Political Legitimization of Hybrid Regimes

This chapter discusses a political aspect of mind-engineering: political legitimization of hybrid regimes. Hybrid regimes are polities which feature a mixture of democratic and non-democratic political systems—notable examples are general elections which are subject to the domineering political influence of the incumbents or other means of power inequalities. This chapter will conceptualize political legitimization by studying the political discourses of Chinese officials and Chinese state media on the democratization of post-handover Hong Kong. After its handover from Britain to China in 1997, Hong Kong politics has been wrestling with the democratization promised in the Basic Law (the “mini constitution” of post-handover Hong Kong), which stipulates that the Chief Executive (equivalent to the head) of the city and all members of its legislature shall be ultimately returned by universal suffrages. By examining the discourses conveyed by the official statements and important documents issued by the Chinese government and their key officials and policy advisors, this chapter shows that China has been (re)defining such constitutional promise of universal suffrages by its political discourses in response to local demands for democratization. The notion of nationalism is reconstructed by Chinese state discourses as a political legitimacy for refuting the popular demand for universal suffrages in Hong Kong. Equally important is how the notion of democracy, which has been widely understood as a participatory political system with fair and open elections, is re-narrated by political discourses of Chinese officials and state media as justification for limited political franchises and non-direct election methods. Democratization of post-handover Hong Kong shows how a hybrid regime reacts to the democratic aspiration of a highly westernized local civil society. It also indicates how China reacts to the universal values among international communities—democracy, freedom, human rights, for example—by redefining them in a “non-western” way.