ABSTRACT
In the last chapter, I showed how six long-term macro-environmental conditions constrained top-down and bottom-up democratization between 1946 and 1984. From 1982 and 1987 onwards, Hong Kong was an increasing anomaly to modernization theory as it became a “higher-middleincome” place and a “high-income economy” respectively. Where a structural approach, such as modernization theory, fails to explain the anomaly completely, a synthetic perspective stressing bargaining as well as constraints and opportunities produced in the political process is useful. In this chapter, it will discuss how external and internal constraints, which inhibit Hong Kong’s democratization and explain the anomaly, made themselves apparent during the formation of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement. I will show how the Chinese Government began to thwart Hong Kong’s democratic development in the early 1980s. Despite the Chinese Government’s opposition to democratization, however, it did have some positive effect on the latter’s democratization through triggering the formation of the largest pro-democracy alliance since 1945 in Hong Kong. The leaders of the alliance also later became the leaders of the largest pro-democracy party in Hong Kong, i.e., the Democratic Party.
