That's a great question.
I'm an optimist on this because already I've seen good quality dialogues happen at UBC, for example. We have students from both, Hong Kong and the mainland, and we have all kinds of diasporas, alumni, and all this. Clearly what Simon and Alan described is that there is even room within the 8.31 agreement. I think everyone here will agree that it's not realistic to expect the NPC to withdraw the 8.31 ruling until at least, I would say, the next party congress in fall 2017, in part because it would put Xi Jinping in a very, very hard position within the party in all this. After 2018, there is maybe hope for a nudge process, but for now that's the constraint. Clearly, there is room, as especially Simon's work has shown, for pushing the boundary of that 8.31 agreement. There's a lack of trust. There is a gap. The two sides in Hong Kong are not getting there.
Yes, I'm an optimist on this. Holding some public forums or nudging local partners and others in Hong Kong, anything that could incubate.... It looks like a place for mediation in the absolute term; then we have to do it the right way. But there must be a better way, as mentioned by Simon, for pushing the boundary.
The other aspect of it, which is something that's in the cart on the Chinese side and the Hong Kong government's side, would be to be very lenient in implementing or running that selection committee. But, of course, on the democrats' side, there's no way to take that as a credible commitment. How can you trust that they will actually...? On the actual selection of the members, yes, there will be 38 constituencies and all that. There is still room for nudging that to make it much more representative, closer to the public. There is room to nudge it, but I think the democrats cannot trust the government to do it. But that's still within the framework as well. Anything that could lead to quality dialogue, to lower a bit the temperature, and really explore all the possibilities to at least make it more comfortable for the 40% of the public and the democrats to support, or to find a way to change that bill and make it supportable....
The alternative, by the way, if we go as we are now, with two trains facing each other, and the bill fails, then in 2017 we would run the old system, which will probably lead to protests in the street and a lot of instability. But China will not budge either. So this is what we're looking at. I still think if we could nudge it a bit, the 2017 package, no matter what—having the one one-man, one-woman vote, having the election actually happen, even if there are only two or three candidates who go through the gauntlet—it would still have a massive impact, a spillover effect, I will call it. It's like when the French did privatization way back when. They did it partially initially, keeping control, right? But even partial privatization changed everything because it brought a whole momentum behind it. So I think that moving with an actual election would still have an enormous positive impact, but it's a matter of finding a way to make it more acceptable.