China Limits Hong Kong’s Elections Because Democracy Activists Kept Winning

March 12th, 2021

Awake Goy

The Chinese leadership is drastically increasing control on Hong Kong’s governance by introducing a mechanism to vet candidates’ loyalty to Beijing and reducing the share of directly elected lawmakers.

The proposed change, passed in China’s rubber-stamp parliament on Thursday with zero objections and one abstention from 2,896 national lawmakers, is expected to keep the names of democracy activists out of the ballots before they are put to a vote in Hong Kong.

Although pro-Beijing politicians have controlled the city’s executive and legislative branches since the former British colony was handed over to Chinese rule in 1997, the victory of democracy activists in direct elections have both embarrassed and alarmed the establishment.

In the 2012 legislative elections, pro-democracy candidates took 18 of the 35 seats that were directly elected through geographical constituencies. And during the elections of district councilors in Nov. 2019, held in the midst of a violent protest movement, about 57 percent of the 3 million votes were cast to politicians supporting the protests.

Chinese officials say it was “loopholes” in Hong Kong’s electoral systems that led to those victories.

“We cannot allow the anti-China, Hong Kong-destroying people to continue blatantly sitting inside the legislative chamber,” Zhang Xiaoming, a senior Chinese official in charge of Hong Kong, said on Friday. “Even one is too many.”