[...] The Chief Executive system has not worked well up to now: if one accepts the CE’s two-fold accountability, to the Central People’s Government and to the Hong Kong population, only one of these—loyalty to Beijing—has an enforcement mechanism, and thus tends to override the other. [...]

Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement brought together disparate themes in an original way: it combined Occupy Wall Street’s critique of economic hegemony with a form of legal-constitutionalist resistance against an authoritarian state; a call for democracy with an aspiration to a post-modern, post-national identity, going beyond a politics of recognition. It could be argued that these features mirror China’s own contradictions, as a nominally socialist country practicing unbridled crony capitalism, and as a cultural empire dressed up as a jingoistic nation-state. Hong Kong’s simultaneous embrace of democracy and post-national identity and its critique of crony capitalism stand in opposition to China on all counts. [...]