Hong Kong, a vibrant international hub, has proudly led an important position of the world’s freest economies for 25 years. Now it is not even available.
In the latest issue of the Heritage Foundation’s annual “Index of Economic Freedom”, which was released on Thursday, Hong Kong was excluded from the list it once dominated because its policies are ‘controlled from Beijing’.
The news comes on the eve of China’s annual National People’s Congress, which kicked off in Beijing on Friday, with greater control over the area apparently on the agenda.
Last year, Beijing introduced a comprehensive national security law that has since been enacted, which has put the global financial center on an authoritarian path more strongly, despite months of fierce protests.
The United States, its allies and international human rights organizations have strongly criticized China over the law, which it said undermined the city’s autonomy and helped Beijing destroy differences of opinion.
Now the Chinese parliament is using rubber-stamped ways to “improve” the electoral system in Hong Kong to ensure that there are “patriots who rule Hong Kong,” Zhang Yesui, the body’s spokesman, said on Thursday. This confirms widespread reports of impending further changes to the city’s political structure.
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“Developments in recent years have shown that much of Hong Kong’s policies are ultimately controlled from Beijing,” Anthony Kim, editor of the Index of Economic Freedom, told NBC News.
Kim said that “the loss of political freedom and autonomy” in the city over the past two years has “made Hong Kong in many ways almost indistinguishable from other major Chinese trade centers.” However, he noted that both Hong Kong and Macau enjoy greater economic freedoms than cities on the mainland.
The index report added that Hong Kong and Macau would be considered ahead in the context of China’s ranking, which came in at 107 out of 178 countries – among countries that are “mostly unfree”.
The first place in the index rankings, produced by the right-wing Washington-based think tank The Heritage Foundation, was snatched up by nearby Singapore in place of the second consecutive year.
The United States finished 20th.
Hong Kong Financial Secretary Paul Chan Mo-po pushed back against the rankings on Thursday.
He said Hong Kong’s “core economic competitiveness” remained strong under the “one country, two systems” arrangement, which has regulated its relations with mainland China since the end of the British colonial rule in 1997.
“I do not agree that our central government has taken over our economic policies,” he told an online panel organized by The South China Morning Post.
“The decision to exclude Hong Kong from the report is not justified. It seems to me that when they came to the decision, it had to be clouded by their ideological tendency and political bias.”
But a separate report published this week states that Beijing was responsible for the “demolition of Hong Kong’s freedoms and legal autonomy” and that it defends human rights – accusations he regularly denies.
The annual report of Freedom House, a Democratic watchdog group in the United States, found that global freedom is declining in general – with nearly 75 percent of the world’s population in democratically declining countries last year.
China, India and the United States, which faced a retiring leader on January 6 disputing election results and an outbreak of political violence with a riot at the Capitol, were among the countries that had suffered democratic decline .
“Right now, Hong Kong is at a challenging point … Time will tell how the city can regain its vitality,” said Anthony Cheung Bing-leung, academic and former housing minister in Hong Kong. “It is to be expected that some observers may conclude that Hong Kong is no different from cities on the mainland.”
Authorities said the security law was needed to restore stability after the protests against the government and against China that shook the area for months in 2019.
The law, which reformed the economic and political landscape of Hong Kong, was first announced before the large and highly choreographed detailed piece of the Chinese political calendar, known as the ‘two sessions’.
The event was delayed by two months last year due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
This year’s congress kicked off on Friday with about 5,000 delegates from the Chinese Communist Party expected to fill the Great Hall of the People – built under Mao Zedong.
Beijing is likely to use the 13th National People’s Congress to show its efforts for economic growth after the pandemic, but China viewers will be looking for clues from leader Xi Jinping’s pursuit of a competitive advantage against Washington.
Hong Kong is one of the many hotspots for tensions between the United States and China, with Foreign Minister Antony Blinken saying on Wednesday that China represents the “greatest geopolitical test of the 21st century”.
He added that it was the only country with enough power to jeopardize the current international order.
“Our relationship with China will be competitive when it should be, cooperation when it can be and contradictory when it should be,” he said in a speech outlining the Biden government’s vision on foreign policy.
Reuters contributed to this report.