Political Science Quarterly
Volume 115 No. 4 (Winter 2000)

 

Hong Kong's Embattled Democracy: A Societal Analysis
By Alvin Y. So. Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Robert Jervis

 

The British hand-over of Hong Kong to the People's Republic of China on 1 July 1997 brought worldwide attention to this small territory in South China. Alvin So's detailed account of the political development of Hong Kong puts the 1997 hand-over into perspective. He takes readers back two decades prior to 1997 to put Hong Kong's democracy into the context of negotiations leading to the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, the struggle over the 1990 Basic Law, and other key benchmarks. The account is lucid and thorough, exceeding anything that has preceded it.

One of So's tasks is to make sense of the restricted democracy that characterizes Hong Kong. He notes that Hong Kong's economic circumstances and level of development predict a more advanced democracy. The construct at the center of So's analysis is the service professional, whom he argues is a force liberalizing Hong Kong's democracy in the face of counterpressures from the business elite and Beijing.

Although the book will appeal to individuals who are interested in Hong Kong, scholars seeking larger lessons or powerful analytic tools applied to the case of Hong Kong's political development may be disappointed. The service professional construct is not a powerful analytic tool. So criticizes the inexactness of Samuel Huntington's concept of the middle class. Yet his definition of service professional is similarly imprecise. His most direct attempt to denote service professionals is "a service segment of college professors and social workers (who work in the state and nonprofit sectors)" (p. 11). Arguing that such a service class is responsible for the rise of the democracy movement in Hong Kong leaves many questions unanswered, such as why Hong Kong democracy is, in the final analysis, so highly constrained. Although the book sheds a great deal of light on questions about Hong Kong's political development, So is frequently compelled to abandon the service professional explanation to account for them.

Another weakness of the class-based explanation is that it does not readily integrate other aspects of the dynamics that have shaped Hong Kong's democracy. So is critical of Siu-Kai Lau's "one-sided" (p. 10) view of democracy as rule by elites, opting instead for a class explanation. The limitation of So's alternative is that it is also one-sided. In addition to the either-or character of the analysis, So fails to weave personalities into his explanation. People such as Chris Patten, Hong Kong's last governor, and Martin Lee, head of the United Democrats, were important parts of the mix. The analytic framework that So offers does not readily accommodate these different threads of the rich fabric that is Hong Kong's political development.

So's narrative provides ample room for alternative hypotheses about Hong Kong's political development that are never explicitly confronted. A shifting-alliances thesis surfaces occasionally throughout the text. It is more interesting and more satisfying as an explanation of Hong Kong's political development than the service professional thesis. Furthermore, So spends little effort reconciling anomalies in the service professional explanation, such as the existence of both pro- and antidemocracy service professional groups.

A minor shortcoming of the book, tempered by the recognition of the difficulty of doing direct research in Hong Kong, is So's reliance on secondary sources to tell the story of Hong Kong's political development. Previous histories of the period play a large role in his research. Given So's proximity to many of the players, it is surprising that he did not use interviews and other forms of direct research to delve further into the motivations, strategies, and tactics of participants.

Despite my criticisms, this is an important contribution to the political sociology of Hong Kong. Scholars interested in Hong Kong or political development generally will appreciate the clear and thorough descriptions of the territory's evolution during the last twenty years.

Robert Jervis
Columbia University