David Cottam is a British historian and former principal of Sha Tin College, an international secondary school in Hong Kong, and a columnist in the China Daily Hong Kong Edition. In a recent column he writes about sortition.
Hong Kong, currently a hybrid of democratic and meritocratic government, is ideally placed for developing [a system with an element of sortition]. Like ancient Athens, its compact size and well-educated population would readily facilitate such a move. Introducing an element of sortition into the Legislative Council would answer the call for greater representation of the people without risking a return to the sort of partisan conflict and obstructionism that previously characterized the legislature. This would establish Hong Kong as a model of modern government, truly representing the people but without the vested interests and divisiveness of warring political parties. Such a system would also reflect Hong Kong’s unique amalgam of Western and Chinese influences, combining democratic values with the nonpartisan Confucian values of harmony and social cohesion. Indeed, this could provide an excellent model of government, not just for the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, but for any place wanting to enhance political participation, reduce partisan division, and ensure that the common good rather than party interests always prevails.
Filed under: Elections, History, Press, Proposals, Sortition |
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Equality by lot 
Interesting! Triggers some lateral thoughts:
From what little I know about China I think it makes sense that China would support some form of lottery and deliberation in Hong Kong. The Chinese system has elements of a deliberative democracy but with some key features that are probably undesirable in a full blown “western DD”. I think comparing Chinese system with DD is instructive.
AFAIK there is only one officially sanctioned party in China. In a deliberative democracy there’s no necessity for multiple party structure either. In DD there’s basically just one political party and it’s the “whole of society”. In China, as I understand it, only trusted party members can partake in formal civic decision making.
So key difference: china may accept lottery providing the citizens are drawn only from “party members”. It’s a risk for a sortition based society that the pool of candidates is restricted clandestinely or otherwise.
for a one party system to function, whether DD or Chinese style, there needs to be a set of inclusive processes that span the whole of society. In China there is a hyper local hierarchical system where local party members form committees eg for streets (a bit like an HOA) and each sends delegates to next level, town, county, Provence, national etc. at the national level there is a conference of some two thousand party delegates, which is basically a kind of citizen assembly/mini-public, which informs Chinese Gov. unlike a lottery driven system I suspect membership of top Chinese assembly is highly regulated.
I think for DD to function there needs to be something like a distributed way for people to take part in local and intermediate decision making/agenda setting/campaigning on a voluntary basis. So something like Braver Angels which organised local conversations but subscribes to non-partisan principles.
thus key value difference: “harmony” vs “inclusion”. I suspect “Harmony” in China is “cutting out dissent” by restricting who can take part. Harmony in deliberative democracy arises by teaching humans how to handle conflict in an emotionally mature way. I suspect in reality Chinese system might encourage some “deliberative facilitation and self-control” to work. I wonder if Much of the personal growth needed for deliberative democracy to function in west is probably “common sense” in China.
Finally, I think a key advantage of Chinese system is the ability to have long term strategies. In western system the horizon is only four years. That makes it harder for systems like China and Russia to trust western democracies. In four years the west will be doing something totally different.
so Russia and China may well support emergence of deliberative democracy in west, if only to make global/international system more stable!! I suspect US and European citizens desire coherent long term strategies that stretch beyond four year election horizons.
For that reason alone they may agree to run CAs in Hong Kong as a trial.
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Government by allotted representatives won’t be worth a damn in Hong Kong for the same reason government by elected representatives isn’t – it’s an imperial territory of the Chinese state, controlled from outside by the CCP, against the will of the bulk of the population. As a result, the one unbreakable rule any Hong Kong government must obey is the maintenance of CCP power and security. This will vitiate whatever form of local government is put in place.
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Oliver,
> Government by allotted representatives won’t be worth a damn in Hong Kong for the same reason government by elected representatives isn’t – it’s an imperial territory of the Chinese state, controlled from outside by the CCP, against the will of the bulk of the population.
Would you say the same thing about Catalonia and its relationship with the Spain? Or about Crimea and its relationship with Ukraine? What exactly is the principle you are invoking?
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Yoram,
Don’t be facetious. A cursory familiarity with Hong Kong politics is sufficient to reveal the extreme degree of outside control being exerted by the CCP on its government. One does not need to apply any particular principle to see that mechanisms of local control will be marginalised regardless of their formal structure.
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Oliver,
Naturally, I am not joking but asking a serious question.
Before it seemed that you were claiming that any local government of Hong Kong is “vitiated” because Hong Kong is “controlled from outside by the CCP, against the will of the bulk of the population”. For this reason I asked if the same holds for other regions which indicated that they prefer detaching themselves from the nation to which they are (were) attached.
Now it seems that you are claiming that the reason the local government of Hong Kong is vitiated is that Chinese government is exerting “extreme” control over the Chinese region of Hong Kong. Presumably, you are implying that Spain and Ukraine exert (or exerted) “non-extreme” control over Catalonia and Crimea, respectively. It may be due to the fact that I do not have cursory familiarity with the relationships between any of those national governments and the local governments of the corresponding regions, but I do not know in what way China’s control over Hong Kong is more extreme than that of any functional government over its various regions. In particular, it seems to me no functional national government would tolerate any attempt by a local government to undermine the power and security of the national government.
Could you add some specifics as to how China’s control over Hong Kong is more extreme than that of other nations over their regions?
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Yoram,
Let’s take the example of Catalonia. The Catalan pro-independence movement has been able, within the Spanish state, to gain control of local government in Catalonia, while still being prevented from declaring independence from Spain. Only when they attempted to unilaterally declare independence did the Spanish government take repressive action against them. This represents a ‘liberal’ degree of domination of the region by the centre, where the local government has relative autonomy and is permitted to respond to local demands, and is able to contend with the centre to a certain extent. In Hong Kong, meanwhile, the CCP prevents any such thing from happening, aggressively repressing anti-CCP voices. This represents a higher degree of domination, where the local government does not have autonomy and does not contend with the centre to any significant extent, because the centre carefully excludes from that government anyone who would want to try. Hence my skepticism about any other form of government they might allow there.
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Oliver,
> Only when they attempted to unilaterally declare independence did the Spanish government take repressive action against them. This represents a ‘liberal’ degree of domination of the region by the centre, where the local government has relative autonomy and is permitted to respond to local demands, and is able to contend with the centre to a certain extent.
So the fact that Catalan elected leaders were sentenced to many years in jail for their political activity is evidence for a ‘liberal’ degree of domination? It seems to me obvious that if this happened in Hong Kong you would be stating this as a prime example about how Hong Kong is being “aggressively repressed” by the CPP.
> In Hong Kong, meanwhile, the CCP prevents any such thing from happening, aggressively repressing anti-CCP voices
How does such “aggressive repression” work? What is the evidence for it? Surely you are not implying that the mere fact that Hong Kong is not seeking independence is by itself evidence of such repression.
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Yoram,
Under the circumstances I described, yes. I put ‘liberal’ in scare quotes for a reason.
Election-rigging, for a start. From <https://thediplomat.com/2023/12/facing-a-rigged-election-hong-kongers-are-expected-to-lie-flat/>:
Not to mention political prosecutions. From <https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c100mjqrm6zo>:
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Further background on the CCP’s approach to Hong Kong’s government: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Hong_Kong_electoral_changes>
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>> So the fact that Catalan elected leaders were sentenced to many years in jail for their political activity is evidence for a ‘liberal’ degree of domination?
> Under the circumstances I described, yes. I put ‘liberal’ in scare quotes for a reason.
Well, it seems you are conceding my point that there is no systematic difference between “liberal” (or “”liberal””) and “imperial”, “repressive”, or any of the other terms you are using to denigrate the Chinese government.
> Hong Kong found 14 pro-democracy activists guilty of subversion in the largest use yet of a China-imposed National Security Law.
Who is to say if “under the circumstance” these convictions could not be considered a “liberal”, or at least a “”liberal”” degree of domination?
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[…] write positively about the idea. Sortition was mentioned in popular social media outlets and mass media. Of particular interest is an exchange on the pages of The Conservative Woman, in which an […]
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