Justin Fox — Understanding China’s Hard Line on Hong Kong

But if the Chinese Communist Party isn’t really Maoist, or even Communist, what is it? The parallel that springs most readily to mind, especially when one learns about the systematic ways in which the Party selects, trains, and promotes its leaders (recommended reading: Richard McGregor’s The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers), is that of a big corporation — IBM or GM in theirOrganization Man heydays. Another parallel is to the corporatist ruling parties that drove earlier modernization drives in other East Asian nations, from the LDP in Japan to the KMT in Taiwan to the PAP in Singapore to what’s now called the Saenuri Party in South Korea…

Hong Kong is different from the rest of China, and Beijing has been willing to let it be different. But Party leaders don’t appear willing to let the territory’s inhabitants challenge the Party’s ultimate authority over them — presumably out of fear that this would weaken its authority elsewhere in China. This year, in fact, they have made several new assertions of that authority, most recently the dictatethat, while Hong Kong residents will get to elect a political leader in 2017 (something they never got to do under British rule, by the way), Beijing will choose the three nominees. 

That’s what brought on the current round of protests. They’re embarrassing for China’s leadership, and any harder crackdown will be even more embarrassing, and possibly extremely damaging to Hong Kong’s economy. But don’t imagine that Xi Jinping and his colleagues in Beijing will be easily persuaded by a bunch of protesters 1,200 miles away, and a bunch of negative media coverage or even official condemnation from the West, that the course that Deng Xiaoping laid in back in 1978 — and violently reaffirmed in 1989 — is in need of a major correction.

Harvard Business Review — HBR Blog Network
Understanding China’s Hard Line on Hong Kong

Justin Fox | Executive Editor, New York, of the Harvard Business Review Group