Hong Kong

Alberto Perez

Professor
Asian Politics
13 November 2011
Hong Kong’s road to Democracy

The topic for this essay is related to the recent reintegration of the capitalist hub of Hong Kong back into China in 1997. I argue that Democratization will continue to flourish in the New Territories region and even in some adjacent parts of Southern China in the future.
According to So,The democratization process was greatly increased after the Tiananmen incident which was a massacre, where students were brutally murdered for having democratic ideals and going against the communist regime, the people of Hong Kong were very angry with China and there were many manifestations against the regime in Hong Kong, this pushed the British to accelerate democratic reforms before the handover; the people were scared of China and what they might do after the territory became theirs again. They saw how they repressed their people in the mainland and wanted change in the country. Before the reintegration agreement with China, the British were hopeful that they would extend the lease on the territories after 1997, but the Chinese had a different idea in mind, according to So, theywanted to achieve complete reunification in a short term (359-381).


So they finally terminated the lease in 1997 but before this the governor of Hong Kong, Patten, put forward a series of democratic reforms into the region. He wanted to make it more democratic before he handed the territory back to China. He made elections possible, he came up with laws that later were merged with theBasic Law, which is Hong Kong’s mini constitution. China however, was not very happy about this, they saw it as an attempt to turn the people against their communist regime. They were not too fond of the British for doing this and they told them that as soon as they gained back the territory, they would change things and try to turn everything back to what it was. And so it was that when they got theterritory they fired many of the newly elected government workers and they put people they wanted in their place, they did however keep the elections because of fear that the people would revolt if they tried to take everything away; so in the Basic Law it was stated that the government would remain almost completely unchanged after 1997 and that it would remain so for at least another 50 years.The Chinese wanted to achieve complete merger in the future by being comprehensive about what the people of the territory wanted. So after the take over and until now there are some elected members of the Legislative Council and that helps maintain the basic concept of democracy which is suffrage and there is also still freedom of press in the city (Pepper, 410-438).
And according to Cheung,the influence of freedom of expression has extended into adjacent territories such as the city of Shenzhen and the southern provinces; the people there are now able to watch international television channels and receive more international media because of the influence that Hong Kong has in the area. This new information coming into China is giving the mainlanders a different view of theircountry and is changing the way they think in terms of for example, wanting more freedoms as they see in the outside world and in Hong Kong. According to Cheung Hong Kong has become a haven to people fleeing mainland China and staying in Hong Kong to express their feelings about the mainland by writing articles, books and using their freedom of press against the communist regime; and sometimes they goas far as smuggling books into China in order to inform the people who do not have access to this information. Cheung states that the people in Hong Kong have so much power if the unite that they can make China change politicians that they do not like, as the case of the unpopular chief executive Tung Chee-Hwa in early 2005. And all this according to Cheung is going into the mainland and is...