FIRST THEY'LL FAIL IN HONG KONG:

A Rebel in the Emperor's Court (DAISANN McLANE , 3/06/05, NY Times Magazine)

Hong Kong politics is such great theater that it's easy to forget that the most important character hardly ever appears onstage: the central government of the People's Republic of China. The Chinese would like Hong Kong's ''one country, two systems'' structure to showcase a controlled, orchestrated Chinese-style democracy. ''It is in Hong Kong that Beijing's ideal for a Chinese model of politics and governance will first be articulated,'' said Christine Loh, a former member of Legco (LEDGE-co) who heads Civic Exchange, a policy group. ''In Beijing's thinking, if they can manage elections in an urban setting like Hong Kong, they can manage elections in cities on the mainland in the future.''

But democracy does not always follow the script. In Hong Kong last September, voters went to the polls and elected to the Legislature an unreconstructed Trotskyite with a passion for soccer, Latin American revolutionaries and universal suffrage. Long Hair sticks out in a Hong Kong where people flaunt their cash and their BMW's; he lives like an ascetic, alone, in a $110-a-month, 200-square-foot public-housing apartment where his bed is an island in an ocean of books and newspapers. He gives most of his $7,000 monthly legislator's salary to his political group, April 5 Action.

None of the pundits expected Long Hair to win. He was known as an eccentric: for more than 25 years, he was Hong Kong's indefatigable protester, hauling the loudspeakers to pro-democracy street demonstrations, yelling anti-Tung slogans from the Legco gallery (for which he went to prison) and marching with mock coffins on June 4 to remember the Chinese students murdered in 1989 at Tiananmen Square.

But in recent years, Hong Kong has suffered as its manufacturing base has fled to the mainland. The Tung government is under fire for its lackluster response to Hong Kong's high unemployment, economic downturn and the SARS crisis. Meanwhile, Beijing has been ''reinterpreting'' Hong Kong's constitution (called the Basic Law) to trim away freedom of speech and assembly and push talks on universal suffrage back from 2007 to an unspecified date. Hong Kong responded with the half-million-strong marches of July 2003 and 2004 -- and the Legco representative Long Hair.

At the big march last July, Long Hair stood up on a ladder and shouted to the passing crowd: ''Now, I'm going to run in the next election. Come over here and put in 10 dollars, 20 dollars! I will represent you!'' Ten Hong Kong dollars was a bit more than one American dollar; by the end of the day he had collected the equivalent of $20,000.

During the campaign, Long Hair aced the TV debates (in Cantonese he uses folksy idioms and street slang with masterful skill; he's a Chinese Al Sharpton) and displayed a talent for political theatrics -- at one point, he thrust a bunch of bananas through the window of the limousine of James Tien, one of his wealthy opponents from the Liberal Party. ''Mr. Tien,'' he asked, ''do you know how much these cost in the street market?''

At the end of the 42-day campaign, Long Hair won a four-year term to represent his district, New Territories East. With more than 60,000 votes, he was one of the top individual vote getters in Hong Kong. [...]

Over the month that I followed him around, I saw Long Hair become increasingly impatient with the slow, bureaucratic rhythms and elite composition of the Legislature. He also seemed very much a loner in the chamber. As a Marxist, his natural allies on Hong Kong's social and economic issues would be in the Beijing-backed DAB, which enjoys strong grassroots support in Hong Kong because of its opposition to the British during the colonial era. But Long Hair's opposition to the Chinese Communists and support for democratic reform in China make him a DAB pariah. As a solid supporter of universal suffrage and human rights, he's a natural member of the pro-democracy caucus, and usually votes along with it. Legco's pro-democracy caucus, however, consists mainly of well-off lawyers and professionals, whom Long Hair derides as ''pro-capitalist.''

So it was easy for him to fall into the role of gadfly in his first few months in Legco. Since he had years of practice at being an outsider, he played the role like a pro. When debates about the details of income requirements for public housing droned on in the chamber, he'd stand to speak and begin, ''Since I am the only one here who lives in public housing. . . . '' During a debate on how long the jail terms for illegal immigrant workers ought to be, the other legislators stopped shuffling papers when he opened with, ''When I was in prison. . . . ''

The Legco debates always reverted to questions of fines and amounts, of details and figures. Still, after Long Hair finished speaking, there was a sense that a reality had entered the chamber that wasn't there before -- that the constituents of Tai Po had visited the floor of Legco, if only for a moment. ''There is more than one role that legislators can play,'' observed Christine Loh. And maybe, I thought, this was Long Hair's: to be the reality check, the guy who brought up the elephant in the room. Maybe it didn't matter that he was a disorganized solo kung-fu fighter. To be himself was perhaps the most effective thing that Long Hair, Marxist and legislator, could do for the Hong Kongers who elected him.

Early on a Monday morning, a few days after his Legco confrontation with Tung, Long Hair called me. ''Did you know that Mr. Zhao has died?'' he asked. Zhao Ziyang was the premier of China who was ousted from the Communist Party in 1989 for supporting the Tiananmen Square students; he spent the last 15 years under house arrest. Vindicating the massacred students of Tiananmen Square is one of the issues closest to Long Hair's heart, a moment of betrayal that he returned to time and again in conversation about China. He was anxious to make sure Zhao was properly memorialized in Hong Kong: ''Hong Kong is the only place in China where we are free to remember Zhao's bravery in public.''

So, that day, he visited Rita Fan to ask that she allow members to stand for a moment of silence in the chamber to remember Zhao. His arguments were compelling: Zhao's courageous support of the Tiananmen students in 1989 was remembered by the more than one million Hong Kong Chinese who had marched in the streets back then in support of Chinese democracy. Also, Zhao, as premier, had an important place in Hong Kong history, for he co-signed, along with Margaret Thatcher, the Sino-British agreement for the Hong Kong handover. There was also a precedent for Legco memorials to fallen Chinese leaders -- the members had stood in silence for a minute when Deng Xiaoping died.

Fan, as Long Hair expected, refused to grant the request. To officially memorialize an ousted Chinese leader on the floor of Legco was too provocative. But she informed Long Hair that if he could, before 10 a.m. Wednesday morning, come up with a majority of members to support him, she would agree to open a floor debate, a ''motion of adjournment'' on the subject.

It was a near-impossible task, which Fan of course knew. Although two-thirds of Hong Kongers voted for pro-democracy legislators, the pro-democracy camp had only 25 of Legco's 60 seats. To get a plurality would mean finding six members willing to break ranks.

Long Hair was determined to try. The next afternoon, I visited him in his office and found his assistant, Keith, on the phone and Long Hair pacing around holding a checklist of members. ''I am lobbying!'' he said gleefully.

At 10 a.m. the day of the regular Legco meeting, I phoned him to see if he'd come up with the numbers. He hadn't. I stopped by his office on the way to the meeting, expecting to find a dejected or angry Long Hair. But he was sitting at his desk, smiling, thumbing idly through a book of photographs and stories about Che. He'd spoken to his democrat allies, he told me. Something was up.

Promptly at 2:30 p.m., the gong announcing the session sounded and the chamber filled. An unusually large number of members wore black. Rita Fan entered and all members stood. She called the meeting to order and all sat down. All except 24.

The entire pro-democracy caucus (the 25th member, Fernando Cheung, came in several minutes late) continued standing, heads bowed, as one member, Lee Cheuk-yan, announced the group's intention to remain silent for a minute to honor Zhao Ziyang.

''Cheng choh! Cheng choh! Please sit down,'' an irritated Rita Fan told the democrats. But they remained on their feet, standing together, just as Long Hair had remained standing in defiance of Fan's instructions before Tung exactly one week before.

Fan adjourned the meeting and all the other members abandoned the chamber to the silent mourners. From the press gallery above, I tried to read Long Hair's expression but couldn't -- for this occasion he'd wrapped a black mourning band around his head, and his head was deeply bowed.

After the long, somber minute, the democracy camp sat back down and waited quietly in the chamber for the meeting to reconvene. But when Rita Fan returned to the chamber, she returned alone. ''I believe we do not have a quorum,'' she intoned. ''I will ring the bell to call the other members.''

For more than 15 minutes, the Legco bell tolled, and no members entered the chamber. Gradually, both the democrats and the stunned press in the gallery began to understand that the other members were not coming back. They were staging a counterdemonstration of a sort by depriving Long Hair and his allies of their venue. They had the numbers to stop the Legco show, and that's what they were doing -- like one of those standoffs in a John Woo movie, where three guys are pointing guns at one another in deadlock. The bells, at last, fell silent, and Rita Fan officially, and for the first time in Legco history, canceled the scheduled meeting.

We know for whom the bell tolls; it's just a matter of how long it takes before the Long Hairs defeat the PRC.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 7, 2005 11:58 AM