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Chinese Leader Warns Against Hong Kong Democracy Protests
Editors’ Note
(about 5 hours later)
HONG KONG — President Xi Jinping of China has used a meeting with business leaders to scold pro-democracy supporters in Hong Kong, delivering the highest-level warning yet to the nascent movement that Beijing will not permit political liberalization in the former British colony.
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Details of the closed meeting, which took place Monday in Beijing’s grand Great Hall of the People, emerged Tuesday in accounts by the participants, who included much of Hong Kong’s business elite.
Without mentioning the pro-democracy movement directly, Mr. Xi said that the political turmoil jeopardized Hong Kong’s stability and prosperity.
“If Hong Kong people don’t break from the political tussle to focus on development, Hong Kong will fall behind,” he said, according to Peter Lee Ka-kit, a developer who took notes during the meeting and read them on Hong Kong television.
Mr. Xi also said that Hong Kong’s prosperity was thanks to “concessions” made by Beijing, Mr. Lee said.
The meeting with Hong Kong’s tycoons took place the same day as thousands of students in Hong Kong gathered at a university campus to open a week of class boycotts intended to pressure the government in Beijing to support open nominations for Hong Kong’s top post, the chief executive. Many plan to take part in a sit-in protest, called Occupy Central, in the heart of Asia’s most important financial center, which is expected to start next month.
China regained sovereignty of the territory from Britain in 1997 in an agreement that guaranteed Hong Kong would enjoy considerable freedom to run its own affairs for a half-century. Hong Kong, governed by a separate legal code called the Basic Law, is by far the richest city in China, with a per-capita income on par with that of the United States.
The government in Beijing considers the protests illegal and says that open nominations for chief executive violate the Basic Law. At the meeting, Mr. Xi addressed that point, telling the business leaders to “resolutely oppose words and actions that would violate the Basic Law and harm rule of law in Hong Kong,” according to another participant, Chan Wing-kee, president of the Chinese Manufacturers’ Association of Hong Kong, who spoke with the pro-Beijing newspaper Ta Kung Pao.
Mr. Xi also urged them to support Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing government “with all their vigor.”
The meeting comes as trust in the central government in Beijing among the territory’s 7.2 million people has fallen to its lowest point since February 1997, months before the transfer of sovereignty, according to a new poll. The poll, released Tuesday by Hong Kong University and conducted by telephone from Sept. 4 to 11, also showed that trust in Hong Kong’s own pro-Beijing government had fallen to the lowest point in more than a decade.
That survey was taken after a decision by China’s legislature last month to impose strict limits on a plan for universal suffrage in Hong Kong. The National People’s Congress said that all Hong Kong voters could cast ballots for the chief executive, beginning in the 2017 election, but that a committee dominated by Beijing loyalists would vet candidates, effectively eliminating any not backed by the Chinese government.
Mr. Xi’s decision to meet with the business elite appeared to reflect a recognition of Hong Kong’s financial importance to China, as well as to signal that China’s Communist leadership was allied with business. In the official group photograph of the meeting, Mr. Xi was placed next to Li Ka-shing, head of the Cheung Kong Holdings and Asia’s wealthiest man, with a fortune of $30.7 billion, according to Bloomberg.
The meeting also emphasized a transformation in the Communist Party’s relationship with Hong Kong. Where once its supporters among the lower classes helped organize workers and strikes, it now openly courts the city’s business elite. Last month Wang Zhenmin, a top Chinese academic who works closely with the government to create policy on Hong Kong, went so far as to say that democracy in Hong Kong had to be limited to protect the interests of the wealthy.
“In your history the business community was the enemy of the Communist Party, always against the rich,” he told reporters in Hong Kong. “But now the Communist Party is the ruling party, the Communist Party must take into account of all classes, the rich and the poor.”
“One of the reasons people say they’re fighting for democracy is because they really feel that Hong Kong politics is run in the interest of the tycoons and the wealthy people,” said David Zweig, the director of the Center on China’s Transnational Relations at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology.
“Here the students are out there fighting for democracy and here is the mainland reinforcing the perception that this is rich man’s politics.”
