Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
China to impose restrictions on elections in Hong Kong
BEIJING — China’s Communist Party already wields outsized influence over Hong Kong’s political landscape. Its allies have long controlled a committee that handpicks the territory’s leader. Its loyalists dominate the Hong Kong legislature. It ousted four of the city’s elected opposition lawmakers last year.
China plans to impose restrictions on Hong Kong’s electoral system to root out candidates the Communist Party deems disloyal, a move that could block democracy advocates in the city from running for any elected office.
The planned overhaul reinforces the Communist Party’s resolve to quash the few remaining vestiges of dissent after the anti-government protests that roiled the territory in 2019. It also builds on a national security law for the city that Beijing enacted last summer, giving the authorities sweeping powers to target dissent.
Collectively, those efforts are transforming Hong Kong’s freewheeling, often messy partial democracy into a political system more closely resembling mainland China’s authoritarian system, which demands almost total obedience.
“In our country where socialist democracy is practiced, political dissent is allowed, but there is a red line here,” Xia Baolong, China’s director of Hong Kong and Macao affairs, said Monday in a strongly worded speech that outlined Beijing’s intentions. “It must not be allowed to damage the fundamental system of the country — that is, damage the leadership of the Communist Party of China.”
The central government wants Hong Kong to be run by “patriots,” Xia said, and will not let the Hong Kong government rewrite the territory’s laws, as previously expected, but will do so itself.
Hong Kong’s leader, Carrie Lam, affirmed the broad strokes of the plan, saying Tuesday that many years of intermittent protests over Hong Kong’s political future had forced the government to act.
When Britain returned Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, the territory was promised a high degree of autonomy, in addition to the preservation of its capitalist economic system and the rule of law.
But in the decades since, many among the city’s 7.5 million residents have grown wary of Beijing’s encroachment on their freedoms and unfulfilled promises of universal suffrage.
These tensions escalated in 2019 when masses of Hong Kong residents took to the streets in protests for months, calling in part for universal suffrage. They also delivered a striking rebuke of Beijing by handing pro-democracy candidates a stunning victory in local district elections that had long been dominated by the establishment.
The latest planned overhaul seeks to prevent such electoral upsets and, more important, would also give Beijing a much tighter grip on the 1,200-member committee that will decide early next year who will be the city’s chief executive for the next five years.