Contemporary Chinese Political Economy and Strategic Relations: An International Journal (Sep 2016)
The Unfinished Experimentation of Political Parties in Hong Kong – Reflections from Theoretical and Experiential Perspectives
Abstract
This article consists of 2 parts. The first part, from Section 1 to Section 3, by King Fai Chan aims at unravelling the inaugural ideology of Hong Kong’s political parties by going back to one of the founders of the Democratic Party, Yeung Sum, and examines his ideology of an idealistic thinking of political cooperation with the SAR government, with an aim of peaceful power-sharing. Yeung Sum’s idea of political parties is a new vision of a political subjectivity that caters to the whole, and this confirms with Giovanni Satori’s theory that an authentic party must be part-of-the-whole. In the end the idea of party as effective opposition was completely overlooked. The article then turns to the second part, from Section 4 to Section 6, by Sze Chi Chan, who aims at detailing the inauguration of an effective oppositional party after the Grand March of 2003. Thus was born the League of Social Democrats, with the second author as one of its founding members. In the second author’s portrayal the League was off to a promising start that ushered in an effective oppositional party, that did pose a series of effective political opposition that readily catered to the need of the whole citizenry, especially the Five District de facto Referendum. Yet in the end the League met with a fate of internal split that tremendously dwindled the its oppositional thrust. As yet we still do not find any pan-democratic party or anti-establishment radical party that can really demonstrate Satori’s ideal of party acting as part-of-the-whole fighting for the benefit of the whole.
