China's United Front Work in Civil Society: the Case of Hong Kong

Abstract

This article unravels China’s united front work in dealing with civil society, using the case of Hong Kong after the political handover since 1997. While it has been widely analyzed by scholars that state corporatism characterizes the state-society relations in China, including the state’s relations with its autonomous regions, Hong Kong as a special administrative region, however, shows that the ruling strategies of China are very adaptive. Comparing with the rest of China where the united front work is partly characterized by a heavy-handed policy of assimilation, the united front work in the post-handover Hong Kong illustrates a more inclusionary version of state corporatism through five types of measures, namely, integration, cooptation, collaboration, containment, and denunciation. The strategies range from soft to hard tactics, and are adopted depending upon whether the central government regards its targets as friends, valuable potential cooptees or enemies. Nevertheless, the soft and hard tactics used in parallel in Hong Kong have resulted in further politicization and polarization of the civil society, and transformed the tension between the state and the local groups into clashes between different local groups, as seen in other autonomous regions such as Tibet and Xinjiang. Over the years, the agents for state corporatism have been ever expanding in Hong Kong. The ideologies propagated have now gone beyond consensus and harmony to also include patriotism and reinterpre-tation of other political ideas, including universal suffrage, conducive to cultivating obedience.