Beijing had already wrested much control, but new changes to Hong Kong’s electoral process sound a death knell for democracy in the city, Joy Park writes, calling for international pressure on China in response.
Clues had come in a recent speech by Xia Baolong, the head of the Chinese Communist Party’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office. Xia stressed that all three branches of the Hong Kong government — executive, legislative, and judicial — must be run by “patriots.” He also called for implementing “patriotism” in Hong Kong’s official requirement for public servants, so that it can be better enforced in the future. Last week, China’s rubber-stamp parliament approved those changes, as expected. (The Hong Kong government is now debating them, though this process is expected to be a formality.) The NPC didn’t change rules surrounding Hong Kong’s judiciary, but given that Xia had also mentioned applying a similar “patriotism” standard to Hong Kong’s judges, we can probably expect Beijing will apply more pressure to Hong Kong’s court system, in addition to the electoral changes it just enacted. Patriotism has long been equated with loyalty to the party in China, where the Chinese Communist Party is propagandized as synonymous with China, the country. To be a patriot in China is to support the party’s policy and direction without question; critique of the party is conversely portrayed as betraying the country. While this idea of blind patriotism has been fundamentally incorporated into mainland China’s society through decades of indoctrination, it is often rejected in Hong Kong, where freedom of speech and freedom of political participation were the norm until recently. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping’s rule, the CCP increasingly sees Hong Kong’s democratic foundation as a hindrance to its total control of the city.
