From the Fragrant Harbour to Occupy Central : Hong Kong's Democratic Development & 'Rule of Law' Discourse

This paper traces the democratic development of Hong Kong from its beginnings as a Crown Colony of the United Kingdom to its current status as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, paying special attention to the political issues that led to widespread street protests in 2014. Those protests, dubbed 'Occupy Central', grew in part from a longstanding tension between the desires of the people to have a greater role in policy-making through democratic representation, and the desires of successive governments to focus on stability and economic growth. Both before and after the restoration of Chinese sovereignty over Hong Kong in 1997, local governments have attempted to manage this tension by advancing rhetoric regarding the 'rule of the law' as THE central principle of local governance, accompanying it with a series of minor reforms. Yet, though Hong Kong's institutions of representative government have evolved substantially over time, it remains the case that the power of the average resident to give effect to her political values through electing representatives to government remains substantially weaker than elsewhere in the developed world. This paper suggests that though Hong Kongers have often appeared to accept that adherence to the 'rule of law' in the territory negates this democratic deficit, Occupy Central indicates that this tolerance may be weakening. Moreover, analysis of the language deployed by both the government and the protestors during Occupy Central reveals a troubling shift to a virtually value-free conception of the rule of the law, in which serious questions about institutions and the relationship between the citizen and the state are shifted aside in favor of populist questions about 'law-breaking'. This change in the discourse that surrounds the rule of law in Hong Kong is an unwelcome development, and in the long run harmful