Posted in International

The Election Law plus the National Security Law pinch Hong Kong

 2021年3月14日

The NPC adopted the decision on electoral reform in Hong Kong.

  1. candidate patriotism, patriotism means love of the party, pre-conditions, definition and interpretation are in the Chinese Communist Party.
  2. changes to the Election Committee: removal of the social service sector (i.e., pro-democracy dominated), addition of Hong Kong members of national groups, i.e., people from the Chinese Communist Party’s CPPCC system, several of the original functional constituencies were originally fully controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.
  3. raising the threshold for CE candidates
  4. The Election Committee was added to the Legislative Council election
  5. the establishment of a new “Candidate Qualifications Committee”

This is to ensure that candidates from the democratic camp, or anyone who the CCP does not want, will not have a chance to run in the election, let alone be elected, from the beginning of the candidacy to the end of the qualification process.

Add to that the National Security Law, which arrests and prosecutes democrats at will, and certainly can arrest democrats who intend to run.

This is no different from the election of Chinese Communist Party deputies, where most individuals from the mainland who run for office end up in prison.

The Chief Executive is the mayor of a municipality or the governor of an important province, and the Legislative Council in Hong Kong has been downgraded to a rubber stamp for the NPC and a vase for the CPPCC at the level of the mainland provinces and municipalities, except that it has a complete and superficial structure of the SAR. Structure and function do not always coincide. Just as mainland China has a Constitution, but only a nominal, literal or semantic Constitution, there is a Constitution without constitutional government.

Hong Kong is now the same, with the name but not the substance of the SAR. It can be said that the transformation of Hong Kong from a “Hong Kong version of the National Security Law” to an election decision has completed the transformation of Hong Kong into an ordinary mainland city.

This change is 14 years later than I predicted in the 1990s.