THE UNIVERSITY OF LONDON THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE Elections and Political Mobilisation: The Hong Kong 1991 Direct Elections Thesis Submitted in Accordance with the Requirements of the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of London LI, Pang-kwong January 1995 UMI Number: U074586 All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. Dissertation Publishing UMI U074586 Published by ProQuest LLC 2014. Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author. Microform Edition © ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. ProQuest LLC 789 East Eisenhower Parkway P.O. Box 1346 Ann Arbor, Ml 48106-1346 To my parents who struggled to bring up their children during the harsh and difficult years of post-war Hong Kong ( l_h£rS<2-S F 7/S5 I I (4 ( ABSTRACT Previous studies of the first direct elections to the Hong Kong Legislative Council (LegCo) in 1991 were largely focused on the effect of the Tiananmen Incident on voters’ choice, neglecting the domestic dimension of social conflict evolving within Hong Kong from the 1970s. Adopting the social cleavage approach, the present thesis argues that two electoral cleavages, centre-periphery and collective consumption, were important by 1991. It, therefore, explores the international, social and political contexts within which the 1991 LegCo direct elections took place in order to explain the political alignments and electoral cleavages during the period 1982-1991. First, the study examines the Sino-British attitudes towards political reforms in Hong Kong and the development of the centre-periphery cleavage in the 1980s as the two countries negotiated the transfer of sovereignty. Second, the expansion of the Hong Kong Government’s activities and its privatisation programmes are analyzed in order to describe the increasingly intimate relations between government and society and to show that, as a result, conflicts evolved over issues of collective consumption. Third, the emerging competition at the time of the 1991 elections is discussed with reference to political mobilisation and alignments during the previous decade. Fourth, the electoral market of 1991 is examined to explain voters’ choice. Finally, the election results are analyzed to demonstrate that two electoral cleavages, centre-periphery and collective consumption, played a significant role. The data used in this study were collected from: official documents, such as the Hong Kong Government Gazette, the Sino-British Joint Declaration, the Basic Law, the Hong Kong Census and By-census reports, the annual reports of various government departments; opinion polls and one exit poll of the 1991 LegCo direct elections; personal interviews with leading political leaders; campaign materials and election debates on television; and newspaper cuttings. 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................... 2 TABLE OF CONTENTS....................................................................................... 3 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ............................................................................... 6 LIST OF TABLES ................................................................................................ 7 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................. 10 CHAPTERS I. INTRODUCTION......................................................................................... 11 Scope and P u rp o se .................................................................................. 11 Literature Review ..................................................................................... 15 Theoretical Framework .......................................................................... 18 Democratisation and Elections .................................................... 18 Concept of Political Cleavages .................................................... 22 Political Mobilisation, Political Party and Partisan Alignment . 26 Organisation of the Thesis ....................................................................... 31 II. HISTORICAL SETTING: THE STATE AND THE SO C IE T Y .............. 34 Hong Kong as a British Colony ............................................................ 34 State Development in the Pre-1945 Period ................................. 40 A Chinese Society Under British Rule ................................................. 42 Colonialism Without Serious Challenge ................................................. 48 Unusual Decolonisation in the Early 1980s ............................................ 52 III. THE RISE OF THE CENTRE-PERIPHERY CLEAVAGE..................... 59 The Settlement of the 1997 Issue ............................................................ 62 The Setting of the Sino-British Negotiation .............................. 64 The Sino-British Negotiations, 1982-84 .................................... 67 Institutional Barriers of Representation ...................................... 72 The Shifting of A spiration ......................................................... 74 3 The Rivalry Over the Democratisation of Hong K o n g ......................... 80 Different Attitudes Towards Political R eform s ................ 82 The Political Reforms from A b o v e ............................................ 87 China’s Pressure to C onverge .................................................... 92 The Conflicting Ideas on the Pace of Democratization ........... 96 The Centre-Periphery Cleavage in the Making ...................................... 104 The Politics of Appointment ....................................................... 106 Threshold of Representation and Barriers of E n try ................... 109 Demand for Democracy from Below: The Tiananmen Effect 115 The Price to Pay ..................................................................................... 122 IV. GOVERNMENT EXPANSION AND THE COLLECTIVE CONSUMPTION CLEAVAGE ............................................................ 125 Development of the Hong Kong Government ...................................... 126 The First Phase, 1945-67 ............................................................ 126 The Second Phase, 1968-81 ....................................................... 133 The Third Phase, 1982-91 ......................................................... 138 Empirical Analysis of Government Expansion ...................................... 142 The Structural Expansion of the Hong Kong Government . 144 The Functional Expansion of the Colonial State ...................... 149 Government Contraction and the Collective Consumption Cleavage . 155 V. THE DEVELOPMENT AND ALIGNMENT OF POLITICAL FORCES . 187 Political Groups Before the 1 9 7 0 s ......................................................... 188 The Kuomintang and The Chinese Communist Party .............. 188 The Reform Club and the Civic Association ........................... 192 The Period of Pressure Group Politics ................................................. 198 Political Alignment in the 1980s ............................................................ 204 The Pre-Mobilisation Stage, 1982-85 ......................................... 207 The Mobilisation Stage, 1985-1989 ............................................ 213 The Consolidation Stage, 1989-Present ...................................... 223 The Budding Party Market in the Early 1990s ...................................... 229 VI. POLITICAL MOBILISATION AND ELECTORAL CHO ICES............ 237 The Constraints of the 1991 LegCo Direct Elections ........................... 238 Political Mobilisation: Chinese and British-Hong Kong Governments . 242 Political Mobilisation: Candidates and Its Affiliated Groups .............. 247 Electoral Themes from the Campaign Materials ...................... 248 Electoral Issues in the Television D ebates ................................. 257 Electors’ Concerns and Considerations ................................................. 265 4 VII. ANALYSIS OF THE 1991 LEGCO DIRECT ELECTIONS RESULTS ............................................................................................... 272 The Profile of the LegCo Direct Elections R esult................................. 273 Ecological Analysis by Electoral Districts ............................................ 279 Hong Kong Island E a s t .............................................................. 280 Hong Kong Island W est .............................................................. 282 Kowloon E a st ............................................................................... 284 Kowloon C entral ......................................................................... 286 Kowloon West ............................................................................ 288 New Territories E ast.................................................................... 290 New Territories South................................................................. 292 New Territories W e s t................................................................. 295 New Territories N orth................................................................