There were farcical scenes in Hong Kong this week as the government’s proposals to “reform” the system under which its chief executive is to be elected in 2017 went down to a surprisingly complete defeat in the legislature. The incompetently led pro-Beijing block, trying to delay a vote it knew it would lose, ordered a walk-out of its members. But the attempt to strip the chamber of a quorum failed, since a few pro-Beijing members did not hear, or did not heed, the call to withdraw. The “pan-democratic forces” won handsomely instead of narrowly, which would almost certainly have been the case had the pro-Beijing people all stayed in the assembly.

The outcome may have been accidental, but it is a reminder of how unsuccessful Beijing’s efforts to shift public opinion in Hong Kong toward acceptance of its proposals have been. Beijing thought that by having the candidates vetted by a committee packed with its supporters it could discharge its obligation to bring in universal suffrage for the election of the chief executive without risking its tight control of the system. Since the huge street protests against those proposals petered out earlier this year, the government has mounted a relentless campaign to turn opinion around and to persuade a few in the pro-democracy group in the legislative council to reconsider their position, making it possible to achieve the two-thirds majority needed to put the reform package through.

The campaign has offered no real concessions, either on the election of the chief executive or on the way in which the legislative council itself is elected. Instead, it has sought to isolate the pro-democracy group and to paint it as anti-democratic. In this topsy turvy world, people who want a free choice in electing their leader are voting “against the wishes of the majority of Hong Kong people” and denying them “the democratic right to elect the chief executive in the next election”, as Leung Chun-ying, the current chief executive, put it in a statement. But the campaign seems to have had the paradoxical effect of reinforcing the feeling of many Hong Kong people that there is little to choose between the old system and the supposedly improved version: in both, Beijing’s will is the paramount element.

A little give last year on the procedure for choosing candidates for the chief executive’s job would have brought Beijing a lot of credit without undermining its influence in Hong Kong. Even now, some flexibility on the way the legislative council is formed might provide the basis for a partial settlement of political difference. But compromise is not, it seems, in the Chinese tool box. Hong Kong matters less to it economically than used to be the case. Its attachment to democracy in the western sense, to freedom of the press, and its anger at the entrenchment of a rich local elite which has climbed on board the Beijing bandwagon, are now just irritants for the master planners at the top in China. But, remember, it was supposed to be “one country, two systems”, something that Beijing seems to have forgotten, or perhaps never really understood.