China’s National People’s Congress passed new rules into law that target how elections are conducted in Hong Kong.
China is intensifying its crackdown on what’s left of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, this time by taking steps to remake the territory’s electoral rules to help guarantee power for Beijing loyalists. China’s National People’s Congress passed the new rules into law with a nearly unanimous vote during its annual meeting this week. The changes directly target how elections are conducted in Hong Kong, ensuring that pro-Beijing loyalists have the advantage in any elections and further sidelining pro-democracy opposition politicians (those who haven’t yet been arrested). The goal, as China’s Premier Li Keqiang said, is to guarantee that there are only “patriots governing Hong Kong.” It moves the territory even further away from the promise of true universal suffrage, one of the demands of the 2019 protests. This electoral overhaul, coming on the heels of the national security law passed this summer that Beijing is using to stifle the pro-democracy opposition in Hong Kong, shows just how committed China is to cementing its control over the city-state. It is an effort that escalated following the massive and sustained pro-democracy movement in 2019. This latest move, experts say, is yet another erosion of “one country, two systems,” the principle that is supposed to govern Hong Kong’s quasi-independence until 2047. The “one country” part means it is officially part of China, while the “two systems” part gave it a degree of autonomy, including rights like freedom of the press that are absent in mainland China. “‘One country, two systems’ is over,” Carl Minzer, an expert in Chinese law at Fordham University Law School, told me in an email. “Politically, Hong Kong as we know it is finished.” How Hong Kong got here Protests erupted in Hong Kong in 2019 in response to a controversial extradition bill that critics feared would allow the Chinese government to arbitrarily detain Hongkongers. The fight over this legislation fueled months of protests, some tense and violent. The bill was withdrawn in September 2019, but by then the demonstrations had transformed into a much larger fight for the future of Hong Kong and its democratic institutions. The Hong Kong government and police crackdown against the protests fueled opposition figures.
