Lady in Waiting

5 minute read
Peter Ritter

Anson Chan isn’t anyone’s idea of a radical. As the first Chinese to hold the post of Chief Secretary in Hong Kong’s colonial government, she was a widely admired example of how a local, through hard work and artfulness, could ascend to the top of the establishment. Since her retirement six years ago, Chan’s stature has barely diminished. With a patrician demeanor that can convey both hauteur and charisma, she is the paragon of the city’s haute bourgeoisie. The city’s working people treat her like a queen. And although she served in Hong Kong’s first postcolonial administration until 2001, she adroitly kept a distance from its unpopular head, Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa. This, plus her advocacy of speedier democratic reforms in defiance of Beijing, has made her “the conscience of Hong Kong” in many eyes.

While Chan has demonstrated plenty of political nous in the past, one thing she has never been is an actual politician — until now. In a second-act surprise, the 67-year-old former civil servant is running for Hong Kong’s Legislative Council; if she wins, she will become the unquestioned leader of the legislature’s democratic caucus. The Dec. 2 by-election — for a seat made vacant by the death of pro-Beijing lawmaker Ma Lik — is being billed as the most dramatic in Hong Kong’s history because of its implications for democratic reform. Chan faces the pro-Beijing camp’s anointed candidate, former security chief Regina Ip. Defeat for Ip will be interpreted as a vote for Chan’s political platform, which includes the introduction of universal suffrage by 2012. It is an anxious prospect for mainland China, which vets candidates for Hong Kong’s top offices. Yet Chan says she is uncowed by Beijing’s disapproval: “I’m putting my money where my mouth is.”

Chan has never shied from a challenge. Born in Shanghai, she was one of eight children. “I’m used to having crowds around me with everyone shouting at the top of their voices,” she says. Her father, a textile merchant, died when she was a child; her widowed mother took over the family business before embarking on a successful career as an artist. (Chan’s apartment is decorated with her mother’s ink-brush paintings, and some of her mother’s steely resolve seems to have rubbed off too.) Although she trained to become a social worker, Chan joined the government as an élite administrative cadet and enjoyed a 39-year career, marred only by a heavily criticized decision to separate a child from an apparently unstable mother — made while Chan was Director of Social Welfare in 1986 — and the bungled opening of Hong Kong’s new airport in 1998, which Chan had been tasked with monitoring. By the time she resigned in early 2001 — after being bullied by Beijing to support her then boss Tung — the gaffes were long forgotten.

Chan’s opponents claim her conversion from bureaucrat to democrat is opportunistic. During a bruising primary debate on Sept. 24, a rival candidate accused her of being a “sudden democrat.” Yet Chan says her decision to run for office was driven not by a change in principles, but by her growing disillusionment with the laggard pace of reform. Under the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the city is supposed to be granted universal suffrage eventually. But more than a decade after the law took effect, Beijing remains wary that full democracy in Hong Kong could spark an outcry for similar rights on the mainland and continues to stifle reform. Hong Kong’s administration, which is chosen with Beijing’s blessings, has not pressed the issue, either. “I don’t like the way this government is acting,” Chan says. She is particularly critical of Chief Executive Donald Tsang — her onetime civil-service subordinate — who, she says, has excluded supporters of democracy from the debate over universal suffrage. “For a Chief Executive who doesn’t have a popular mandate, it seems to me all the more important that you embrace all the political parties. How else can you create a harmonious society without making all political parties seem like they have a role to play?”

According to Ma Ngok, a political scientist at the City University of Hong Kong, Chan could become a dignified face for the territory’s vocal but ineffective opposition. She is also helped by the fact that her opponent carries plenty of political baggage. Ip remains unpopular in many quarters for her support of a divisive, and ultimately failed, antisubversion bill. That controversy, which brought half a million Hong Kong people onto the streets in protest in July 2003, led to Ip’s resignation as Secretary for Security. Ip recently made a public apology for her aggressive promotion of the bill, and says she also supports universal suffrage. But, she adds, debate over reform is pointless without Beijing’s go-ahead. “We can’t get to democracy by polemic,” Ip says.

Chan says she’s not looking for a showdown, either. “I have every confidence that if you give us universal suffrage, we will not make a mess of it,” she says. “If we do it well, maybe it will convince the central government there’s nothing to fear.” That’s unlikely in the immediate future. But with a popular moderate like Chan as the face of Hong Kong democracy, Beijing will have to work much harder to find objections to it.

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