And democracy Hong Kong style.
The PRC’s view of elections in its satrapy is that only candidates acceptable to the Communist Party of China can stand for office in Hong Kong. Indeed, the Deputy Secretary General of the National People’s Congress’ Standing Committee, Li Fei, has said out loud that openly nominating candidates would create a “chaotic society.” He went further:
[R]ights come from laws, they don’t come from the sky. Many Hong Kong people have wasted a lot of time discussing things that are not appropriate and aren’t discussing things that are appropriate.
The contrast between freedom and tyranny could hardly be made more starkly clear.
Pursuant to Li’s remarks,
The…Standing Committee ruled that all candidates for chief executive must receive more than half of the votes from a special nominating body before going before voters.
And
[T]he 1,200-member nominating committee would select two or three candidates. After one is selected through universal suffrage, the chief executive-elect “will have to be appointed by the Central People’s Government.”
The good citizens of Hong Kong, though, have been holding massive demonstrations during the current run-up to the elections for governing positions there, demanding that actual democracy break out (as agreed by the PRC when the UK gave up Hong Kong to them at the end of the last century). These citizens demur from the PRC’s despotism.
Democracy, freedom, are messy and chaotic at times. That’s the price, and the strength, of free men working their way along a path of their own choosing, rather than suffering the order of government telling them what their path must be. The noisiness and seeming chaos are in the nature of every man being free, of every man having his say, of every man acting in his own time according to his own needs and wishes. It is a sign of a healthy society.
My suggestion, in the hubris associated with my position on the outside looking in: the citizenry should agree on a couple of candidates for the relevant posts—most particularly, for Chief Executive—and then, en masse, write those names in, and thereby elect one of them to each of those relevant posts. The citizens then should demand the PRC recognize that man as the Hong Kong Chief Executive and those men as the elects for those relevant posts.
Of course, such a prior arrangement is not different from what the Standing Committee has done, but as a one-time event to make an important statement and to make the PRC’s behavior internationally public, perhaps an exception can be made. After all, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is the citizens of Hong Kong’s right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.
In such an event, extraordinary measures become necessary.
