Expert calls for plugging electoral loopholes in HK

A Chinese academic has called for changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system to plug loopholes so that the principle of “patriots governing Hong Kong” can be fully implemented.

Most countries examine the qualifications of their election candidates and have some basic principles to ensure the candidates running for public office are patriots, said He Junzhi, deputy head of the Chinese Association of Hong

Kong and Macao Studies.

The inadequacy of such regulations in Hong Kong gives plenty of space to anti-China rioters, said He, who is also executive deputy director of the Institute of Guangdong, Hong Kong and Macao Development Studies at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, Guangdong’s provincial capital.

He said many loopholes in Hong Kong’s electoral system were exposed during the district council election in 2019 and during some preliminary procedures in the runup to the Legislative Council election originally scheduled for last year.

Many necessary rules were not in place or had not been fully implemented, such as regulations on the oath-taking system for public employees and qualifications for election candidates, he added.

Condemning the so-called primary election organized by anti-China rioters and opposition political groups last year ahead of the original date of the Legislative Council election, He said it had neither legal effect nor constitutional basis.

Some candidates running for election threatened to veto the budget introduced by the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government before they even saw it, which was a total loss of the most basic political ethics, He said.

He said the political underrepresentation of some sectors in Hong Kong tended to amplify the voices of extreme opposition forces within the system and prevented the voices of other sectors from being fully expressed.

“This lack of proper representation leads the outside world to believe that extreme opposition forces represent the whole of Hong Kong,” he said. “The situation must be rectified.”

In recent years, some anti-China disrupters in Hong Kong, including some Legislative Council members, actively colluded with foreign forces and acted as agents of anti-China forces in Western countries, posing serious threats to national security, He said.

Any public servant who has blatantly acted as an agent of Western countries has obviously violated the principle of “patriots governing Hong Kong”, he said.

“They must be subject to legal punishment and disqualified from holding public office in Hong Kong,” He said.