Liberalism in Hong Kong
The liberals consolidated their popular support from the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre and received landslide victories in the first direct elections in 1991 and 1995 in the final colonial years.
The liberals took the defensive role against the Beijing's authoritarian regime going into the early SAR period which led to the massive demonstration against the Basic Law Article 23 in 2003.
Nevertheless, many western-educated Chinese intellectuals based in Hong Kong became the some of most prominent liberal thinkers which pushed for modernisation of China, including Ho Kai and revolutionaries such as Yeung Ku-wan and Sun Yat-sen. During the early post-war period, a small scale self-government movement had also derived from Governor Mark Aitchison Young's proposed constitutional reform.
Sir John Bowring, the Governor of Hong Kong from 1854 to 1859 and a disciple of liberal philosopher Jeremy Bentham for instance was a chief campaigner of free trade at the time.
"[2] The free market tradition lasted throughout Hong Kong history, and the city was rated the world's freest economy for 25 years, from 1995 to 2020,[4] a title bestowed on it by The Heritage Foundation, a conservative Washington think tank,[5] and was greatly admired by libertarian economist Milton Friedman.
Governor Mark Aitchison Young announced the plan for constitutional changes on the day of the return of the civil government in 1946, as "an appropriate and acceptable means of affording to all communities in Hong Kong an opportunity of more active political participation, through their responsible representatives, in the administration of the Territory.
[20] However due to the Communist takeover of China and the outbreak of the Korean War, Governor Alexander Grantham was less enthusiastic about the constitutional reform which eventually led to it being shelved in 1952.
In 1971, Financial Secretary John Cowperthwaite coined the term "positive non-interventionism", which stated that the economy was doing well in the absence of government intervention and excessive regulation, but it was important to create the regulatory and physical infrastructure to facilitate market-based decision making.
This policy was continued by subsequent Financial Secretaries, including Sir Philip Haddon-Cave, who said that "positive non-interventionism involves taking the view that it is usually futile and damaging to the growth rate of an economy, particularly an open economy, for the Government to attempt to plan the allocation of resources available to the private sector and to frustrate the operation of market forces", although he stated that the description of Hong Kong as a laissez-faire society was "frequent but inadequate".
The reform proposals were first carried out in the Green Paper: the Further Development of Representative Government in July 1984 which allowed 24 seats in the Legislative Council to be indirectly elected by electoral college in 1985.
The liberals also formed the Joint Committee on the Promotion of Democratic Government (JCPDG) to demand a faster pace of democratisation and to introduce direct elections in the 1988 Legislative Council.
To counter the liberal emergence, the business elites formed a conservative coalition with the pro-Communist Beijing loyalists, which warned of the rise of populism and disruption to the prosperity and stability if democratisation was to implement too quick.
The democrats have held the annual Tiananmen vigils every year and called for the end of one-party rule in China which was seen as "treason" and "subversive" by the Beijing authorities.
The UDHK and Meeting Point alliance and other pro-democratic independents including Emily Lau swept the votes by winning 16 of the 18 direct elected seats.
Despite Beijing's strong opposition, he put forward the progressive constitutional reform proposals to enfranchise 2.7 million new voters and lower the voting age from 21 to 18.
[39] Safeguarded by the liberal majority, the Patten proposals were passed in the Legislative Council after unprecedented political wrangling despite the Beijing's attempt to defeat the bill by allying the business elites.
Many liberal pieces of legislation were able to pass in the final years of colonial rule, such as decriminalising same-sex acts, abolishing death penalty and the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance.
Being excluded from the government by the unique design of the electoral system and composition of the Legislative Council, the liberals took a defensive role of safeguarding Hong Kong's civil liberties, human rights, rule of law and autonomy from Beijing interference while striving for the universal suffrage of the Chief Executive and the Legislative Council as stipulated in Hong Kong Basic Law Article 45 and Article 68.
The liberal movement lost its momentum after the 2004 decision of the National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) ruled out the universal suffrage for the Chief Executive and Legislative Council in 2007 and 2008.
[41] In 2009, the radical League of Social Democrats (LSD) proposed a "Five Constituencies Referendum" campaign by triggering a city-wide by-election to pressure the government to implement the universal suffrage in 2012.
After a secret meeting with the Beijing authorities at the Liaison Office, the central government accepted the Democratic Party's modified proposals to allow ten new seats to be directly elected.
[43][44][45] After the National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) on 31 August 2014 announced the framework of the constitutional reform proposal in which Chief Executive candidates would be pre-screened before being elected by the Hong Kong public, the students activists led by Scholarism and Hong Kong Federation of Students (HKFS) launched a coordinated class boycott which turned into a breaching into the Central Government Complex.
[48] Although the Occupy protests ended without any political concessions from the government, it precipitated a generation of galvanised youth and awakening of Hong Kong people's civic consciousness.
In the 2016 New Territories East by-election, Edward Leung of the pro-independence Hong Kong Indigenous received more than 15 percent of the popular vote despite being defeated by Civic Party's Alvin Yeung.
the government unprecedentedly barred many localists including Edward Leung from running in the 2016 Legislative Council election, localist candidates under different banners of Hong Kong's "national self-determination" and "democratic self-determination" received 19 per cent of vote in total with six of them being elected, including Occupy protest leader Nathan Law of the Demosistō becoming the youngest legislator in history at the age of 23.
The liberals feared it would open itself up to the long arm of mainland Chinese law, putting people from Hong Kong at risk of falling victim to China's closed legal system.
The storming of the Legislative Council Complex after the annual July 1 march led to the spillovers of the protests all over the city, as the government refused to fully withdraw the extradition bill.
The 24 November District Council election, which was widely seen as a de facto referendum on the protest, resulted in the historic landslide victory for the liberals and localists, where the pro-Beijing camp lost nearly four-fifth of its seats.
[58][59][60] To curb the protests, the government invoked the Emergency Regulations Ordinance to impose a law to ban wearing face masks in public gatherings on 4 October.
[64] On 10 August, the police raided the offices of Next Digital, the parent company of prominent local liberal newspaper Apple Daily and arrested its founder and outspoken activist Jimmy Lai and his two sons on the suspicion of violating the national security law.
