Next Sunday (19), the 90-member Hong Kong legislative assembly will be elected in the first house election since a series of changes to the electoral process were imposed by Beijing in the first half of this year. As a result, the proportion of the territory’s population that says they are willing to go to the polls is the smallest in decades.
A poll released in late November found that just 52 percent of Hong Kong people plan to vote next Sunday, the lowest since 1991, when the territory still belonged to the UK. In response, the government, which considers it a crime to encourage a boycott of the election or a null vote, started a campaign to encourage voter turnout on the 19th.
The election for the house was scheduled for September 2020, before the implementation of the new rules, but was postponed due to the pandemic.
The number of seats in the Legislative has increased from 70 to 90, but the number of directly elected representatives will drop from 35 to 20. Another 40 will go to legislators chosen by an electoral committee, appointed as pro-Beijing and which previously could only define the head of the Hong Kong Executive. The occupants of the remaining 30 will be elected by representatives of economic interest groups, such as banks and commerce, also favorable to Beijing.
To increase control of the Chinese regime, a separate commission has the power to analyze and veto candidates for the legislative assembly, members of the electoral committee or candidates for chief executive, which has been used as a strategy to bar applicants who do not follow the booklet of communist dictatorship – earlier this year, dictator Xi Jinping said Hong Kong can only maintain its long-term stability and security if it ensures that “patriots rule Hong Kong.”
Changes in electoral legislation followed the implementation of Hong Kong’s national security law in June 2020, which has served as a basis for increasing repression against opponents and activists.
This was a response to the pro-democracy protests that took place between 2019 and 2020. Another motivation for China to impose electoral changes was the defeat of pro-Beijing candidates in the 2019 Hong Kong district council election.
In an editorial, the Wall Street Journal called the legislative election a “farce”, which demonstrates how Beijing is “crushing the autonomy it promised” to Hong Kong and “trying to impose its political repression even abroad”. Hong Kong Secretary for Constitutional and Interior Affairs Erick Tsang Kwok-wai threatened to sue the newspaper.
Nathan Law Kwun-chung, an exiled activist in Britain who in 2020 appeared on Time magazine’s list of the 100 most influential people in the world, recommended in an interview with Reuters that the people of Hong Kong “ignore” the election to the legislative assembly.
“We must not give any legitimacy to the election, we must not pretend that we will have an election – it will just be a selection made by Beijing,” he criticized.
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