• Bao Tong, Recalling Tiananmen, Calls on Hong Kong Protesters to ‘Take a Break’ By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

Bao Tong, Recalling Tiananmen, Calls on Hong Kong Protesters to ‘Take a Break’
By DIDI KIRSTEN TATLOW

Bao Tong, the dissident adviser to the former Communist Party leader Zhao Ziyang, at home in Beijing last year.

Bao Tong, an adviser to the former premier and Communist Party chief Zhao Ziyang, who closely witnessed the 1989 student protests in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, said on Sunday that the demonstrators in Hong Kong were right but that there was “no harm in taking a break from the debate now” and letting time help their goals mature.

Mr. Bao, 81, who is considered an astute political observer, also said that there were similarities and differences between the current protests in Hong Kong, part of a pro-democracy movement called Occupy Central, and the democracy movement in Beijing in 1989 that ended on June 4, when the Chinese military moved in and killed hundreds, possibly thousands.

Mr. Bao was speaking by telephone from home in Beijing, where he has been under house arrest on and off for years for his close association with Mr. Zhao, a liberal official who backed the 1989 democracy demonstrators’ goals and who was purged for it.

“I’m saying if I were a protester, I’d do this,” he said.
The protesters in Hong Kong should take stock of where they were and plan for the longer term, he suggested, confirming a commentary he wrote that was published by Radio Free Asia early Sunday.
He emphasized that his opinions about Occupy Central were personal, yet they were also born of long experience with Chinese politics. 

Mr. Bao was following events in Hong Kong “very closely,” his son, Bao Pu, said in an email.
“He is also very much informed,” said the younger Mr. Bao, who is a publisher in Hong Kong.
“There are similarities and dissimilarities” between Beijing in 1989 and Hong Kong in 2014, said the elder Mr. Bao by telephone.
“A dissimilarity is that back then it was in the mainland, today it’s in Hong Kong,” he said.
“A similarity is that it’s happening in one country. A dissimilarity is that it’s happening in ‘two systems,’ ” he said, referring to Hong Kong’s political arrangements with Beijing after it returned to China in 1997, meaning not under exactly the same political system.
“Back then it was mostly an anticorruption movement. The issue now is that Hong Kong is demanding genuine elections. This is different,” he said.
“The leaders refuse dialogue, that is similar. Whether the policies of the leadership, and what it will set in motion, are similar or not, I don’t know,” he said.
“But I believe that any large task cannot be achieved in one movement, in one struggle, one expression of opinion. And I think in any exhausting task, one has to rest,” he said, in words apparently aimed at protest leaders, who have not signaled any desire to pause their activities.

Mr. Bao also appeared to suggest that Hong Kong’s political leaders were not in charge of the situation but had unseen masters, and those — whom he did not identify by name but are believed to be the top leaders in Beijing, such as Xi Jinping — had not said anything publicly about the situation.
“I haven’t heard the first line of people” in China “say anything,” he said.
But, “I think that under ‘Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong’ that this situation should be solved by the Hong Kong people,” and not their representatives who had been chosen by a narrow suffrage, if at all.

In Hong Kong, Freeman Tai, a 23-year-old who graduated from college last year and is now a teacher who has joined the protesters in Mong Kok, said that the demonstrators were not cohesive enough to come and go as Mr. Bao suggested.
“If you tell them to go away for a month, some would stay and some would go home,” he said. Disbanding now also might disrupt the protesters’ long-term unity.
“We can’t be sure everyone is going to come out in a month, so it’s kind of risky,” he said.

Yet Mr. Bao’s words came amid a hardening of tone from Hong Kong’s embattled leader,Leung Chun-ying, who warned on Saturday that “all necessary actions” would be taken to ensure that government workers could return to work on Monday. 

The roads around the city’s government headquarters have been blocked off by the weeklong demonstrations.
The protests have paralyzed crucial parts of the city and led to clashes with police and other unidentified people, some of whom police said had links to organized crime gangs.
In the commentary in Radio Free Asia, Mr. Bao wrote, “The seeds that have been planted will certainly flower and will have results, but it takes time.”

“No great task can be achieved all at once; they all need some time to gestate. There’s no need to keep digging up the seeds to see if they’re still growing every day. Take a break, for the sake of future room to grow. For tomorrow,” Mr. Bao wrote.
In the commentary, he offered unequivocal support for the goals of the demonstrators, who are demanding elections by universal suffrage with a free choice of candidates in the 2017 vote for the next chief executive.

“True patriots are those who say ‘no’ to fake universal suffrage,” Mr. Bao wrote.
“They are ‘the ones who don’t wish to be slaves,’ ” he wrote, a line from China’s national anthem, “March of the Volunteers.”

Because of his role in the 1989 democracy protests, Mr. Bao’s comments in the dispute over democracy that is raging in Hong Kong inevitably brought to mind the movement in China a quarter of a century ago.

The violent suppression by China’s military of the Tiananmen Square movement shook the world and led to a softer approach by Communist leaders in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union when similar protests erupted in late 1989, inspired by Tiananmen. 

The Berlin Wall fell thereafter.
Mr. Bao suggested in his commentary that China was on the wrong side of history when the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress decided in late August to limit Hong Kong elections, long promised by Beijing, to several candidates approved by Beijing, by requiring that they be selected by a committee that is stacked with Beijing loyalists.
“Actually, if the National People’s Congress refuses to rescind its announcement; if ‘one country, two systems,’ becomes ‘one country, one system,’ then Hong Kong’s political and economic system will certainly be damaged, and that thing we fear the most, that damage to and loss of confidence in Hong Kong’s markets will come about,” he wrote, referring to the political arrangement under which China took Hong Kong back from Britain in 1997.

“I have no doubt that one day, this view will have become the consensus view of history. But saying it out loud now, I don’t think it has much chance of being heard. This will take at least a little time,” he wrote.