Hong Kong's Tortuous Democratization

Book excerpt: This book raises interesting questions about the process of democratization in Hong Kong. It asks why democracy has been so long delayed when Hong Kong's level of socio-economic development has become so high. It relates democratization in Hong Kong to wider studies of the democratization process elsewhere, and it supplements the received wisdom - that democracy was delayed because of colonial rule and by the opposition of China - with new thinking, for example, that its quasi-bureaucratic authoritarian political structure vested power in bureaucrats who refused to have top-down democratization; a politically weak civil society and a non-participant political culture that crippled bottom-up democratization; plus the division between pro-democratic civil society and political society.