THE GLOBE AND MAIL - July 14, 1997

By Rod Mickleburgh - China Bureau

THE sharp red lettering on the young student's black T-shirt stood out clearly amid the bustling suits and well-dressed shoppers at one of Hong Kong's busy intersections. It read: Save Tibet.

Advocating such sentiments is supposed to be illegal now that Hong Kong is a Special Administrative Region of China.

Yet the student said no one, except for a curious reporter, had said a word about the message on her T-shirt since she began wearing it two weeks ago.

Bookstores, meanwhile, continue to prominently display a published collection of prison letters from China's most renowned dissident, Wei Jingsheng. At least one store has maintained its large Tibet section, full of books sympathetic to the Dalai Lama.

Elsewhere, there has been pretty well a demonstration a day since the July 1 handover, including a noisy group that hollered from close quarters at chief executive Tung Chee-hwa as he entered government offices last week.

Far from calling in the tanks, Mr. Tung smiled, waved, shook a few protesters' hands and accepted a pamphlet before heading inside.

While the familiar caveat "too early to tell" certainly applies, these are hopeful signs that predictions of an end to all manner of political rights, once the red flag of China flew over Hong Kong, are wrong.

Indeed, there is no need for Hong Kong's pro-China, business elite to worry about public protests and sporadic anti-China outbursts because they have complete control over the levers of power.

This is a message they appear to have conveyed successfully to China's nervous leadership. Why crack down, attracting waves of international criticism, when Hong Kong's social and political activists are so far removed from decision-making?

Mr. Tung, a billionaire shipping tycoon who espouses conservative, Confucian values, has autocratic powers similar to those of his predecessor, former British governor Christopher Patten.

His cabinet-like executive council is dominated by business executives, except for a single trade-union representative from a pro-China labour organization.

And the current provisional legislature is both unelected and unrepresentative of public opinion. It replaced the previous elected legislative council as soon as China assumed sovereignty over Hong Kong.

The legislature is stacked with business representatives and pro-China politicians who barely register in opinion polls. A dozen of those appointed to the legislature were rejected by voters in Hong Kong's 1995 elections.

Members of the poll-topping Democratic Party and other feisty pro-democracy politicians are on the outside looking in, because of their decision to boycott the provisional legislature rather than submit their fate to a Beijing-approved selection committee.

In these one-sided circumstances, Joseph Cheng, head of the Contemporary Chinese Research Centre at City University, said he has already noticed an attitude change in Hong Kong's justly celebrated top civil servants.

"It seems to me they are not treating questions as seriously as they did before the handover," Prof. Cheng said. "I hope this is only an impression and not reality, but they seem more light-hearted and not as willing to be forthcoming.

"This is a bad sign because it's obvious the old system of checks and balances has been quite weakened."

Nor do next year's promised legislative elections hold out much hope.

By introducing proportional representation for the lone 20 seats to be decided by universal suffrage, Mr. Tung's government has eliminated any chance of the Democrats, who thrive on head-to-head contests, making a splash.

At the same time, 30 of the remaining 40 legislative seats are allotted to so-called functional constituencies, restricted to representatives from Hong Kong's many professional and business sectors. The final 10 seats, to be decided by a complicated electoral college, are considered certain to remain in Beijing's pocket.

"Under these rules, we will never be able to form a majority in the legislature," says Democratic Party chairman Martin Lee. "It's as simple as that."

The incoming administration cannot be blamed entirely. The grotesque functional constituencies are a legacy left behind by British colonial administrators who distrusted democracy and feared offending China with any whiff of it in Hong Kong.

Mr. Patten tried to open up the system by allowing workers to vote in nine of the constituencies instead of just their bosses, but this reform has been quashed.

Control is very much in the hands of Beijing and its business sympathizers, and they know it.

"They've been handed everything on a plate," said prominent Hong Kong pollster Michael DeGolyer. "If they begin to abuse this gerrymandered pre-eminence, it will make them even more resented, and that could lead to real trouble in the future."