The forthcoming local election in Clacton-on-Sea, a small coastal town in Essex, was all but unknown to outsiders up to a week ago. The United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) was quietly optimistic that their Little-England platform – restricting immigration, withdrawing from the EU – would soon win them their first parliamentary seat. Then a mural appeared, painted in the inimitable style of Banksy, the best-known guerrilla of the contemporary art world who is justly celebrated, albeit anonymously, for his Swiftian critiques of modern belligerence, racism and unfettered capitalism. The mural shows five surly grey pigeons sitting on a telephone wire, glowering at a green migratory bird perched a short distance away. The pigeons hold placards that say: “Migrants not welcome”, Go back to Africa” and “Keep off our worms.” Although the painting was quickly erased by an officious district council, it lives on in a photograph posted at the artist’s website. It hardly needs to be said that UKIP’s xenophobia is now notorious worldwide, and anti-racist campaigners everywhere have been gifted an image every bit as potent as “the 99%” slogan that galvanised the recent Occupy protests in America.
It is unlikely that besieged officials in the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong are browsing foreign newspapers for instructive tidbits, but they could do worse than pay attention to what transpired in Clacton-on-Sea. For just as Banksy’s mural has now become world famous because of its disappearance, so too has coverage of Hong Kong’s Occupy Central protests mushroomed because of China’s overzealous efforts to make them go away. Despite restricting social media coverage of the protests, and flirting with greater amounts of force to disperse the crowds, Beijing finds itself at an impasse. With each new day the groups of students who form the heart of the Occupy protest have proved maddeningly adept at mobilizing international support for their cause. What was meant to be a quiet election of a slate of approved bureaucrats – in a region that was promised, rather deceptively, a “high degree of autonomy” after its 1997 repatriation from Britain – has turned into another troublesome high-profile democratic protest with an anxious, sceptical global audience.
Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying has agreed to indirect negotiations with the protesters, via his deputy, Carrie Lam, but the standoff is far from over. Twenty-five years after the Tiananmen protests, Beijing knows that a televised violence is a perilous gamble. Even with the fairly mild response to date, Occupy Central’s ubiquitous umbrellas have become a symbol of resistance. If tear gas and police charges give way to anything resembling the carnage in 1989, the unpredictable knock-on effects in other parts of China are, to say the least, worrisome.
One indication of how President Xi Jinping handles political dissent is the recent life sentence handed down to the Uighur intellectual Ilham Tohti after his conviction on charges of “separatism”. This utterly disgraceful decision comes after decades of repression of the independence movement in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Throughout its heavy-handed imposition of measures that favour the Han Chinese, who have been encouraged to migrate into the province, Beijing has made almost no concessions to the aggrieved Uighur community, nor has entertained dialogue on the issues. As Uighur resistance to authoritarian rule has grown increasingly implacable and violent, Beijing has responded with an iron fist. All of this bodes ill for Hong Kong.
While Hong Kong remains a special case in China’s complex political landscape – culturally and economically distinct from most other parts of the country – what is happening there is increasingly being noticed elsewhere. At this point the Occupy Central movement has embarrassed Beijing and exposed its insincerity, but the political stakes – to this point, at least – are fairly limited. What remains to be seen is whether Beijing has fully grasped the lessons from its last confrontation with democratic protests. Instead of taking a hard line and drawing further attention to its shortcomings, Hong Kong’s officials should realize that a negotiated settlement to the present crisis, however painful, will soon fade from the headlines. A violent showdown, however, could provoke any number of further complications and, like the Tiananmen protests before them, seriously compromise China’s international reputation for a generation.
