di Peter Baher* 

Many of you have already seen or listened to lectures of professor Baher, but some have not seen him so I do a very brief introduction. Professor Baher is a political sociologist, political scientist from Lingham University in Hong Kong. His work followed several directions first and I always stressed it and a very important part of his work concerns translating and editing classical work of sociology. He was one of the translators and editors of Max Weber on Russian Revolution and the famous work of Weber Protestant ethics and the origin of capitalism. The translation has been done by one of the father of modern sociology Talcott Parsons, so it takes courage to translate it again. The first transation became in a certain way obsolete and has to be done again.

He also works on the problem of cesarism and bonapartism and dictatorship in general, and his book will be soon published on dictatorship in history and in theory by Cambridge University Press than he published A reader of one of the major work Arendt an important publication widely used and read in Anglo-Saxon world and finally when he moved to Hong Kong several years ago after having though in Britain and in Canada, in Hong Kong he is very much interested in two problems: first of all the post –communist transition because you have a double transition Hong Kong capitalist society entries into China, Chinese society which is an authoritarian regime try to use Hong Kong and develop some sort of post communist transition and this important event there and epidemy unknown disease called SARS which broke out in this part southern China, Hong Kong and their contagious is very dangerous and until know we don’t know how to cure it and there are several cases and three new cases now and again is possible the epidemy will spread so he organized a sort of epidemiological centre to study the effect of mass epidemic on modern society. I want you to listen him on this last problem.

(Prof. Baher starts his speech)

Well thank you very much for that generous introduction I’m delighted to be here in Luiss and I must say that I think this centre for Transition Studies that had been set up here thanks to professor Zavslasky is a very important initiative because transitions are taking place all over the word and what this centre does is provide for international scholars to swoop, to exchange experiences about an issue of common interest and there are very few such centre in the world and to have one of them based here is a tremendous asset and professor Zavslavzky and his compatriots have to be very much congratulated for this initiative. Most of you here have heard me speak about Hong Kong political order already but some of you have not, so what I’m trying to do today is to hopefully remain interesting for those of you that have already heard me while at the same time not assuming too much for those who did not hear me previously. I’m going to talk in greater depths about Hong Kong political order but I’m going to spend the bulk of my comments looking on the social impact of SARS and what actually happened in Hong Kong because I think that something very remarkable took place there, well what I called for a better term a “community of fate”.

Let me begin by saying something about Hong Kong political order and than look at the way in which this political order was affected by the emergence of SARS.

I’ve already said in previous classes that Hong Kong is an important place in the international scene because for USA for instance it is a test of the main lands ability for pragmatism and reforms as we heard Hong Kong currently exists under the formula one nation to systems. Hong Kong special administrative region I would say Hong Kong SAI for short is one system, the people’ s republic political and economic is the other, but they are now joining the same political roof of China. The question that arises than is that what happen if Hong Kong would to became ungovernable? Ungovernable from the standing point of the communist Party.

What would happen if one of the systems prove to be incompatible with the other, would then the promise and the formula one nation two system be simply tuned up? Would there be constitutional crises? What would happen? We have seen that because Hong Kong is understood by the main land to be a political model for Taiwan any dramatic political crises in Hong Kong is going to be watched very carefully by Taiwanese people and leaders and at certain conditions we might see Taiwan declare itself independent giving up on the idea that there is any way of forming some part of the people of the Republic of China. If this happens China would declare war, if it declares war the Americans will be involved in the conflict. An Act of the Congress passed in 1994 commits America to some kind of Defence of Taiwan. The outbreak of SARS in the spring of 2003 was always more than an issue of Public Health it was also an historical moment in which the vigour of Hong Kong and the main land political institutions would decisively tested. When I refer to a political order I’m talking about something more basic, something more elemental than either a particular administration or the stream of policy decision that every administration must produce to run a modern state. A political order in the sense that I’m using it refer to the structure framework of government a political order in the way that I’m using it refers to the rules of the game as it work within which policy decision are grounded and executed. I think this also suggest an other distinction between a policy blunder, a policy mistake, a policy era on one hand and the political defect on the other, by political defect I mean a tension or a contradiction or deficiency and although a lot of reason common on Hong Kong are focused on a serious of ministerial scandals and chaotic decisions that show the incompetence of particular people and particular administrations.

It seems to me we have in political sociology to go deeper. We have to look to the fundamental political arrangements which are to a degree responsible for our conditions, many of these particular problems, so what I’m suggesting is that we provide a structure analysis of Hong Kong decision-making. To do that requires looking at the system of Hong Kong government and we will see that this system was shown to be very fragile, very week during the time of SARS. What I want to do now is to talk a little bit about how this system works and this involve me to explain you the basic law of Hong Kong . The basic law was a product of British and Chinese negotiators in the 1980 and it is sometimes described as a Hong Kong mini constitution. What I want to say is that to use the word constitution and this is the word regularly used to describe the basic law- is both true and false simultaneously. It is true in so far as the basic law allocates various powers to the Hong Kong SAI executive, legislative and judicial brand ships and the description of the basic law as a constitution is also true in that this basic law sets up a modus vivendi among them in other word a kind of not exactly a balance but at least some workable arrangements but the label mini constitution is misleading to the point of being false if one imagine the basic law to be a constitution in for instance the American republican sense. I take the American republican because I see it as a one of the first modern democratic constitutions, one which has survived the longest I notoriously like his French counter-by.

Most obviously the Hong Kong basic law is not a constitution because Hong Kong is not a state. The law was not a product of the Hong Kong people but it was a product of the departing colonial power and the mainland Chinese and the territory over which this basic law distributes its powers has no sovereignty on its own, unlike republic and constitutions such as the Italian constitution and the American constitution which stand on them own feet, the basic law is subordinated to an appendige of article 31 of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) constitution: so the basic law is a derivative product it derives from something else rather than being a founding charter sui generis. Let me just quote you from Article 1: they define the Hong Kong SAI an inaliable part of the PRC.

Inaliable means it could never ever be taken from this. Article 2 of the basic law stipulates that it is the national people congress that authorize the Hong Kong SAI to exercise a high degree of autonomy not the Hong Kong body but the national people congress in Beijing. The Court of final appeal is supposed to have final adjudication but this is not as final as it appears for reason we saw yesterday because a decision at Hong Kong highest court can be sent by the Hong Kong government to Beijing for interpretation at least in one prominent case a very important decision taken by the High Court is overturned by the Chinese under this power of interpretation.

The way that I express Hong Kong’s position is to say that Hong Kong since he has no Bill of Rights essentially depends on the authoritarian toleration of sovereign. The sovereign being of course the people republic itself. The basic law we might say is an hybrid of liberalism with communist party characteristics the liberal part can be found in the negative liberty that it allows, it allows people to get on with their lives without being impeded by the actions of others but the problem with negative liberty as we saw is that it is compatible with a non liberal state whose rulers may or may not choose to act in a liberal manner. Now under a republican conception of freedom people are free to extend they counterpart in political affairs that shape their collective destiny, but in contrast when an authority is in a position to undermine the liberty of its citizens even if that authority does not choose to do so in a particular time citizens are basically unfree because at any moment the liberties they have and this liberties are extensive in Hong Kong but they are dependent upon permission of an other sovereign and to that degree is always possible that their liberties can be taken away. Complementing a political culture of authoritarian toleration is an other feature of the basic of law which I would like to call burocratic antipolitics.

What I mean by this is first of all the chief executive of Hong Kong is accountable under the basic law to the Hong Kong SARS itself but also to the central people government but the problem is that this really means very limited accountability. The chief executive is not elected by Hong Kong people. The current executive was elected by a committee of 800 hundred Beijing loyalists it has no basis in society, it has no popular legitimacy and no popular mandate for what he does. Similarly the legislative council or leg-co as it is called, the lower chamber consists of 60 members of which only 24 are elected by geographical constituencies the rest are chosen under a very strange formula of a so called functionalist constituency.

It is a mechanism through which business, trade unions, who by the way are predominantly Beijing led and the profession represent themselves. It is a very wide system and this profession elects basically these people but they have a very small number who do the election so there are about 24 functional constituency members representing a very small electorate.

Hong Kong’s political situation in principle is not hopeless because in the basic law itself the article 35 the ultimate aim of the election of both the chief executive and the legislative council is far democratic election in theory this could happen after 2007-2008, but if you keep on reading the basic law you will see that the obstacles to this innovation are formidable for example in order for the basic law to be changed in such a way that the chief executive was directly elected.

There would have to be two-third majority voted in leg-co I remember you have got this functional constituency which is not representative the sitting chief-executive would have to approve the vote and then the standing committee of the people of the Republic of China would also have to approve it and there is a similar even if slightly different set of preconditions for the legislative council and what I foresee if things keep on changing the way that they are is that you can have a constitutional crises in Hong Kong around 2007-2008, because it’s quite likely if things persist that more and more of the directly elected seats would be won by the democratic parties, at the moment the directly elected seats are not all won by democrats but if this happen all the direct elected seats won by the democrats and the other not you have a polarization in Hong Kong which at the moment has been avoided. There is an awful lot of stuff in the basic law and in current Hong Kong politics which is worth talking about but we don’t need the level of details in this kind of talk, what I want you to suggest however is that essentially the basic law has its sense and it is designed to be an obstacle to political pluralism and democracy. The chief politicians who run Hong Kong at the moment, the chief executive and its cabinet have a very little popular legitimacy because they are neither elected by nor accountable to Hong Kong people. The significance of SARS when it erupted in the spring of last year showed an other Hong Kong, a place conscious of itself as a social entity whose members where increasingly determined to act without government guidance, without permission and to constitute themselves as a kind of parallel body. As Hong Kong rulers struggle to manage the crises and was seen incompetent by Hong Kong people the great fluidity of Hong Kong society coagulated into a community of fate. At this part of the talk I want to move from the disciplinary bayers that has guided my remarks thus far largely political science more towards sociology and I do think it very important that as a social scientists we not only concern that we get the facts right, its very important to look out of data, it’s very important to ask people questions, its very important to listen to what they say and to be willing to really understand them and not simply come with ideological baggage which you want to impose on a particular problem, all this is important, but it’s clearly necessary to develop some set of concepts because what a concept does is it helps to explain interconnection between things, helps to go beyond to what otherwise appear narrative or a very disposed series of event. This concept which I’m developing – the community of fate tries to do this. What I mean by a community of fate is a human group bounded by a shared space which for periods of time is infused with a sense of urgent and common purpose. The community of fate is compatible with economic and other differences but it momentarily overrides them because distinction among people have less importance than social emotions they share as mutual beings’ faced by the prospect of collective defeat or death. When I talk about the preoccupation with death or disaster I’m not talking of other anxieties that human beings may have, for example idiosyncratic anxiety fears about fleeing, crashing, I’m not talking of feelings everybody has they grow older that they have lived most of their lives. I’m not talking about all this things as profound in their singular as they are.

On the contrary a community of fate arises among people who confront together the same worry and during the SARS crises in Hong Kong the community of fate was visually epitomized by the masks, you must see the picture of that time when everybody was wearing a mask and I think that what he mask does is at one psychological level it homogenise people, it makes them the same, the mask says in effect we are similar you and I and no amount of money, no state distinctions make us immune to the possibility of imminenceness and death. So symbolizing this common and deadly plight the mask literally efface ( this is an English word) it obliterates other social distinctions, to such a degree- I should add that was often difficult to recognize one’s colleagues one’s friends and one’s students under this mask, of course I used the term community here with such reservation because I’m aware that at least in English usage community is one of those terms which has been severely compromised over the years by sentimental overuse but I think that in this instance community convey something correctly namely a total experience that cut across other divisions to constitute Hong Kong people as a single entity. SARS in other words became the central experience of people’s life I should say since the hand over of Hong Kong from Britain to China in 1997, Hong Kong has been heat by various problems, but if we consider them, let us consider to the limitation in contrast to SARS the financial crises of 1997 which was triggered in Thailand pulled Hong Kong into recession, and of course in recession some people loose their job but not everybody does, similarly Hong Kong has seen for almost 4 years deflection.

Deflection is not good for retailers but if you are a customer who is earning the same amount of money or your wages arising, there are bargains to be add in a deflection economy, property prices in Hong Kong have fallen 2/3 in 5 years pushing over about sixty thousand people into negative equity, but only a minority of people in Hong Kong are in the private housing market, most are in rental units in big estates, so again the property deflection does not hurt people who do not have private property in housing. The point that I’m making is that the harm that hurt that Hong Kong had felt before SARS was segmental whereas SARS hit everybody, and all at the same time. Thus its important but what I want to say presently is I don’t want you to think that in a period of SARS in a time of SARS there was an outbreak brotherly and sisterly love, that this was a period of massive altruism, the picture is more complicated than that as I will show you in a moment. But let me summarize so far what I’m trying to say. I’d been looking at Hong Kong political order I’d been saying that in some important sense it was broken, it does not allows participation, it does not allow people to express what they want in representative of their choosing, it stuck as far as people is concerned, it is a machine that it is stuck and what I’m going on to say is that SARS created something parallel to this political order. This community of Fate and I have said so far that this community of fate was the result of the sense of urgency. But I’m sure you are not be satisfied of this. this seem too general but what I want to do know is to try and be more specific about what a community of fate is in this context, in other words what’s its major elements are. It’s seems to me that a society, before a grouping of people to take on the character of the community of fate four things must be present and I will call those things

1) dangerous recognition

2) moral density

3) duration- period of time-

4) closure

Let me explain what I mean by each of these components of the community of fate. In the first place a community of fate requires the recognition that people are faced by a menace that is so pressing, so immediate, so evident, so obvious as to demand urgent attention because without that recognition, without their attention a human group may be destroy innocent of what heated. In other word its not enough for danger to be there you have to know it is there to form a community of fate and in Hong Kong with its advanced communication system a crises was very evident to most people from around March 1990 to 2003.

I chose March 1990 because it was when the first five SARS deaths were confirmed. After that the government made a call to arms saying that every decision should be prepared for SARS and 2 of April the World Health Organization ( WHO) put a travel advisory on Hong Kong saying to people do not go to Hong Kong unless you have a very very urgent business and for about two months the economy of Hong Kong implodes. I should just say an anecdote because I travelled abroad during this period for conferences in one or two days but the International Airport is a very very busy place I think it’s the first or the second most used airport in the world. It’s a fantastic airport, brilliantly modern, very efficient and very full. Can you imagine how bizarre it was to go to an airport and it was empty, many flights were cancelled and when you go to the airport and look up at the screen it was all read, there were only one or two things that go: I was to the airport to go to a conference and a I knew my plane was going to be there because I called the airline company in advance to confirm it, but when I went in the plane it was a quarter fall so again this gives you a dramatic sense of what was like to be there.

The second element of a community of fate is moral density, namely a pervasive and intense feelings of social interconnectness in which people are aware of a common predictment that strathced beyond the family unit. In Hong Kong I suggest this identification was facilitated by ethnic homogeneity of the Hong Kong population of 6,82 million around 97% are Chinese, and around 60% of those were born in Hong Kong. The vast majority of people in Hong Kong speak the same language which is Cantonese. An other indicator of the sense of people recognizing something in common is question that the Hong Kong transition project has been asking Hong Kong people since 1993. What you consider yourself to be? Do you consider yourself to be Chinese, Chinese- Hong Kong or Hong Kong person?

Most people said Hong Kong person or Hong Kong - Chinese, but Hong Kong Chinese is a mixture of ethnicity but for ten years of survey conducted once a year an useless question hardly ever has been more than 24% of people saying that they consider themselves as Chinese correlating with the patriotism for their mainland.

Moral density is facilitated clearly by this ethnic homogeneity. I take this concept of moral density from Emile Durkheim and he discusses this issue especially in his book the division of labour in society and also does not quite use this term in its masterpiece of 1912 “The elementary forms of religious life”, probably the best book in sociology ever written. If you have read that work you will say there must be something very strange about Peter Baher’s use of moral density because in the moral density the social interconnectiveness requires material density or physical density, in other words the existence of body literally body insufficient numbers to demand close and regular interaction require physical interaction face to face encounters of what can be called co presence which acts like a social generator charging up the electricity of common reality and of course you would say to me this is not applicable in Hong Kong case because it is not true that in Hong Kong case far from being material density people being close in physical contact they separated as much as possible and you are right. People vacated the usual public spaces, the shopping molls, the restaurants, the cinemas and they do not use public transport unless they have to go to work. So how moral density could exists?

Well, here is were I will beg the indulgence of the master Emile Durkheim by suggesting that there is something missing in his account which he has not seen and this is radio and television. Durkheim lived before the age of radio and television he was print media, he was familiar with and such media have, I think markedly less emotional impact than the transmission of moving picture and the moving sound waves of voice, with his timbre and rhythm and cadencies. Visualization of movements affects us. It seems to me because it imitates life as it is lived the human body is always in motion, even when we are sleeping we are in motion, people breathing, people turning over, there is a constant movement in the human body. Print – media is less electrifying because it is flat in one dimension, it is literally unreal. To put it graphically it is more psychologically impressive and troubling to see a plane crashing in one of the two world trade centre towers than it is to see a picture or a series of picture of the crash in a newspaper. People can watch this picture in a video frame over and over again with a sense of voyeuristic horror tinted with fascination. Movement put us in the present tense, it gives objects vivacity and dynamism and it stimulates imagination, conversation with many people in Hong Kong confirm my only experience of being there during the SARS episode.

That television and radio updates, often delivered on half hour intervals put the all place on high alert and since writing these lines I have came across a lot of commentaries on the media during SARS and they all say the same thing: which is Hong Kong people lived vicariously they live trough the media, through the pictures and especially through radio. There is one man in Hong Kong his name is Albert Chen and he has a radio programme in the morning which is called “tea cup in a storm” this is a turn round of the British expression of a “storm in a tea cup”, if you say this it means that what happened is a small little thing don’t make a big fuss, but in Chinese he has used this English expression and the programme is called “tea cup in a storm”.

Now Albert Chen is a very charismatic person and he is very pug nation, which means he is a kind of fighter on behalf of ordinary people and ordinary people called them up and what was happening in his programme every morning between 7.30 and 8.00 is that if he would get the government ministers in and nurses would ring up and say : “ you are not protecting us, we don’t have masks, we don’t have this, we don’t have that”, and other people would ring up : “my father died of SARS I was not allowed to see him cremated. Why?”.

There is a tremendous emotion in this and if you talk to Hong Kong people they were stand and felt very deeply what was happened and where very hungry towards the government which made some miscalculations, what happened was that shows like Albert Chen and they were others on the TV too, where government ministers were humiliated in front of people but at the same time all this new updates and so people new things trough the media. People were stuck in their apartments, they taking their children out of school, many are not going to work, the children are allowed to play with other children, and we are talking about very small apartments, this people are stucking here and they are listen to radio all the time and TV is on all the time . So my argument would be that there was a Durkheim bumbling up of the emotion and identification but in absence of material density because that was provided by radio and television. And there were instances I should say where citizens took their own initiatives. For example many Hong Kong people where asking to the radio we want to know where the SARS cases are, are they happening near us. and the government ministers came on the radio and said: look I’m sorry I would like to tell you where they are but there are previous issues here and Hong Kong people were not satisfied with that, so what was happened were four computer specialists and got the information and put it on the world wide web, and between the end of March and the beginning of April there were something like 5.2 millions hits on this web site and the government started to gave in and started to produce its own data and so citizens initiatives goes one step ahead of the governments, and the government seems to be slow in responding. The other thing about this moral density, which is the third element you recall the community of fate. It is once that Hong Kong people started to get information about where the SARS case were the got even more frightened, because although they were more concentrated in certain areas it was evident that there was a dispersion and if you look up at the side, up where you have not to, you would see not too far from you a state with a SARS case. So you get a disposion of concern is not just one part of Hong Kong and people could not say it cannot affect me. People could fell it starting to move around Hong Kong and again this conduce to a community of fate -in my view- because everybody felt vulnerable. Even so dangerous recognition and moral density are not enough to constitute a community of fate also important is duration, in other words how long it lasts. An other way of putting this is to say that is that community of fate is a form by trial rather than by shock by one event, in Hong Kong this was shown daily not only by the web site but by a serious of events all scary in themselves which lasted for two months. I want to go on detail but let me give you a couple of examples. In late March or early April there was an outbreak in a housing estate called Harmony Gardens, that outbreak ended up killing 42 people. That was scary because what people thought was two things: first of all SARS was being taken by rats they were the vectors, so you don’t need to be near somebody to get SARS. I remember that in a place like Hong Kong there are a lot of rats that was very alarming. The other thing that people felt was turning into an influenza now SARS is a corona virus, corona virus is like common cold and we catch the common cold from being in close proximity to other people though sneezing and coughing and of course the corona virus is ebon to because it comes out from people mouse and tiny droplets but they relatively heavy droplets and they drop with in about three feet. The drop of influenza are much smaller they go further and than they hang in the air, and they can hang for quite sometimes and that’s why influenza has been in the past so deadly that was a great shock that corona virus which was of the family of cold much worse of course but that it could be turning in influenza. Than about a week later just when people was saying that it wasn’t a true theory the estate down the road also come with it. An other instance on 13 of May there was a tremendous grieving in Hong Kong when a doctor called Joanne died of SARS. People in Hong Kong were very out broken by this, she was turned into a hero, she was somebody who had voluntary decided to work with SARS patients. Other doctors died but by accident they didn’t know that people had SARS, her case was even sad because his husband died of cancer the year before, people were really shaken by this and there was a tremendous outpoint of grief for her of a very religious kind, she was Christian, many people in Hong Kong are Christian, even if there are confusionist or Buddhists they respect religion, there were many kind of events over the last two months just when you felt you could settle down something else happened, which looked as if things will go on and on and on, what I’m being saying is that a community of fate depends on its duration, finally a community of fate is formed where people are compelled to stand their ground, in other words when they cannot flee, where they cannot pick up their families and go, this is what I’m calling closure. It is true that 7% of Hong Kong people have waited a board in other country and they can live there and there are also 43% of Hong Kong people who have relatives abroad. The message they receive for example the Chinese community in Toronto was stay away. We are sorry but if you came here you could endanger my child and people have sometimes said: well you know the reaction to Hong Kong people was racist, it was not racist, everybody would have behaved like this in a similar case.

This unwelcoming aspect of closure was made worse by a number of high profile incidents which seem to indicate that Hong Kong had been debarred from the world, for instance Hong Kong athletes have the so called special Olympic for disabled people that use to take place in Ireland, the Irish government said they do not come. They finally changed their mind but for a month Hong Kong people were very hungry, when eventually they could come, they could come as long as they had been outside of Hong Kong for ten days, and they took this check and they took that check, then there were other incidents too, in Hong Kong people bring very much in the jury convention of watches and so on, in Los Angeles Switzerland they were told again to stay away. From an outside point of view from the point of view of someone sitting here in Rome, you might say this is quite reasonable, of course foreign countries have to protect their citizens and we don’t know much about SARS, and therefore these measures are reasonable but inside this point of view that it is to say from ordinary Hong Kong point of view this is devastating because these are people that consider themselves very cosmopolitan, very international, travel a great deal and sudden they are unwelcome and even disabled athletes are told that they cannot come to an important competition, all this news comes up in the newspapers day after day, so this is what I mean by closure.

OK, I’m going to try to be very brief because you listened to me very patiently for almost 50 minutes, and I know it is tiring, even if the lecture is given in Italian, thank you very much for your attention let just me try to pull together briefly that there is a lot more of course I’ll be here for questions.

The point that I’m trying to make is the community of fate that was formed had a number of political consequences, because Hong Kong people saw themselves momentarily as one body. Other divisions at that time faded away and they were faced by a government which seems to be acting incompetently. What happened was a range of citizen’s initiatives. Citizens initiatives which frequently contradicted what the government said, the government would say you can leave your children in school its ok, how could people would take them out, I don’t want to suggest as I mentioned earlier that this was California in the summer of 1967, this was not a summer of love there was discrimination against people who had SARS, there was a discrimination against their family, there was discrimination even among some doctors, people are very concerned to protect themselves, the community of fate is not about mass altruism, it is about mass recognition of a common problem and to cut a very long story short, on 1 of July as we heard in previous classes we see this massive demonstration, the biggest ever in Hong Kong history over a local issue, half million people on a street protesting against national security laws, and really what they was protesting about was their own government, they were protesting about its incompetence, its inability to really protect them, and they were out there in such number seems to me because the community of fate has actually prepared the way for that event.

*Università di Hong Kong