Hong Kong democracy protest is ‘undemocratic’

HONG KONG — The Chinese state media, including the main newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, have continued to criticise the protest movement pushing for fully-free elections in Hong Kong.

The People’s Daily, the Communist Party’s Central Committee publication, yesterday carried a commentary calling the protest “anti-democratic”.

Titled Occupy Central Is Backtracking Democracy, the article argued that a minority of people have hijacked public interest to push their own political views. Such a move tramples on the principle of democracy, it added.

The piece, which also blamed British rule for making Hong Kong “hostile to democracy”, is the latest in a series of harshly worded commentaries by the People’s Daily against the protest movement.

Commentaries in the People’s Daily are watched closely as an indicator of the Chinese government’s intentions.

At the height of the protest last week, the newspaper carried a front-page commentary accusing pro-democracy groups of threatening to drag Hong Kong into chaos. “If matters are not dealt with according to the law, Hong Kong society will fall into chaos,” the paper said then.

South China Morning Post reported yesterday that some of the harshest People’s Daily commentaries were written by someone with the pen name Guoping, which can be translated as “national peace” or “national commentary”. Two commentaries on the Hong Kong protest by Guoping were released by the Chinese state media late on Sunday night. One commentary criticised campaign participants for using populism to mobilise young people.

“Hong Kong belongs to seven million Hongkongers and, more so, to 1.3 billion Chinese,” said the commentary. “The central government and all countrymen’s attitude and stance (on the 2017 election for Hong Kong’s Chief Executive) are unprecedentedly unanimous and not to be shaken.”

The Post added that in the second commentary, the writer criticised street politics and said it would not change the fact that whoever governs Hong Kong must be loyal to the state and to Hong Kong. Meanwhile, another influential Chinese Communist Party journal has said in its latest edition that blindly copying Western-style democracy can only bring disaster.

Citing enduring violence and turmoil in countries such as Afghanistan, Egypt, Iraq and Libya, which have tried to adopt such a system of government, the fortnightly magazine Qiushi said Western democracy did not suit all countries.

“The West always brags that its own democracy is a ‘universal value’ and denies there is any other form of democracy,” said Qiushi, which means “seeking truth”, in the issue distributed over the weekend.

“Western democracy has innate internal flaws and certainly is not a ‘universal value’; its blind copying can only lead to disaster,” Qiushi added.

The article made no mention of Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule in 1997 having been a British colony, but the timing of its publication cannot have been a coincidence.

The Chinese state media and officials have launched numerous attacks on Western-style democracy in the past, saying that the country’s own system of socialism with Chinese characteristics is the best way to govern the world’s most populous nation.

The protesters’ demands have centred on how to elect the Chief Executive of Hong Kong. The Chinese government has proposed that starting in 2017, the territory’s voters would be allowed to choose the Chief Executive by ballot. But it has stipulated that there can be only two or three candidates and they must be approved by a nomination committee, which would be dominated by people heeding Beijing’s wishes. AGENCIES