier to talk about an election in which you have won. A young lady yesterday, after Ronnie Chan made his very interesting speech, provocative speech after lunch yesterday, a lady, I think from Voice of America, asked a question. She asked, “Mr. Chan, can you explain why so many voters in Hong Kong went to the polling station on May 24 and why so many of them voted for the Democrats?” I think she had the answers to both questions in her mind. People went to the polling station, of course, to cast their vote and the fact that so many people, 53% of the registered voters turned up. This has been interpreted by various people in Hong Kong in a number of different ways and obviously, the lady had her own answer in mind.

I’ll leave this for a few moments later for a second statement, why so many people voted for the Democrats. Well, if it’s a democrat with a small “d”, I regard myself as a democrat, as well. I believe that all the candidates in the election, in the geographical constituency election, in particular the 20 successful candidates all regarded themselves as democrats. All regarded themselves as supporters of democracy. Otherwise, why would you take part in the direct elections? If you do not believe in democracy, why would you put yourself to the test of ballot box? My party, the DAB, filled up candidates in all the geographical constituencies. We were the only other party, besides the Democratic Party, that did so. Of course, all the winners were democrats, with a small d. But that would be—what’s the word used by Ronnie Chan?—oxymoron. How can you be pro-Beijing and also a democrat at the same time? I’ve been asked this question many, many times.

Let’s look at the results of the recent elections in Hong Kong, the geographical polls. Nearly 1.5 million people went to the polling stations, a record high in Hong Kong. We’ve never seen anything like that before. And among these voters, exactly 25 percent or to be more accurate, 25.3 percent, voted for my party, the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong. Proportionately, we got 25 percent of the seats. We got five seats out of the 20. So we got our fair share of the seats; no more, no less. 42.3 percent of the voters voted for the Democratic Party. They got nine seats out of 20, that is, 45 percent, a little bit more than they deserve. But yet we rounded the numbers, right. So again, they got their fair share.

Smaller parties seem to benefit from the system. The Frontier, Emily Lau’s party, they got a little bit over 10 percent of the vote but it got three seats of the 20, that is 15 percent. I’ve forgotten what percentage vote Christine got. She got her seat. So, a very low turnout rate was not the only false prediction the political commentators have made. Before the elections were held, people said those commentators and some politicians in Hong Kong said the system, including disproportional representation system was designed specifically to benefit the pro-China forces in Hong Kong. It beats me how it could be done.

At a number of forums, actually, my friends in the Democratic Party told their audience the system was designed specifically to limit the number of seats or to reduce the number of seats the Democratic Party could win. Well, it’s true. In 1995 the Democratic Party was supported by almost the same level, the same proportion of voter. They got about 42 percent of the vote in ‘95. But it got 60 percent of the seats. So if they wanted to continue getting a larger proportion of the seats than they deserve on the basis of the vote they got, then of course the system would not suit them. But if you look at the result as a whole, you see that it is nonsense to say that the system was tailor made for the so-called pro-Beijing or pro-business parties. If it was supposed to be tailor made for us, it must have been a very poor tailor. We got our fair share, no more, no less.

And if we talk of fairness, I suppose it is not easy to compare the fairness of different systems of voting, especially when the systems are all well established in countries with long histories of democracy. I don’t think that we can say either proportional representation is fairer than pass the post or vice versa. But if you look at the representatives of the successful candidates, in 1995, because we adopted the single seat constituency, first pass the post system, if we counted the votes won by all the 20 successful candidates in the geographical constituencies, the votes amounted to less than 60 percent of the vote, of the total number of ballots cast. What does it mean? It means that in ‘95, over 40 percent of the voters were disappointed. The candidates they voted for, the candidates they supported, were defeated.

In several of the constituencies, the candidates were actually defeated by a very narrow margin. Two of the candidates won in the government constituencies by a few dozen votes out of several hundred thousand. But if you lose by one vote, you lose. In three of the constituencies where my party stood in and lost, my colleagues lost by two to three percent of the vote. They represented 48–49 percent voters but then, their opponents who once said to them, “I represent the people. You don’t. I’ve got the mandate, you don’t.” Then of course, those who got the mandate, those who represented the people, represented only less than 60 percent of the voters.

Now this time, with proportional representation, again if you count the vote won by the 20 winners in the geographical constituencies, it amounted to over 86 percent of the total number of votes cast. So of course in any election, some voters will be disappointed, the candidates they support will lose, but then the proportion of the appointed voters this time is less than 14 percent. So we can at least say if it is controversial whether one system is fairer than the other, we can at least say that with this proportional representation system, we have the 20 directly elected seats more representative, representing a larger proportion of the voters than was the case with first pass the post single seat constituencies.

People said, of course, this only applied to the one third of the seats in our Legislative Council that were elected by direct election. Christine said she was not happy with the system because there are 40 seats in our Legislative Council, in the present, newly elected Legislative Council, which have not been elected by universal suffrage. That’s true. The functional constituency seats and the election committee seats, they are not elected by very democratic ways. They’re not meant to. They were not intended to be democratic when the system was invented. By the way, it was invented by the British when they were still ruling Hong Kong. The Chinese were never clever enough to invent anything like that.

We are talking about speeding up our process of democratization and some groups, some political groups are calling for universal suffrage for the whole legislature in the year 2000 which will be the year for our next general election. Well, my party will only stand to gain if we open up all the seats to direct election and still adopt some form of proportional representation. With the record high turn out rate last May, I think we can say quite confidentially that we, the DAB, has the support of a quarter of the population in Hong Kong, the voting population in Hong Kong. So if you open up all sixty seats to direct elections on proportional representation next term, the I think it would be more likely for us to win one-quarter of the seats which would number 13 whereas, we got only nine seats in the last election. So if we are thinking of the prospects of my party, of the DAB in future elections, there’s no reason at all for us to object to speeding up this process of evolution.

However, we have to be responsible. That’s Ronnie Chan’s advice. We have to be responsible and I think to take a responsible attitude to the timetable for our political evolution. We cannot forget, we should not forget why in the first place these undemocratic or not so democratic functional constituency election committee seats were invented. This brings us back to the years when the basic law was started and debated in public. I’ve always said those were the best years, the most democratic years in Hong Kong since the conclusion of the signing of the Joint Declaration. Of course, those were pre-June 4 years.

Various parties, there were no political parties yet. But the political groups, we sat down together regularly and held debates sometimes, very heated debates about the political future of Hong Kong. And what’s more, the Chinese officials in charge of Hong Kong affairs, the predecessors of Lu Ping, the then head of the Hong Kong Affairs Office in Beijing, they came over to Hong Kong regularly and listened to the views put forth by all these political groups, including of course, the views by what people called Democrats, Martin Lee and Szeto Wah, they were actually members of the drafting committee. We debated and there was a consensus; all of us agreed that in order to implement this policy of Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy, we must develop a democratic system of government to replace the colonial government we have.

That was laid down in the Basic Law. The ultimate goal for our political development should be universal suffrage for all the seats in our legislative counsel and universal suffrage for electing the chief executive, the head of our government. That’s was one thing on which everybody agreed. But there was another thing which everybody agreed with. We should move towards this goal not immediately either before or after the transfer of government but by steps. Nobody, I say nobody—not even Emily Lau then, because she was not a politician then—nobody among those groups, those political groups who took part in the debate insisted that we should have universal suffrage for the whole legislature as soon as the SAR is set up. We debated not about whether we should proceed by steps; we all agreed that we should have a timetable. The only difference in our opinion lay in the pace of democratization, how fast we should move forward.

There were those really conservative groups representing the business community, principally, who believed that we should move forward cautiously by small steps. They insisted that we should have a large Election Committee accounting for a large proportion of the seats in the early Legislative Council after the handover. And then there were more liberal groups who wanted to see a faster pace of democracy, but none of them believed that it was desirable to have all the legislature elected by universal suffrage as soon as the new government was set up or to have the chief executive, the head of government, elected by universal suffrage.

The reason, I think, was simple. Hong Kong people then were not entirely dissatisfied with the status quo, with the existing political system. The British negotiating team did a very good job in the early eighties in convincing the Chinese government that the Hong Kong system was working very well, that no change was necessary after the transfer of government in 1997. A lot, we heard a lot about efficiency of our government, about the advantages of a small government, of keeping our government very small, of the consistency in government policies because we were free from party politics.

Very few people appeared to find political parties attractive. Very few people find political parties attractive now in Hong Kong. My party, the DAB, in terms of membership we are the largest political party in Hong Kong. And how large are we? We have a little bit over 1,300 members. That makes us the largest. Young people, ambitious young people who want to start a political career in Hong Kong today, like Christine, do not necessarily want to join a political party. There are lots of political talents outside all the political parties in Hong Kong. I hate to say this but it is the fact.

But back in the mid-eighties, people were even more cautious when they talked about developing a democratic system for Hong Kong. We looked at Canada, Australia, United Kingdom, then we shuddered. We saw the elections there, democratic elections. We saw the promises the politicians made during the election campaign and we saw how government had to grow, how well their spending had to increase, how taxes had to be raised. Then we said—at least some of us—some people in Hong Kong said, well, why don’t we open our doors to these democratic elections, to democracy. We have to follow their way, we have to put up with expanding government, expanding welfare expenditure. Our low taxes, efficient government, all these advantages which both the British government and Hong Kong and also the Hong Kong people especially, the business community, had always been proud of, would go.

So people said, let us do it cautiously. Democracy is good but we have to pay a price. Also, of course, people did not like uncertainty, uncertainty in our political future. People said look, we already have enough uncertainties with sovereignty reverting to China. Let us not add to these uncertainties. Look at all these familiar faces in our legislature. They were all appointed, appointed by the governor. Well, we may not know them well but they are the elite, the professional and business elite, the term used by Christine. They have been doing a good job. Look at them. If we open up all the seats to direct elections, how many of these people would like to stand in the streets, stand around street corners canvassing votes. Very few of them would.

So, we wouldn’t like to see all the familiar faces gone with the new government set up in 1997. Let us at least have some of them with us in a new legislature. Hence, this safety net, the functional constituency elections. A senior government official then explains to the public the purpose of this functional constituency election. It is a safe replacement for the appointment system. Instead of the governor appointing a medical doctor into the legislature, we now let the medical doctors themselves let one among themselves into the legislature. So we can be sure that there are the medical doctors, the engineers, the accountants and so on, the lawyers, there. The family of faces, without having to go into the streets shouting through the loudspeakers.

That was how the functional constituencies came into being, and the Election Committee, as well. The original purpose of the Election Committee seats, it was meant to be sort of a balance after all the other seats were elected. Again, it was a replacement for the appointment system. When part of the seats were still appointed by the governor, the governor used to make the appointments after all the election results were out. And he looked at the results and said, oh, we are short of labor representatives so let me appoint a couple of labor people into the legislature. The Election Committee was supposed to serve this purpose. It is not doing it but that was what it was originally for.

A lot was said about these very complicated systems of election during those years when the Basic Law was drafted and debated in public. Of course, the Basic Law was finalized some eight years ago. A lot has happened in Hong Kong during the past eight years. We have held several very successful elections. We have had experience, new experience, in democracy. I think there is good reason for us to re-open the debate about our timetable in our political evolution. We should look back into the past eight years and see what changes we should make to the timetable set out in the Basic Law for us more than eight years ago. Before we do that, I don’t think we should come hastily to conclusion that we should bring forward to date of universal suffrage for the whole legislature. There are people, there are politicians in Hong Kong who have always advocated an early date for democracy. Well, I have due respect for them, although I think their views were not fully represented in the Basic Law debate in the late eighties.

But there are others who, I believe, have never said a word for democracy in the year 2000 until they saw the turnout rate on May 24. They looked at the figures, 53 percent, 1.5 million, and then they said, well, it’s time for us to bring forward the date of full democracy to the year 2000. I can’t see the logic in that.

This brings me to the first statement that the lady made which I referred to earlier. Why did 1.5 million people go to the polling station? Some people said they went there because they wanted more democracy. The fact that they were there means that we should have full democracy as early as possible. If that’s the case, then how can you account for the very low, consistently low turnout rates in the past, that Hong Kong people not to want democracy in 1995, in 1991? Why did they suddenly become fond of democracy in the past year? Of course, the most politically correct reason given in public for the high turnout rate is people’s quest for democracy. In private, I’ve heard many people saying, for example, that many voters went to the polling stations because they wanted a souvenir card.

And not only in my camp, in the pro-China camp, pro-Beijing camp, said so. Some foreign correspondents who have spent enough time in Hong Kong to know Hong Kong people well, made that remark to me after the election. But in public, of course, no one would say that. How can you suggest that Hong Kong people went to the polling station in the torrential rain for any reason less lofty than supporting the course of democracy.

Yes, Hong Kong people want democracy, that’s true. We’ve always wanted democracy. We wanted democracy in 1985 when we started to draw up the Basic Law. We wanted democracy in 1991 when we first had direct elections for our legislature and in 1995, as well, many people thought, many people preached that the ‘95 elections would be the last elections in Hong Kong, the last democratic elections in Hong Kong. They expected a record high in the turnout rate then.

We always wanted democracy, that’s one thing. Whether the whole legislature, 60 seats, should be elected by universal suffrage in the year 2000 is another thing. I think it is unfair to answer Frank Ching’s question to Mrs. Anson Chan last evening. I am not against holding a referendum to take the position but I think it would be very irresponsible of the government and of the political parties, as well if we call for a referendum before we open a debate, before people take a new look into both reasons given for our timetable, the timetable set out in the Basic Law, reasons given for the functional constituencies, the Election Committee. Only after an extensive debate, a meaningful debate has been carried out within our community, and only after, we are sure that the people, the people in Hong Kong understand fully the implications of full democracy, of bringing forward the date for universal suffrage for the whole legislature and support it. Only then is it responsible for us to hold a referendum or to take any other way, any other method, to decide a new timetable.

Practically, though, I don’t think it is feasible to bring forth the date to the year 2000. We have to abide by the law. We talk a lot about rule of law. We may have a referendum showing that the people of Hong Kong want a faster pace of democratization. But in order for that to happen, we have to change the Basic Law. If you don’t want other people to change the Basic Law easily, we have to follow the procedures in the Basic Law itself. It has to be adopted by the Chinese National People’s Congress which meets once a year. If we cannot take the amendment motion to the NPC next March, we’ll have to do it in March 2000. And we won’t have time after the Basic Law is amended by the NPC to go through the required legislation in Hong Kong. So I don’t think the year 2000 is a feasible date.

The position of my party is we have got to see a review, an extensive review of the development of our political system as soon as possible. I hope that we can arrive at a consensus among Hong Kong people and bring forward the date for full democracy. I certainly look forward to that. Perhaps I should end my speech with this remark. Thank you very much.