A menu with only one dish

Democratic development in Hong Kong is set to go from bad to farce with a row over a march for universal suffrage set for 4 December. Activists are calling on China to change the current rigid system where selected voters 'choose' from a list containing only one name, but Hong Kongs leader is urging people to stay at home, claiming that Beijing overlords will allow no alterations.

The already tense situation became another degree more pressurised when the leader of the Roman Catholic church of Hong Kong, Bishop Joseph Zen, urged members of his flock to take to the streets to protest against such an obviously flawed system. Yet the Catholic church's most famous lay member in Hong Kong is the city's 'elected' leader, Chief Executive Donald Tsang, who is the man urging people to stay at home. Churchgoers are stymied: since both men are known for the hours they spend in communion with the Almighty, who is God backing? The other churches are backing the Bishop, as are many non-religious groups, including teaching unions and non-governmental organisations.

Although the Chinese leadership in Beijing is traditionally painted as a hard-line group of elderly men whose decisions brook no dissent, China-watchers are observing the clash in Hong Kong with great interest. The reason is that the dispute closely mirrors a similar row in 2003 - a battle the man on the street unexpectedly won. China caved in and the unpopular regulations and officials from that time are now history. David defeated Goliath on that occasion, and may do so again.

The fiery debate was stoked recently when Lord (Christopher) Patten, a former pro-democracy campaigner in Hong Kong, visited the city. Picking his words more carefully than he did in the past, his statements were claimed by both sides as supporting their views. Patten dismissed allegations that Hong Kong people were 'not ready' for democracy, but added that everything needed to be seen in the context of China's rise. China has been a world superpower for 18 of the past 20 centuries, he said, and we should be aware that we were living in a brief respite before it returned to its preferred position.

Chief Executive Tsang toured the UK and the US, making the point that Hong Kong had no democracy at all for 140 years of British rule, but had made great progress in the eight years since the 1997 handover from Britain to China. Although his hosts politely nodded at these statements, it was hard for Hong Kongers to see them as anything less than a woefully inaccurate re-writing of history. In fact, Hong Kong had a fully-elected legislature in the mid-1990s, which was replaced by an all-appointed one at the handover in 1997. Long-term pro-democracy fighters such as Martin Lee have set off on journeys to retrace Tsang's steps and correct these gross errors.

The democracy row in Hong Kong has been given an added piquancy by the fact that the city is unmistakably a modern, free, mature society in the image of London or New York. The people opposing democracy, who consist almost entirely of those who already have power and don't want to lose it, know that they would be foolish to deny that the world is heading in the direction of greater freedom and individual rights. So instead, they are arguing that 'we also are pro-democracy' but feel democracy is better if it is introduced gradually.

This argument loses its potency when activists point out that they have been campaigning for universal suffrage for decades, and were promised it as long ago as 1946. The term 'delaymocrats' has been coined by wags in Hong Kong, who define it as: 'People who claim to espouse democracy but do everything in their power to prevent it being introduced.'

People in Hong Kong take comfort from the fact that democratic development is even worse in some neighbouring places. They wryly recall watching a leadership election in North Korea in the mid-1990s, in which, just as in Hong Kong, there was only one candidate on the voting slip.

Incredibly, that single candidate, Kim Jong-Il, failed to win. The election committee decided unexpectedly to give the title being contested to Kim Il-Sung, the sole candidate's dead father.