Hong Kong Intelligence Report #54 From Colour Politics to Full Expansion of Corporatist Politics
Updated: Dec 25, 2021
"False narrative to threaten the top and bottom, establish the theory of cronyism to detain the faithful."
- Zhao Yushi "Bintui Lu" Volume 7 （1）
IMPORTANT
a. After the handover (although Hong Kong has been returned to China, it has not yet been liberated by the Chinese Communist Party, so Hong Kong is still in the pre-liberation capitalist world), the vested interests in Hong Kong (the so-called Chinese monopoly capitalist groups that replaced the British monopoly capital are just another kind of colonial power that the British Hong Kong Government has cultivated; the real estate hegemony and its monopoly of all kinds of enterprises, chambers of commerce, societies, trade unions, think tanks, media, statutory bodies, political parties, the Administrative Officers of the Hong Kong Government, etc.; e.g. the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, Our Hong Kong Foundation, VISION2047, etc.) have always had the primary political objective of creating a 'crony alliance that the Central Government/Chinese Communist Party must rely on'. In other words, it is always to create a political situation in which 'the Central Government/Chinese Communist Party must rely on their crony alliance' to safeguard their own vested interests continued from the British Hong Kong colonial era. In order to do so, the vested interest groups need to routinely exclude and eliminate any individual and any force independent of their cronies. It is to force the central government to rely only on their cronies, not on any forces not controlled by their cronies. On the positive side, it is the simplest and least complicated to use only this single crony party, to listen only to the crony coalition with vested interests, and to ask the crony coalition with vested interests to act only. For example, the Occupy Central and the colour riots of 2019 also happened in this context, which is why a group of protesters directed by the US government at the behest of the oligarchs did not even take a shot at the vested interests in Hong Kong.
The underlying purpose of these political theater activities is always to prove that 'the central government can only rely on their cronies with vested interests in Hong Kong, and no one else', i.e. that Hong Kong's real estate oligarchy is untouchable.
b. The "Western democratic system" is a false issue because the political system adopted in Hong Kong is also derived from the Western political system. There are two major political systems of bourgeois dictatorship in capitalist societies, namely parliamentary democracy with alternating ruling/opposition parties, and corporatism (commonly known as elitism; the opposite of scientific socialism, including one-party dictatorship or bureaucratic domination, such as Mussolini's Fascist Italy, PAP's one-party dictatorship in Singapore, and Salazar's National Union in Portugal). "Democracy with Hong Kong Characteristics" is only an import from the West, a cover for this.
Elitism is inevitably based on the concept of foolishness of masses, and therefore elitist politics is crony dictatorship.
However, for the bourgeoisie as a whole, both types of bourgeois dictatorship are "democratic" systems of capitalist society. That is, the capitalists' own democracy, freedom, human rights, and welfare.
In fact, it is all about one social class's own democracy, thus there is only the question of whose democracy.
c. The class basis/necessity of corporatism lies in labor unions (union federations) joining a crony coalition, which is why collective bargaining rights and their independent unions are never allowed under the corporatist system. In other words,
Each union in Hong Kong should be truly independent of any corporatist labor group in order to pursue purely the class interests of its own class. For example, the 2018 KMB pay adjustment strike and the 2021 Foodpanda strike. In recent years, there have been successful examples of labour movements in Hong Kong that are in line with the social conditions and the times. All of these good examples have been characterized by independent unions pursuing collective bargaining rights and an anti-corporatist tendency to break away from the dictatorship of the corporatists. The class base of the corporatist elite dictatorship is the labor unions controlled by the labor aristocracy.
Workers should not unite under corporatists.
In reality, cronies are only networks of oligarchic mutual aid organizations, intended to more steadily squeeze the working class and defend vested interests. For example, Labour Advisory Board, which always betrays and disregards the interests of the working class, is a typical mechanism of class coordination (anti-class struggle, anti-Marxism) of corporatism. Its class-political basis is the corporatist network of trade unions. Its negativeness is also its positiveness ('efficiency'?) That is, the entire working class is 'forcibly represented by the labor aristocracy of the trade unions'.
d. What is the significance of the 7th Legislative Council Election on December 19, 2021? In terms of institutional design, the real voters of the Legislative Council election are the real voters of the NPC/CE election, i.e. the members of the Election Committee. 1,448 members of the Election Committee of the bourgeoisie are the real voters (it is extremely ironic that the representatives of the so-called grassroots organizations and the representatives of the labor sector are at least the petty Bourgeois! The labor aristocracy ''represents'' the real working class but it is a different class). According to the Companies Registry's statistics on the number of registered companies in November 2021, the number of ruling classes in Hong Kong is at least 1,376,265, plus 14,302 for non-Hong Kong companies, i.e. 1,390,567 for all registered companies in Hong Kong at present (the minimum value for the number of ruling classes in Hong Kong). (2) (3) Therefore,
"Democracy with Hong Kong Characteristics" (bourgeois democracy enjoyed by 0.1%): Only about 0.1% of all Hong Kong's bourgeoisie (1,448 members of the Election Committee; the 28 functional constituency statutory interest groups are roughly in line with the five major constituencies of the Election Committee) control and monopolize the entire political lifeline of Hong Kong. Moreover, even 99.99% of Hong Kong's bourgeoisie is excluded. What about the working class? Of course there is no representation (don't forget that the so-called "grassroots" groups and the "labor sector" are basically represented by the petty Bourgeois).
The 1448 EC vested interest groups are the real voters because they not only directly elect the Chief Executive, the Hong Kong NPC representatives, but also send representatives of their own specific interest groups of functional constituencies as stipulated in the Legislative Council Ordinance, and nominate candidates for direct election as representatives of their own interest groups. From the beginning to the end, only 1,448 people actually enjoy and exercise the real right to vote. Hong Kong elections are a game in the hands of their cronies.
From the perspective of class analysis, this first "post-perfection" Legislative Council election is still an one-man show for the oligarchs. The three seats in the labor sector of the functional constituencies are all held by members of their own corporatist labor groups.