Hong Kong, Moving Away From Rule by British Officials, Holding Its First Election

It was a scene that has been played millions of times in the United States. The young candidate, dressed in an ill-fitting gray suit, was standing in a neighborhood community center, shaking hands and waiting nervously for the debate to begin.

Asked why he was running for office, the candidate, a 34-year-old social worker named Jacob Chan, replied, in the time-honored fashion of politicians everywhere: “I think I have rich experience for the job.”

As ordinary as this scene might seem, it was part of a process of historic change. For it took place in the British crown colony of Hong Kong, which until now has been governed by British officials and their hand-picked minions.

Today, for the first time, the people of Hong Kong will choose 24 of the 56 members of the colony’s Legislative Council, whose members until now have been civil servants and appointees of the governor. The election is meant to be the beginning step in a gradual transition toward representative government.

A Year After Pact

The balloting will be held exactly one year after the day, on Sept. 26, 1984, when British and Chinese officials initialed an agreement paving the way for the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. In it, China made the vague promise that for 50 years after 1997, Hong Kong’s government “shall enjoy a high degree of autonomy.”

Today’s elections will be indirect. Of the 24 new members of the Legislative Council, 12 will be chosen in balloting by “functional constituencies,” such as the bar association, the banking association, labor unions and the chamber of commerce. Most of the others will be chosen from locally elected “district boards,” the members of which were chosen earlier this year.

As a result, relatively few of Hong Kong’s people, an estimated 50,000 out of 5 million, are eligible to vote.

But the British government has said the election is merely the first step in the process of democratic reform and has pledged to revise the system again in two years. It is now considering whether to begin holding direct elections or even to permit the growth of political parties--a development that could be expected to make China especially uncomfortable.

Until the Sino-British agreement a year ago, Hong Kong had been for more than a century one of the world’s most notorious hotbeds of political apathy. Its inhabitants, many of them refugees from civil wars and political campaigns in China itself, were willing, by and large, to let Britain do the governing while they went about the business of making money.

Two Revolutions at Once

Now, all that is changing. Hong Kong has suddenly become a political scientist’s wonderland, going through two separate revolutions at once.

On the one hand, Hong Kong is belatedly following the path of revolution blazed by the American colonies in 1776. Its increasingly affluent Chinese middle-class is beginning to take over political power from Britain. Colonial government is giving way to self-rule.

On the other hand, Hong Kong is also witnessing the first stirrings of a different sort of political revolution, the kind experienced by China itself in 1949. Officials of the Chinese Communist Party are moving into Hong Kong and trying to learn as much about it as they can, preparing for the day, 12 years from now, when Hong Kong will be under the control of China.

The Hong Kong branch of China’s official New China News Agency, which has served for 36 years as Peking’s de facto consulate in the British colony, recently expanded out of its 24-story headquarters and opened three new offices here.

In addition, the agency has dropped all pretense of being solely a news-gathering operation and devotes itself openly to government affairs. In May, the organization moved its editorial employees out of the main headquarters to a new office where the reporters and editors will not get in the way of more important business.

News Official Prominent

In the year since the Sino-British agreement was reached, Xu Jiatun, the director of the news agency’s Hong Kong branch, has come to play a remarkably public role here, serving in effect as a sort of shadow mayor.

Xu poses for pictures, makes speeches, gives banquets for Hong Kong leaders, attends funerals, sends tasty hami melons to British officials, and offers quotes to Hong Kong reporters on subjects ranging from local kidnapings to the contradictions of capitalism. However, he declined to be interviewed for this article.

Whether a democratic form of local government can survive within a country controlled by a Communist Party formed along Leninist lines is a question no one is yet able to answer. Fears here that the two political systems are incompatible prompted Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping to promise Hong Kong that there will be “one country, two systems.”

Many political activists here believe that the best protection Hong Kong has against interference from Peking is to create as strong a representative government as possible in the next 12 years before China takes over.

‘Autonomy’ the Issue

Martin C.M. Lee, a Hong Kong lawyer who is running for the Legislative Council, said: “Without direct elections, it is impossible to secure that ‘high degree of autonomy’ promised to us in the agreement. I’m afraid that in 1997 we may not have a meeting of minds with China about what a ‘high degree of autonomy’ is.”

There have been suggestions for representative government and direct elections in Hong Kong in the past, but the British have always managed to scuttle the idea.

As a result, Hong Kong is still run by a governor appointed by the British Foreign Office in the name of the sovereign. On paper, at least, the British governor wields greater power in Hong Kong than does the head of the Communist Party in China. The Legislative Council has advisory powers only.

Now, the British are caught between conflicting forces.

They are anxious to avoid charges that they have sold out the people of Hong Kong by negotiating its return to China but they want to govern the colony for the next 12 years in a way that will avoid offending China, a potentially important trading partner. And Chinese officials have dropped broad hints that they are less than thrilled with the movement toward democracy in Hong Kong.

“They (Chinese officials) are a bit anxious that the tide of public opinion and adversarial politics (in Hong Kong) will get out of hand,” a British official said recently. “They seem to want us to keep a tight grip on Hong Kong so that we can hand it over to China, with a good bank balance, in 1997. Then local autonomy will be handed over to Hong Kong from China, like a gift.”