All HK lawmakers must be patriots

The open support 15 opposition lawmakers of the Hong Kong Legislative Council offered the four lawmakers who were disqualified on Wednesday is actually enough to also disqualify them from office. Their behavior and the insults some of them hurled at the resolution disqualifying the four lawmakers violates their oath of office, which is the reason the four were disqualified in the first place.

Their absence from duty before their resignations are approved cannot paralyze the LegCo, where the remaining lawmakers still occupy more than half the seats, instead it only exposes their lack of professional ethics.

And neither their resignations nor the support of foreign politicians who have taken up their refrain will weaken the country’s resolve to ensure that the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is governed by patriots, something that is by no means unique to China.

Many countries stipulate that public officials cannot have any allegiance to another country.

Yet notably, their foreign endorsers describe the 19 lawmakers, including the four who have been expelled from the LegCo for their unpatriotic soliciting of foreign interference in Hong Kong’s affairs, as democracy fighters.

The question is whether the United States or the

United Kingdom, the two countries most at fault for fanning the unpatriotic sentiment in Hong Kong, would brook senators or members of parliament colluding with foreign entities to create social unrest or economic hardship aimed at separating a region from the rest of the country.

Were it not for the collusion of the opposition lawmakers with external forces, Hong Kong would not have been plunged into the violent disorder that has mired it in the worst economic recession in a decade or been subject to the aggravating effects of sanctions.

Given its importance, the LegCo should be the last place into which the meddling tentacles of foreign countries reach. Yet thanks to these lawmakers that has proved not to be the case.

That’s why the National People’s Congress Standing Committee, the country’s top legislature, passed Wednesday’s resolution disqualifying the four lawmakers.

What confronts the SAR is by no means normal internal differences of opinion, but national security threats from outside. Before all the puppets of external powers are uprooted from their seats in the LegCo, the city will not recover its lost stability.

One country is the prerequisite for two systems. Hong Kong can only be governed by patriots.