BEIJING – When Beijing wanted to destroy the resistance to its rule in Hong Kong last summer, it introduced a national security law that allowed the authorities to arrest numerous advocates for democracy and sent a chill across the city.
Now, less than a year later, China wants nothing less than a fundamental overhaul of the city’s normally controversial politics.
Zhang Yesui, a senior Communist Party official, announced on Thursday that China’s national legislature plans to rewrite Hong Kong’s election rules to ensure the area is ruled by patriots, who define Beijing as loyal to the national government and the Communist Party.
Mr. Zhang did not release details about the proposal. But Lau Siu-kai, a senior adviser to the Chinese leadership on Hong Kong policy, said the new approach would likely set up the establishment of a government agency to veterinarian each candidate, not just for CEO, but also for the legislature and others. office levels, including neighborhood representatives.
The strategy seeks to further concentrate the power in the hands of the representative of the Communist Party in Hong Kong and diminish the political hope of the already beleagured opposition of the area for years to come.
It also seems to put an end to the dream of full and open elections cultivated by millions of Hong Kong residents in the years since Britain returned the area to Chinese government in 1997. Sincere universal suffrage – the right to direct election – was one of the main demands of protesters during the 2019 demonstrations that engulfed the city with more than 7 million people for months.
Mr. Zhang, a spokesman for China’s national legislature, the National People’s Congress, indicated that political unrest in recent years had created the need to change the region’s electoral system to ensure a system of ‘Hong Kong-ruled patriots’ .
He defended Beijing’s right to bypass local officials in Hong Kong in adopting such legislation, just as the central government did in June enacting the National Security Act. Congress will discuss a draft plan for changes to the electoral system when it meets for a week-long session beginning Friday.
The election restrictions are likely to further stifle the opposition, which has been plagued by arrests and detentions since Beijing enacted the Security Act in June. Police on Sunday, in the most forceful use of security legislation to date, charged 47 of Hong Kong’s most prominent democratic advocates with conspiracy to undermine after holding an election in July.
Democratic campaigners had hoped to win a majority in the local legislature in September last year, and then block government budgets, a move that could force Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam to resign. The government later postponed the election. City prosecutors said the activists’ strategy of trying to oust the chief executive amounted to interfering with government functions, a violation under security legislation.
Opposition politicians defend their tactics as legitimate and commonplace in democratic systems, arguing that they are simply fighting to preserve the city’s relative autonomy, promised under a policy known as ‘one country, two systems’.
But some of Beijing’s strongest allies in the city have accused the democracy camp more of endangering Hong Kong’s future by testing the limits of the Chinese government and forgetting that the city was not an independent country.
“We are not another Singapore,” Leung Chun-ying, a former Hong Kong chief executive, said in a statement. “In Hong Kong, the so-called Democrats pushed through the democracy envelope too far and tried to undermine the authority of Beijing, for example by appointing the CEO, separately.”
Ronny Tong, a former pro-democracy lawmaker who now serves in Hong Kong’s chief executive’s cabinet, said he hoped Beijing would not make it impossible for opposition figures to present themselves.
“If you overdo it, which I do not want to see, we become a one-party legislature,” he said. “It does not align with the spirit of one country, two systems, and therefore I have issued a warning to those who want to listen.”
Yet he acknowledged that Hong Kong officials had little role to play. “We just have to wait and see.”
Keith Bradsher reports from Beijing and Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong. Vivian Wang reporting from Hong Kong.