The Reeducation Camps of Xinjiang

The dispatches on the Rohingya have dried up as the repatriation deal between Myanmar and Bangladesh, set to begin last month, stalled out.

Filling the void have been stories of Uighur Muslim internment camps in the restive western Chinese region of Xinjiang. Chris Buckley got things rolling in early September with "China Is Detaining Muslims in Vast Numbers. The Goal: ‘Transformation.’" The story's bombshell two-sentence paragraph was

The number of Uighurs, as well as Kazakhs and other Muslim minorities, who have been detained in the camps is unclear. Estimates range from several hundred thousand to perhaps a million, with exile Uighur groups saying the number is even higher.

All qualification was quickly lost and the number of Uighurs detained for reeducation became 1 million. I was walking home from work one night right after the midterm elections and I ran into a guy, an Amazon worker, coming from an anti-Trump rally. We got to talking, and it turned out he was Iranian. I said most people in the United States have not a clue how devastating the Iran-Iraq War was. He said one of Saddam's Scud missiles blew up down the street from his house. While we agreed on a lot, he said he was more frightened of China than an errant U.S. hyper power. He mentioned the 1 million in internment camps in Xinjiang.

Chris Buckley, along with co-author Austin Ramzy, was back at it yesterday with "China’s Detention Camps for Muslims Turn to Forced Labor." The Xinjiang reeducation camps, come to find out, have a forced labor component. Residents graduate from indoctrination to jobs in textile mills, sometimes housed right there at the internment camp.

China is a nation run by the central planning of the Communist Party. The Communist Party has a problem with poverty and underdevelopment in Xinjiang. Xinjiang is also the focus of foreign powers attempting to create separatist problems for China by means of Islam. It is an established pattern for Western intelligence services: Afghanistan, the First and Second Chechen Wars, Libya, Syria, etc. So the Chinese are being proactive. Training and jobs. The refugees fleeing Guatemala and Honduras might very well favor such internment camps in Arizona, California and Texas if it meant permanent residency and stable employment. And what about the opioid killing fields of West Virginia and Ohio?

These stories about the Uighur internment camps of Xinjiang are a good illustration of how the news works a la the Integrity Initiative. Intelligence agencies fronting as NGOs develop and work with "clusters" to spread misinformation.

Don't Bet Against China: This is a Market Correction Not a Financial Crisis

On my way out of town when the global market slide commenced at the end of last week, I was not able to stay abreast of the news coverage. Old friends who I met asked what I thought. Were we heading into another financial crisis? My answer, for what it is worth, was no. People have been predicting a China meltdown for years, and it hasn't happened yet. The Communist Party has been able to centrally manage impressive growth year in and year out for decades; there is no reason to believe that they can't succeed in converting China to a mature, Western-style consumption-based economy.

That being said, something is definitely happening here. Chinese demand for raw materials is slackening, which has an effect on commodity prices worldwide. Then there is the issue of currency. The dollar has run up in value, which prompted a devaluation in the renminbi earlier this month; and prior to that, the yen. Draped on top of all this is the jingoistic Western press which wants to fix blame squarely with China for the stock selloff. (A good example of this today is Eduardo Porter's fabulistic "Political Risks May Foil Economic Reform in China," or Thomas Friedman's shrill "Bonfire of the Assets, With Trump Lighting Matches.")

I think Chinese prime minister Li Keqiang gets it right (see Neil Gough and Chris Buckley, "China Again Cuts Interest Rates as Concerns Mount Over Economy"):

“Currently, global economic trends are opaque and confusing, and market volatility is quite large, and this has had some impact on the Chinese economy,” Mr. Li said, according to a report on Chinese television news. “But fundamentally the overall stability of the Chinese economy has not changed, and positive factors sustaining a turn for the better in the real economy are accumulating.”

China, he added, would be able to fulfill its economic goals for the year. Mr. Li also noted that there would be no continued depreciation of China’s currency, the renminbi, after a sharp devaluation earlier this month. The currency “can maintain fundamental stability at a reasonable and balanced level,” he said.

This point of view -- that China, the world's second largest economy, is fundamentally sound -- is echoed from both poles of the political spectrum. On the one hand, you have Michael Hudson, in the Democracy Now! video at the top of the post, saying that the Chinese are successfully managing the conversion of their economy away from an export-dominated model, and that the stock drop in the U.S. is basically panic selling to get out of the market before the bubble bursts; while on the other hand, you have an op-ed, "False Alarm on a Crisis in China," by Nicholas Lardy, senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, in fundamental agreement with contrarian firebrand Hudson -- China's economy is strong; what we are witnessing here is a market correction:

Washington — CHINA, many believe, is in a financial and economic meltdown causing anxiety and panic everywhere. China’s stock market dive first dragged down other emerging markets and has now spread to the United States, slicing trillions of dollars off the value of stocks traded here and in other global markets. Since China is the world’s second largest economy and has growing financial ties around the world, developments there clearly have enormous potential implications for both developed and emerging markets.

But the popular narrative is not well supported by the facts. There is little evidence that China’s economy is slowing significantly from the 7 percent pace reported by the government for the first part of the year. Wage growth is running at about 10 percent annually; the pace of creation of nonagricultural jobs is stronger than in any recent year; both real disposable income and consumption expenditures of Chinese households are growing strongly. It is not the picture of an economy heading for a hard landing. 

Services, not industry, are driving China’s growth, as has been the case for three full years. This is likely to continue since per capita incomes in China are reaching a level where a growing share of spending is on entertainment, travel and other services rather than on goods.

Naysayers question government economic data, continuing to focus on weakness in China’s industrial sector and the extremely slow growth of electric power output. But steel production, for example, is significantly more energy intensive than entertainment, so the demand for electricity has fallen sharply as the structure of the economy has evolved.

Assuming that electric power growth is a good proxy for China’s overall economic expansion is like trying to drive a car by looking in the rearview mirror.

Some economists watching from abroad believe that the country is in the midst of a financial crisis because of the excessive debt burden it incurred in recent years. But that view is even less well supported. After a very modest two-day depreciation earlier this month, the exchange rate of the renminbi has changed little against the dollar for eight consecutive trading days; capital outflows continue at a moderate, very sustainable pace; bank liquidity remains strong. This does not yet look remotely like a financial crisis.

Rather than a financial and economic meltdown, China is experiencing an overdue correction in its equity market. And the connection between China’s equity market and China’s real economy has always been tenuous.

Don't bet against China.

Obama Guts Dodd-Frank + Umbrella Movement Epitaph + Grocery Store Torture Report Discussion

When we look back on the Obama years, I fear, they will be seen as a dividing line. On one side of the line will be the quaint notion that people actually have a say in how we live our lives; on the other, the dystopia of our lives as actually lived in a brutal society held together by lies ruled by the super-rich and their police-state enforcers.

Last night the House of Representatives narrowly passed a budget bill (Ashley Parker and Robert Pear, "House Narrowly Passes Bill to Avoid Shutdown; $1.1 Trillion in Spending") that guts a main provision of Dodd-Frank, the key piece of legislation designed to prevent another Great Recession. House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, no one's idea of a Leftist firebrand, broke with the Obama, who was lobbying for the bill, and asked her caucus to reject it. The budget ending up clearing the House with 162 Republicans and 57 Democrats voting yes.

Jonathan Weisman explains in "Furor Over Move to Aid Big Banks in Funding Bill" what it is that the House just did:

WASHINGTON — In a 1,600-page, $1.1 trillion spending bill, a provision to roll back an obscure financial regulation became a focal point of uproar as Congress struggled to keep the government funded. 

The “push-out” regulation — a measure to ensure that banks trade their riskiest financial instruments without the protection of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Federal Reserve’s backup — was controversial from the start. Hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars were shoveled into Wall Street banks after instruments like credit default swaps became worthless in the financial crisis, but even some crucial Democrats were unsure if Congress went too far when it voted to include push-out in the landmark Dodd-Frank law to regulate Wall Street in 2010. 

But with regulators pressing to put rules into effect to carry out the law, a provision in the enormous spending bill to remove the push-out regulation drew bipartisan outrage. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said she was “heartbroken” by the “taint” visited upon the spending bill, which would finance virtually all of the government through September.

***

The fierce Democratic opposition over the Dodd-Frank rollback provision created the odd spectacle of President Obama and Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. calling Democrats to muster support for the spending bill over the opposition of Ms. Pelosi. 

“I love the American political system, I really do, but the ability to sneak in substantive policy measures and make it take it or leave it, I think it’s appalling,” said Simon Johnson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management and a former chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, who is a prominent critic of the nation’s big banks. 

The push-out legislation assumed outsize importance, not only because of what it does but because the biggest Wall Street companies have fought it since it was proposed. 

The language in the spending bill was inserted by Representative Kevin Yoder, Republican of Kansas, but he did not write it. Citigroup did. In 2013, the bank and its allies were able to corral a bipartisan vote to pass the rollback out of the House Financial Services Committee. In an analysis by The New York Times of Citigroup emails, more than 70 lines of the committee’s 85-line rollback bill came from Citigroup’s recommendations.

The banking industry strongly supports the rollback measure. James C. Ballentine, an executive vice president at the American Bankers Association, said financial instruments like credit deferred swaps are used to mitigate risk, not bolster it. To force their trading into units unprotected by federal taxpayers would be onerous, he argues. 

“The push-out requirement to move some swaps into separate affiliates makes one-stop shopping impossible for businesses ranging from family farms to energy companies that want to hedge against commodity price changes,” Mr. Ballentine said. 

Tony Fratto, a former official in the Bush Treasury and White House, called the opposition “a lot of hyperbole” around “an incremental common-sense regulatory improvement.” 

Mr. Johnson said the evocation of family farms and mom-and-pop banks was specious. The four largest banks conduct more than 93 percent of all derivatives trading in the United States. The repeal push is for them, he said. 

Such banks can still deal in derivatives and credit-deferred swaps in units uninsured by the federal government, but they could charge clients a considerably higher premium if they could keep that federal backstop. 

“In 2008, we learned the economic consequences of conducting derivatives trading in taxpayer-insured banks,” said Thomas Hoenig, vice chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, calling the repeal Congress is contemplating “illogical.”

We're back to where we started before that 2008 election-night celebration in Grant Park when Oprah and Jesse Jackson cried for the television cameras.

Obama has been a terrific bust. His administration has returned the U.S. military to Iraq, has signaled a open-ended commitment to staying on in Afghanistan, has embarked on a New Cold War with Russia, is pivoting to Asia to confront China, and now has provided the crucial support to gut Dodd-Frank.

Most people understand that it was Wall Street's addiction to lightly-regulated derivatives that caused the financial crisis. Obama's support for a federal backstop of the big banks' derivatives business proves that nothing has changed.

So next time you run into a liberal who wants to tell you that Obama is a good and decent leader who would always do the right thing if not for those devilish Republicans in Congress remind him of Obama's support for the 2015 budget.

The epitaph of the Umbrella Movement has been written by Chris Buckley and Keith Bradsher, "Hong Kong Protesters Lose a Last Bastion, but Vow to Go On." The goal here, as in any political campaign, is to claim victory, regardless of the actual outcome, once the campaign is over. Note the tabloid-like opening:

HONG KONG — Constance So, a slightly built university student, wept as she looked for a way past the tightening ring of police officers closing in on the last of the sizable protest camps in Hong Kong. 

With friends urging her to avoid an arrest record, Ms. So, like many others, decided to give up voluntarily. There was no violence, only a few defiant final stands and many tearful goodbyes, as the nearly three-month Umbrella Movement disbanded. 

“It was like my home,” Ms. So said. “I’m leaving my friends behind. I feel like I’m betraying them.” 

For the Hong Kong authorities and their superiors in Beijing, the peaceful end to the protest is likely to be seen as a major victory. They repeatedly rebuffed demands for a greater degree of democracy in this former British colony, and defused the longest sustained political uprising on Chinese territory in many years without a bloody crackdown.

Yet even in their defeat, the protesters, most of them college students, left with a new sense of political identity, a willingness to challenge the almighty power holders in Beijing, and a slogan from a science-fiction film that many of them repeated as they cleared out of the encampment in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district: “We’ll be back.” (A sliver of a protest camp remains in Causeway Bay, a busy shopping area.)

Buckley and Bradsher, thankfully, do include a counter-narrative, which has to do with the diminished status of  Hong Kong's tycoons:

Some in Hong Kong worry that the protests this autumn have harmed the long-term cause of achieving greater democracy. 

They fret that Beijing has permanently transferred large numbers of security and intelligence specialists to Hong Kong to keep a much closer eye on the Chinese Communist Party’s many critics. Beijing, they say, could end up even more resistant to further democratization in Hong Kong for fear that a hostile government might be elected. 

“This movement has done more damage to the pro-democracy camp than anything in the last 17 years,” said Steve Vickers, who was a senior Hong Kong police official before Britain handed over Hong Kong to China in 1997, and who said he favored the introduction of greater democracy. 

Under the British, and through the first 17 years of Chinese sovereignty here, the most powerful political force has been the leaders of the city’s biggest businesses — heavily Scottish at first, but now mostly Chinese families originally from the neighboring Guangdong Province or from Shanghai. These tycoons have long opposed increases in social spending, fearing they would lead to higher taxes on them.

But the bruising political battle with democracy activists has hurt the tycoons’ image and their clout with top city officials and the Beijing authorities, people with a detailed knowledge of Hong Kong’s policy making said. 

To Beijing’s annoyance, the tycoons were reluctant to criticize the protesters for fear that their own businesses might be boycotted. One of the most politically active business leaders, a real estate developer, James Tien, publicly broke ranks in October with the administration’s support for Mr. Leung and called for more negotiations with the protesters. 

“The tycoons are no longer a factor; their days are past,” said the person who works closely with the Beijing and Hong Kong governments.

Last night at the grocery store I asked the checker, a guy I have known for years, what he thought of the torture report. He said, "Torture? What torture report?"

I explained to him that the Senate had released its study of the Bush administration's post-9/11 use of torture and its creation of a network of overseas secret prisons to house the tortured detainees.

He said, "Well, I'm still glad I live in this country."

"Have you ever lived anywhere else?"  I asked.

"No, I haven't."

"How do you know it's not better in, say, Ireland?"

"Well, you're right. But I would like to think that it is better here."

Gray Lady Goes Yellow: Joshua Wong Cast as Bobby Sands

I have been critical of the Umbrella Movement protesters not because I believe they are insincere but rather because they are being used by Western powers as the latest iteration of a color-revolution scheme designed to create problems for adversary nations; in this case, the People's Republic of China.

Events of the last week, beginning November 30 with the failed attempt by students to expand their Admiralty occupation to include government buildings, followed by the short-lived hunger strike by student-leader Joshua Wong and the staged surrender to the police of Occupy Central leaders this past Wednesday, make clear that the Umbrella Movement is a Utopian one. Hong Kong students are fighting for something that exists nowhere on the planet -- completely unfettered elections.

While protesters in the United States, a continental-sized nation of 316 million people, are outraged at the continuation of lethal police brutality and racism and have been mobilized since the fatal shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri last August, predating the Umbrella Movement by a month. I would wager that if you tallied the amount of space devoted to the Hong Kong democracy protests compared to the racial justice/police brutality uprising caused by Michael Brown's murder you would find that the Umbrella Movement comes out on top.

If we include in the comparison events after grand juries refused to indict police in both the Michael Brown and Eric Garner cases then, probably, the weight of coverage favors the racial justice protesters.

But this doesn't change my thinking that the Western "media clergy," as Samir Amin referred to the Fourth Estate in a recent Monthly Review article, has engaged in boosterism when it comes to the Umbrella Movement.

To see what I mean all one need do is read "A Frail Face Becomes a Defiant Focus of Hong Kong’s Waning Protest Movement" by Chris Buckley and Alan Wong. The story appeared on Friday. The next day Joshua Wong scrapped his hunger strike.

HONG KONG — A spindly, stooped teenager in a blue windbreaker shuffled from a tent on the edge of Hong Kong’s main remaining protest camp. Dozens of onlookers applauded, shouted to him or just stared. Cameras snapped and journalists leaned in to catch his soft voice.

The teenager, Joshua Wong, who embodied the hopes of the city’s pro-democracy street movement in its headiest days, has become the exhausted yet defiant focus of what looks to many like the movement’s final throes. 

Mr. Wong, 18, on Friday entered the fourth day of a hunger strike at the very place where he had instigated the confrontation that ignited months of street demonstrations. On Sept. 26, students occupied a gated forecourt of the local government’s offices after Mr. Wong shouted encouragement. Hong Kong residents took to the streets in large numbers two days later, after the police tried to disperse the students with tear gas.

This week, Mr. Wong and four other students on hunger strike huddled in tents next to those same steel gates. On Friday, one of the students gave up, and Mr. Wong and the others appeared increasingly spent. 

“I’m quite tired from the hunger strike right now, but I will persist in fighting,” Mr. Wong said in an interview on Friday, hunched, pale and occasionally slumping on a chair. 

Under a canopy, he and the other strikers lie wrapped in blankets and sleeping bags in their one-man tents, surrounded by supporters and given constant attention. Doctors visit every few hours. Mr. Wong and his fellow hunger strikers periodically post information about their blood-sugar levels and other health indicators on the social media they use compulsively.

It goes on like that. You would think Wong is at death's door approaching Bobby Sands status of two-months without food.

Mr. Wong occasionally emerges from his tent, his slight frame even lighter than its usual 99 pounds after days without nourishment, apart from a teaspoon of sugar mixed in water and 100 milliliters of an energy drink taken on doctors’ advice. A friend steadies him as he makes his way to a public toilet. On Friday, Mr. Wong used a wheelchair, his legs under a blanket. 

Still, he and the other hunger strikers have mustered the energy to speak to hundreds of protesters who gather around the camp’s main stage at night. On Friday night, Mr. Wong was perched on the stage and in a quiet voice urged the demonstrators to remain steadfast.

This is four days without food. This is yellow journalism. Nowhere, for instance, will you find the Gray Lady similarly following Palestinian hunger strikes in Israeli prisons.

As I said, Joshua Wong gave up his fast this past Saturday. And now, as the Hong Kong government has politely alerted the remaining protesters that their two encampments will be taken down, the Umbrella Movement is fracturing with some calling for resistance.

****

UPDATE: In fairness to the Gray Lady, there was an excellent unsigned editorial this morning, "Release the Guantánamo Force-Feeding Videos," about the Guantanamo hunger strikers and the U.S. policy of force-feeding them.

Ferguson vs. Hong Kong: U.S. More of a Police State Than China

We here in the Land of the Free fancy ourselves a "shining city upon the hill" (see Jesus' Sermon on the Mount; John Winthrop's "A Model of Christian Charity"; Ronald Reagan's 1984 Republican National Convention acceptance speech). We like to imagine ourselves living in the most open of open societies; our institutions lawful and corruption-free; our democracy vibrant and fair.

Then there is a moment like yesterday's announcement by Governor Jay Nixon, a Democrat, that Missouri is in a state of emergency pending a decision by a grand jury on whether to indict the police officer who gunned down an unarmed black teenager in broad daylight in August. Monica Davey reports in "State of Emergency Declared in Missouri for Grand Jury’s Decision on Ferguson" that

FERGUSON, Mo. — Gov. Jay Nixon declared a state of emergency on Monday, allowing him to activate the Missouri National Guard in preparation for a grand jury decision on whether to indict a white police officer for shooting to death an unarmed black teenager, Michael Brown, three months ago. 

The declaration was certain to add to mounting tension here as people awaited the grand jury’s decision, which officials have said is expected in mid- to late November. Many here have said they expect the grand jury to decide against indicting the Ferguson officer, Darren Wilson, and they anticipate a show of anger and protest afterward. Some protesters said that calling up the Guard before a grand jury decision was a premature, antagonistic move that presumed that demonstrations would be violent.

Mr. Nixon called up the Guard in August during demonstrations that sometimes grew violent. Although the Guard’s role was limited to protecting a police command post, its presence drew vehement criticism from demonstrators, who said it was further indication of a military-style approach by the law enforcement authorities.

Compare this with a story (Chris Buckley and Alan Wong, "Hong Kong Clears an Area of Pro-Democracy Protesters") about the orderly removal of a slice of the Umbrella Movement encampment in the Admiralty District where the main Hong Kong government buildings are located:

HONG KONG — The Hong Kong government moved to clear pro-democracy protesters from a small area in front of an office building on Tuesday morning in the first move against the demonstrators in weeks. The authorities met no resistance, with student protesters saying they would not oppose the court order. 

Dozens of bailiffs wearing black vests, backed by the police, supervised the removal of barricades in a small section of the main protest area around the Citic Tower after reading aloud a court injunction. They took hours to methodically clear metal barriers and the random items left from protesters who had been living there in tents for weeks, from books to undergarments. 

The operation’s timing was no surprise; it was announced ahead of time. Demonstrators had largely vacated the area, and the police, unlike in past operations against the movement, did not wear riot gear.

Imagine if Hong Kong's leader, CY Leung, had declared a state of emergency and requested troop support from mainland China when students failed in an attempt to occupy government buildings on September 28 which then ballooned into mass protests. The outrage in the West, both official and from the Fourth Estate, would have be volcanic; proof, we would have been lectured, that the People's Republic of China is a totalitarian state hungering to snap under its iron boot heel the supple neck of a democracy-loving, Western-oriented youth.

But when police in St. Louis County, Missouri responded with assault rifles, APCs, flash grenades, tear gas, and helicopters to protesters outraged by the murder of an unarmed teenager there is no parallel outcry.

Yes, the Gray Lady published some excellent stories on 1) the massive militarization of local police forces, and 2) the Jim Crowesque justice system that sees a traffic ticket turn into fines and jail time for mostly black men. Nowhere though was there a thoughtful think piece or unsigned editorial connecting the U.S. with the world.

In Hong Kong, there has been an active occupation of public spaces since September. Police have been reticent to engage the Umbrella Movement youth. In Ferguson, protests have continued since August, but the protesters have never been given any leeway; at one point, during the peak last summer, they were not allowed to stand still, nevermind erecting an encampment complete with barricades. Plus, protesters in Ferguson were faced with a mustering of the Missouri National Guard.

Now the Guard has been activated once again. At this point any kind of indictment of Darren Wilson would come as a shock. The prevailing wisdom is that there will be no indictment. In other words, it is permissible to blow away an unarmed youth. Clashes clearly are anticipated. The injustice is too glaring.

Protesters appear to be well organized. Over 50 groups on the ground. We could be looking at another Seattle WTO or anti-war mobilization in the run up to Bush's invasion of Iraq. The police and the Guard invariably overreact because at the core of their training is the idea to brook no challenge to their use of overwhelming force. (Here, from what I've seen, the Hong Kong police seem much better trained than your average U.S. peace officer.)

The question is what will the Michael Brown protest movement do when confronted with the overreaction. There is a golden opportunity to expand the movement and shut down, albeit for a moment, the police state.

Bad as It Is, Failure of Umbrella Movement's Straw Poll Is Even Worse Than It Looks

The Umbrella Movement is one-month old. 

At some point the Gray Lady stopped referring to the Hong Kong pro-democracy sit-in as a "Revolution" and started calling it a "Movement." I thought that by the end of the sit-in's first week it was basically over because by then it was clear that the police were not going to make the mistake they made initially, which was the police mistake made during the Seattle WTO ministerial of responding to peaceful protesters with massive amounts of tear gas and pepper spray and flash-bang grenades. When the police respond with massive force to a non-violent demonstration it actually brings more people into the streets.

By the end of the first week in Hong Kong the crowds were thinning. The first burst of enthusiasm had spent itself.

At this point there are two main encampments: one in the Admiralty district and one in Mong Kok. The Zuccotti Park encampment, the hub of the worldwide Occupy Wall Street movement, managed to survive for two months, from September 17 to November 15, 2011 before Mayor Bloomberg's police force broke it apart early one morning.

I'm sure the leaders of the Umbrella Movement are aware that the clock is ticking and something needs to be done soon to avoid the fate of Occupy Wall Street; hence the planned straw poll designed, most likely, to generate momentum to get officials back to the bargaining table. Unfortunately, as Chris Buckley and Alan Wong report in "Pro-Democracy Movement’s Vote in Hong Kong Abruptly Called Off," the vote crashed on the launch pad:

HONG KONG — Organizers of a planned vote among Hong Kong’s pro-democracy demonstrators abruptly canceled it on Sunday, exposing tensions and confusion over how to sustain the movement a month after protesters occupied major streets to demand free elections. 

Student leaders and organizers of Occupy Central With Love and Peace, the group that laid the groundwork for a civil disobedience campaign for democracy, had urged people to vote at protest sites on Sunday and Monday as a way of registering their support for student negotiators seeking political concessions from the government. 

The referendum boiled down to two simple questions: Did voters endorse demanding that the Hong Kong government press Beijing to make democratic concessions on election rules, and did they agree that the changes should apply to city Legislative Council elections in 2016 and the race for chief executive in 2017?

But hours before the balloting was due to start on Sunday night, organizers announced it was off and apologized. They said there was too much disagreement over the wording and value of the vote. “We acknowledge that there was not enough consultation with the public,” they said in an emailed statement. 

At a news conference, some organizers were contrite, while others cast their surprise move in the best possible light.

“It won’t affect the morale of this movement,” said Alex Chow Yong Kang, the secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students. “This decision can rebuild the trust between us and the protesters. Protesters have all along shared a single goal; it’s just that they may have different views about the execution.”

But even before the cancellation, the vote, intended as a display of unity, had brought into focus tensions among protesters over how to hone their broadly shared aspirations into durable demands and strategies. Such strains could deepen as the protesters face fatigue in their own ranks and the refusal of the Hong Kong government and Chinese Communist Party leaders to make the major concessions demanded by demonstrators, said David Zweig, a professor of social science at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. 

“The question becomes: What’s the endgame?” he said in a telephone interview from Toronto, where he was visiting. “Once they didn’t pull out earlier and declare victory, they needed something from the government to be able to declare victory. Now they need to find some endgame, and I think that they’re not going to find it without compromise.”

Although supporters of the protests were unlikely to disagree with the two wordy propositions on the canceled ballot, some feared the vote could pave the way for unacceptable compromise or premature withdrawal from the street occupations in three parts of the city. Benny Tai, an associate professor of law who is a co-founder of Occupy Central, earlier denied that intention and said he had no power over deciding when protesters left the streets. Occupy Central had initially envisioned a much smaller, briefer protest in Central, the main financial district of Hong Kong.

At a news conference on Saturday, Mr. Tai said that he could not say how to sustain the protests into a second month. “You can just go down to the plaza and ask the protesters who have stationed there for so many days, how long do they prepare to stay. I think you can get a good answer.” 

But protesters have voiced a range of opinions on the future of their grass-roots movement. Some have wavered from the demand that voters be allowed to put forward candidates for chief executive without vetting from Beijing, while others said that demand, called civic nomination, could not be weakened.

Peter Lee wrote recently on the Counterpunch web site, "Democracy in Hong Kong: The Unelected Battle," about a document dump "of the meeting minutes of the Alliance for Democracy, a grouping of pro-democratic organizations engaged in Occupy-related issues."

In the minutes, Benny Tai, the chief legal mind for Occupy Central with Love and Peace, frets that direct nomination -- the goal of the Umbrella Movement -- is not an international legal standard:

Unless the [document dump] report is repudiated, the pro-dems don’t have a legal leg to stand on within the framework of the Basic Law and the NPC; what’s more surprising is that they recognize that they don’t even have a particularly strong legal case for direct nomination under the “international standards” for democracy the students are currently trumpeting.

Claudia Mo, a Civic Party stalwart and ex-AFP reporter (which might explain why she has appeared a few times in AFP’s Occupy coverage as a quotable notable), observed that “international standards” seemed unclear.

Benny Tai, whose job is presumably to make an airtight legal case for the action, instead observed that international practices don’t demand popular nomination. In fact, the UK doesn’t have direct nomination, as a HKSAR representative pointed out during the student dialogue. The key stipulation is a matter of principle: Do citizens have real choice? Do the candidates represent different needs and backgrounds? The best he could say was that popular nomination would unequivocally meet international standards, not that it was the only way.

Even more problematically, perhaps, the UK opted out of the Article 25 of the Universal Covenant of Civil and Political Rights for universal suffrage and direct elections for Hong Kong during its merrily undemocratic colonial years, and the PRC succeeded to that treatment when it took over in 1997. The OHK legal case rests on the rather frail legal reed that Beijing inadvertently surrendered its reservation by holding legislative elections.

And that is the best that the cream of the Hong Kong legal profession and the NED—whose job it is to twist Beijing’s knickers on these kinds of treaties—has been able to come up with after over a decade of determined lawyering. 

Remarkably, Benny Tai also voiced the concern that another popular referendum might be necessary to legitimate OHK’s demands and allow it to achieve standing as a negotiator, another tip that the case is not a legal slam dunk. (I might point out parenthetically that I approve of this state of mind, since otherwise we’re left with the metaphysical, undemocratic, and dare I say borderline-putschlike idea that the students can claim the right to speak for “Hong Kong” simply by putting feet on the street.)

So the struggle is in its essence political, not legal. 

Without a solid legal strategy, therefore, OHK has turned to a political strategy, that is, to create a rumpus in Hong Kong sufficient to discredit the HKSAR report and reopen the issue.

In other words, absent any legal standing, a popular vote, even a straw poll held in the main protest encampments, became a necessity. The fact that it couldn't get off the ground bodes ill for the Umbrella Movement. Judged by the standards of Occupy Wall Street's Zuccotti Park, it has a month left.

The highly politicized U.N. Human Rights Committee in Geneva weighed in with an assist for the Umbrella Movement late last week. Michael Forsythe reported, "U.N. Human Rights Panel Urges China to Allow Free Elections in Hong Kong," that

The United Nations Human Rights Committee urged China on Thursday to allow elections in Hong Kong without restrictions on who can run as a candidate. The move appeared likely to draw strong criticism from Beijing, where officials decided in August to set strict guidelines for the 2017 election of the city’s next leader, prompting mass sit-in protests.

The 18-member panel in Geneva said that Hong Kong needed to do more to ensure that its people had not only the right to vote, but also the right to run for office. 

“Hong Kong China should take all necessary measures to implement universal and equal suffrage in conformity with the covenant, as a matter of priority for all future elections,” Cornelis Flinterman, a member of the rights panel from the Netherlands, said on Thursday, referring to an international agreement on political rights.

The committee focused on the Aug. 31 decision by China’s Communist Party-run legislature to adopt guidelines for the 2017 election that would effectively keep anyone not approved by Beijing from appearing on the ballot for chief executive, the city’s top post. 

Under the guidelines, candidates must get the approval of more than half the members of a 1,200-person nominating committee, which includes many of Hong Kong’s pro-Beijing tycoons as well as representatives of other social groups friendly to the central government. The city, Asia’s most important financial center, was transferred from British to Chinese control in 1997, and its legal and administrative system is separate from that of the rest of China. 

Yuval Shany, a member of the rights panel from Israel, said the nominating committee was “not fully representative of the Hong Kong population.”

The irony of Israel lecturing China about providing full representation for Hong Kong passes, of course, without comment by Forsythe. One wonders why the Human Rights Committee doesn't implore the United States to allow candidates to run without restrictions. Better yet, why not an official U.N. rebuke for the myriad voter identification laws being passed by Republican legislatures to disenfranchise poor people?

One possible silver lining is that the Umbrella Movement is creating a new international standard, "Civic Nomination," one that is not practiced in the industrialized core Western democracies. This can be used, as it is in London, to reignite Occupy Wall Street.

Hong Kong Chief Executive Speaks for Leaders Worldwide: You Can't Have Open Elections Because Then Poor People Will Have Power

Yesterday government officials in Hong Kong debated leaders of the Umbrella Movement on television, something that would never happen in the United States, and something which did not happen during the Occupy Wall Street protests of autumn 2011. Then protesters were dismissed as infantile Utopians who were unreasonable for not articulating a list of demands that could be conveniently translated into the political/legislative process. At the same time, Obama and the Democrats appropriated the main Occupy argument about income inequality, which carried them to an impressive victory over Romney and the GOP in 2012.

Reuters has a handy story about the TV debate, "Hong Kong students put their case to government, but no breakthrough":

Communist Party rulers in Beijing in August offered Hong Kong people the chance to vote for their own leader in 2017, but said only two to three candidates could run after getting majority backing from a 1,200-person nominating committee, which is widely expected to be stacked with Beijing loyalists. 

The protesters decry this as "fake" Chinese-style democracy and say they won't leave the streets unless Beijing allows open nominations. 

"We hope the Hong Kong government doesn't become an obstacle on the democratic road for Hong Kong people," [student leader Alex] Chow added. "But that it will help us dismantle these road blocks and to lead Hong Kong people to bring about true democratic reform." 

[Chief Secretary Carrie] Lam reiterated the government's position that open nominations were not possible under Hong Kong law. 

"The students' voices and demands have been clearly heard by the special administrative region government, Hong Kong society and the central government," said Lam, seated on one side of a U-shaped table with four colleagues facing an equal number student leaders wearing black t-shirts. 

"But no matter how high the ideals, they must be strived for through legal, appropriate and rational means." 

The unprecedented open debate on democracy, that put protesters on an equal footing with Hong Kong officials who have branded their acts illegal, reflected a shift in the government's approach to engage rather than shun a movement that has lasted beyond most people's expectations.

Chief Secretary Lam was careful to note that no other nominating process exists in the Basic Law other than by nominating committee. The students of the Umbrella Movement want to abolish the constituent groups that are represented in the Hong Kong legislature and make up the nominating committee. As Michael Forsythe and Alan Wong report in "On TV, Hong Kong Openly Debates Democracy":

The students and other protesters want a more open nomination process as well as the abolition of so-called functional constituencies, which are industry, professional and social groups that are represented in Hong Kong’s legislature and in the committee that currently picks the chief executive. 

The government has rejected or ignored all of the students’ demands, except for their request to talk.

Hong Kong’s chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, made clear on Monday that the government would only listen to what the students had to say and explain to them how Hong Kong’s political process works. The territory has a great deal of autonomy from Beijing, and its people enjoy a broad range of civil liberties that mainland Chinese lack, including freedom of speech and assembly.

If the Umbrella Movement, seeking a more popularly democratic way to elect the chief executive of Hong Kong, dismisses the pre-selection of two or three candidates by a rigged nominating committee as a "fake," then the democracy of "the greatest nation on Earth," a.k.a., the United States is also a "fake," which it of course is.

Speaking for all plutocrats worldwide Hong Kong's top official Leung Chun-ying laid it shockingly bare the other day (which surprisingly received little comment, really no comment that I saw): that a government cannot have truly popular, wide-open nominations because then the poor will have a majority voice and they might vote themselves a welfare state. The amazing story by Keith Bradsher and Chris Buckley,"Hong Kong Leader Reaffirms Unbending Stance on Elections," appeared yesterday:

HONG KONG — The Beijing-appointed leader of Hong Kong, Leung Chun-ying, said Monday evening that it was unacceptable to allow his successors to be chosen in open elections, in part because doing so would risk giving poorer residents a dominant voice in politics. 

Mr. Leung made the statement during a broad-ranging defense of his administration’s handling of pro-democracy protests that have disrupted the city for more than three weeks. 

In an interview with a small group of journalists from American and European news media organizations, his first with foreign media since the city erupted in demonstrations, he acknowledged that many of the protesters are angry over the lack of social mobility and affordable housing in the city. But he argued that containing populist pressures was an important reason for resisting the protesters’ demands for fully open elections. 

Instead, he backed Beijing’s position that all candidates to succeed him as chief executive, the top post in the city, must be screened by a “broadly representative” nominating committee appointed by Beijing. That screening, he said, would insulate candidates from popular pressure to create a welfare state, and would allow the city government to follow more business-friendly policies to address economic inequality instead. Leung Chun-ying, the chief executive of Hong Kong, supports Beijing’s lead role in screening the region’s future leaders.  

Mr. Leung’s blunt remarks reflect a widely held view among the Hong Kong elite [and elite world over] that the general public cannot be trusted to govern the city well. His statements appeared likely to draw fresh criticism from the democratic opposition, and to inflame the street struggle over Hong Kong’s political future.

***

Mr. Leung said that if “you look at the meaning of the words ‘broadly representative,’ it’s not numeric representation.” 

“You have to take care of all the sectors in Hong Kong as much as you can,” he said, “and if it’s entirely a numbers game and numeric representation, then obviously you would be talking to half of the people in Hong Kong who earn less than $1,800 a month.” 

“Then you would end up with that kind of politics and policies,” he continued.

The philosophy C.Y. is espousing is of course the American way of thinking, so American it is enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. The Founding Fathers were as paranoid -- if not more so -- with popular democracy as they were with monarchy or oligarchy.

So for the Gray Lady to continue to favorably spotlight the young protesters of the Umbrella Movement who are trying to implement a form of democracy that the owners and editors of the paper clearly do not support, which is to say a broadly egalitarian system, one has to note the glaring display of bad faith. This then lends weight to the notion that U.S. mainstream advocacy of the Umbrella Revolution -- something that would never be tolerated in the homeland; look at Ferguson: protesters were not allowed to stand still let alone sit down -- is part of a Color Revolution scheme "Pivot to Asia."

After what happened in Kiev last February, no wonder Beijing is paranoid.

The Big Lie of Occupy Central With Love and Peace

A good distillation of the Western perspective on the pro-Democracy protests underway in Hong Kong can be found today in an unsigned Gray Lady editorial, "China’s Crackdown in Hong Kong."

So far USG has been reticent to lecture China in the usual hectoring and hypocritical American fashion. No need to. The talking points can be disseminated through the Fourth Estate; and here the Gray Lady editorial board does the job.

First, the central falsity must be peddled: Beijing has reneged on its commitment to hold free and fair elections in Hong Kong by 2017 because candidates for chief executive must be screened for pre-approval by a PRC-friendly nominating committee:

If China had honored the political commitments it made before taking control of Hong Kong from Britain in 1997, it is likely there would be no protests in the city streets and no crackdown over the weekend by riot police using tear gas, pepper spray and batons against pro-democracy demonstrators. 

Instead, the government in Beijing, ever fearful of its people, reneged on promises and allowed or ordered Hong Kong authorities to attack students and other citizens demanding democratic elections in Hong Kong. The pro-democracy protesters were so enraged that thousands defied a government call on Monday to abandon street blockades across the city. On Tuesday morning, tens of thousands, including many new recruits angered by the police actions, had again filled the city center.

*** 

. . . China also promised free elections for Hong Kong’s chief executive in 2017, but, late last month, China’s legislature called for limiting the candidates who would be allowed to run, among other restrictions. With the government insisting on controlling the nomination process, the protesters’ demand for fully democratic elections looked to be slipping away, so they took to the streets.

Next, the editorial goes on to fire the other talking-points bullets found in the Western arsenal: 1) Chinese president Xi Jinping is a ruthless autocrat itching to bring a bloody Tianamen crackdown to the good folks of Occupy Central with Love and Peace (this is the entire focus of a story today by Ed Wong and Chris Buckley), and 2) such a crackdown would be devastating for corporate stability and would threaten the independence of Taiwan.

Peter Lee's story yesterday in Asia Times Online, "Beijing reaps bitter fruit in Hong Kong," directly refutes the whole "Beijing reneged on its commitment to full democracy" mantra. The PRC never imagined a situation where candidates to lead Hong Kong's government would not be vetted:

Selective memory has also found its way into reporting (or at least headline-writing) Occupy's claims that the current democracy movement was triggered by Beijing "reneging" on its promise of democracy for Hong Kong by scheduling universal suffrage for 2017, but insisting that only candidates vetted by the commission could run for office.

As far as I understand it, the commission set-up was integral to Beijing's foundational plan for Hong Kong. In other words, the PRC would commit to 50 years of free rein for business/society only if the direct democracy genie could be kept in the bottle by controlling the list of candidates eligible for office.

I also suspect that the PRC told the Thatcher government that, if the UK tried to belatedly introduce full direct democracy in Hong Kong prior to 1997 (as Chris Patten championed) and burden the PRC with the unpleasant task of rolling back a democratic status quo when it claimed sovereignty over the territory, that would be a trigger for the real Occupy Hong Kong - by China. 

As noted above, Deng Xiaoping was the conceptual architect of the strategy to install a "kill switch" on Hong Kong democracy and balance Hong Kong's economic and social freedoms under the "one country two systems" formula with political control by keeping hostile administrators out of the Hong Kong political mix. 

Here's what Deng Xiaoping said about the Hong Kong rule in 1984:

"Some requirements or qualifications should be established with regard to the administration of Hong Kong affairs by the people of Hong Kong. It must be required that patriots form the main body of administrators, that is, of the future government of the Hong Kong special region. Of course it should include other Chinese, too, as well as foreigners invited to serve as advisers. What is a patriot? A patriot is one who respects the Chinese nation, sincerely supports the motherland's resumption of sovereignty over Hong Kong and wishes not to impair Hong Kong's prosperity and stability. Those who meet these requirements are patriots, whether they believe in capitalism or feudalism or even slavery. We don't demand that they be in favour of China's socialist system; we only ask them to love the motherland and Hong Kong." 

And here's how that intention was implemented in Article 45 of the Hong Kong Basic Law, which became the effective constitution of Hong Kong upon reversion in 1997:

"The Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region shall be selected by election or through consultations held locally and be appointed by the Central People's Government. 

"The method for selecting the Chief Executive shall be specified in the light of the actual situation in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region and in accordance with the principle of gradual and orderly progress. The ultimate aim is the selection of the Chief Executive by universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures."

Clearly, the PRC's envisioned terminus (the "ultimate aim") of the democratic reform line is universal suffrage to vote for candidates put forth by a nominating committee, not universal suffrage in the nomination as well as election process, which is the Occupy Hong Kong movement's demand. 

If the PRC government revised, promised to revise, or hinted it would revise this understanding to do away with its most important tool for controlling electoral politics in Hong Kong, the nominating committee, please let me know. Until then, I will regard the "China reneged/broke its democracy promise" line as a canard peddled to provide unnatural enhancement to the legitimacy of the Occupy movement.

"We don't like the Basic Law and want to overturn it after 17 years through street action" is, I suppose, a tougher sell than "China broke its promise" but, in my opinion, it's more honest.

Of course the most obvious point in all of this is that we here in the United States, the "fountainhead of democracy," pre-screen candidates by select committee as well. These select committees are called either "Republican Party" or "Democratic Party." Concentrated wealth calls the shots for both.