Can Hong Kong’s new NPC deputies be the change that the city’s zero-sum politics needs?

The street protests by half a million people on July 1, 2003, saw the emergence in Hong Kong of an assertive civil society, that however lacks political power brokers. Although a few did emerge in 2010, when Democratic Party members went to the central government’s liaison office to negotiate the city’s electoral reforms, Hong Kong on the whole lacks political power brokers.

Intermediary agents are critical in any process of democratisation. In 1986, when Taiwan’s opposition Democratic Progressive Party was formed, then president Chiang Ching-kuo did not order the police or military to suppress it; marking a watershed in Taiwan’s democratisation. Importantly, some academics served as mediators between the DPP and the ruling regime, thus averting any crackdown on the nascent party.

The case of Hong Kong is very different. Politics here is often seen as a zero-sum game; when one side wins, the other loses. Take the recent passage of new Legislative Council house rules. Pro-government elites hailed the rules as a necessity for a more productive legislative-executive relationship, but the opposition denounced it as authoritarian.