HONG KONG – China’s rubber-stamp Parliament voted today for sweeping changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system – including powers to veto candidates – as Beijing moves to ensure only “patriots” run the city following huge pro-democracy rallies.
Beijing has acted decisively to dismantle Hong Kong’s limited democratic pillars after massive and sometimes violent protests coursed through the financial hub in 2019.
At last year’s meeting of the National People’s Congress, the Communist Party leadership imposed a draconian national security law on the finance hub that has since been weaponised against the democracy movement.
Dozens of campaigners have been jailed, smothering protests in a city which had enjoyed greater political freedoms than on the authoritarian mainland under a system dubbed “one country, two systems”.
Today, only one member of the 2,896-strong National People's Congress abstained in the vote, which critics say will hammer another nail in the coffin of Hong Kong’s democracy movement.
The decision aims to place the power of governing the city “firmly in the hands of forces that are patriotic and love Hong Kong”, parliamentary spokesman Wang Chen said in Beijing at the opening of the congress on Friday.
Senior Chinese officials have since made clear loyalty to the Communist Party will be key to deciding if a Hong Konger is a “patriot”.
Chinese state media today sketched out some of the key provisions of the law, which will still need to be written and then promulgated under the country’s opaque political system.
Those include an Election Committee which votes for the leader to reflect Hong Kong’s “realities and representative of the overall interests of its society,” according to Xinhua.
The committee would be fattened out to 1,500 representatives, up from 1,200.
In addition, the law will bring in a “candidate qualification review committee”, as well as boost the number of seats in the LegCo – Hong Kong’s legislature – from 70 to 90.
It was not immediately clear how many of the seats would be directly elected by Hong Kong’s people.
But the initial details show China plans to reduce the number of directly elected officials in both the LegCo and the committee that chooses the chief executive, said Willy Lam, professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s Centre for China Studies.
“It’s a fail-safe formula to ensure only people deemed patriots will be on those two important bodies,” he said.
“From Beijing’s point of view, members of the pro-democracy coalition are not considered to be patriotic.” – AFP, March 11, 2021
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