By James Pomfret
HONG KONG (Reuters) – Since Britain returned Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, opposition activists have been trying to bring full democracy to the city, believing that China will keep its promise to one day allow universal suffrage. to choose city leader.
The campaign was hit the hardest on Friday. Chinese parliamentarians in Beijing have unveiled details of a plan to improve the political structure of China’s freest city, according to critics, but have killed the promise of one vote.
China’s move comes months after a comprehensive national law was passed on the Asian financial center, combating disagreement and more than a year after months of sometimes violent anti-China, pro-democracy protests marching on the city.
“There is not much we can do to effectively change what they decide,” Democratic Party leader Lo Kin-hei told Reuters.
The structural changes will include raising the city’s legislative seats from 70 to 90, some of which must now be decided by a committee of Beijing loyalists. Seats likely to be controlled by Democrats will be scrapped or reduced.
A 1,200-person committee to elect Hong Kong’s leader will be expanded – a system controlled by Chinese ‘patriots’ will be ‘improved’, according to Wang Chen, a deputy chair of China’s national standing committee People’s Congress.
Wang told reporters that the move, which would reinstate parts of Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law, would consolidate China’s ‘overall jurisdiction’ over the city and create ‘deep problems’ once and for all. rectify.
In the basic law, Beijing promised universal suffrage as an ultimate goal for Hong Kong.
But Friday’s movements are now stifling the risk of any revival of the democracy movement, founded after Beijing’s violent repression of protest democrats in and around Tiananmen Square in 1989.
With many prominent Democrats now in jail or being forced into exile, including Lo’s predecessor, Wu Chi-wai, who was denied bail this week along with dozens of others due to a suspected conspiracy to “overthrow” the government, the Democrats are trying to exploit their grassroots level. networks to keep their ideals alive.
“Confidence in the system is fading … and that’s not a good sign if we want a more peaceful society that does not allow different voices to be in harmony,” Lo told Reuters.
‘Move BACK’
Another veteran Democratic campaigner said Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who became head of the Communist Party in 2012, changed the trajectory of Hong Kong’s move to full democracy, contrary to the promise of China’s deceased leader, Deng Xiaoping, to allow Hong Kong people to “rule” Hong Kong.
“This is a great tragedy,” said the source, who did not want to identify due to the sensitivity of the political atmosphere. “They move backwards, not forwards, and take us back to a dark, dark place in time.”
As the opposition is likely to become a permanent minority in a remodeled legislature, the move to China’s one-party model will create openings for new patriotic factions, say critics and some Beijing politicians.
Given its rise to a global superpower, China now has the power and resources to expand its autocratic government despite criticism and sanctions from the West.
Some see Hong Kong’s British common law system as the last bastion against China’s sharpened authoritarian grip.
More than 50 Democratic attorneys have pleaded guilty in a city court this week, some of whom are facing potential life sentences under the National Security Act promulgated directly by the Chinese parliament last June.
Two Democrats, veteran activist Leung Kwok-hung and former law professor Benny Tai, had to be transported between two courtrooms for simultaneous hearings, while others were taken to hospital after falling ill during marathon sessions.
Under the security law, the accused are based on bail – which according to critics overturns the common law tradition.
Hong Kong returned to China in 1997 under a formula ‘one country, two systems’, which guarantees its way of life, freedoms and independent legal system.
Barrister Martin Lee, 82, who is called the city’s father of democracy, wrote in a 2014 New York Times editorial that universal suffrage was the only way to honor Deng’s formula ‘one country, two systems’ and ‘to prevent his blueprint a litany of broken promises.
The current moves could be a final departure from that.
“This is now too much of a correction,” a senior Western diplomat told Reuters.
“If you try to pull back control, there is a danger that they will overdo it and kill the goose that lays the golden egg.”
(Additional reporting by Anne Marie Roantree; editing by Nick Macfie)