BEIJING – When Beijing left last summer to suppress resistance to its government in Hong Kong, it imposed a national security law that authorized authorities to arrest dozens of democracy advocates and sent a chill through the city.
Now, less than a year later, China wants nothing less than a fundamental overhaul of the city’s normally contentious policy.
Zhang Yesui, a senior Communist Party official, announced on Thursday that China’s national legislature planned to rewrite election rules in Hong Kong to ensure that the territory was governed by patriots, which Beijing defines as people loyal to the national government and the Communist Party.
Mr. Zhang did not disclose details of the proposal. But Lau Siu-kai, a senior adviser to the Chinese leadership on Hong Kong policy, said the new approach would likely call for the creation of a government agency to examine all candidates who compete not only for the chief executive, but also for the Legislative and others. job levels, including neighborhood representatives.
The strategy seems destined to further concentrate power in the hands of the Communist Party representatives in Hong Kong and to decimate the political hopes of the territory’s already besieged opposition in the coming years.
It would also seem to mean the end of the dream of full and open elections fueled by millions of Hong Kong residents since Britain returned the territory to Chinese rule in 1997. Genuine universal suffrage – the right to direct elections – was one of the main demands of the protesters during the 2019 demonstrations that involved the city of more than 7 million people for months.
Zhang, a spokesman for China’s national legislature, the National People’s Congress, indicated that political turmoil in recent years created the need to change the country’s electoral system to ensure a system of “patriots ruling Hong Kong”.
He defended Beijing’s right to bypass local authorities in Hong Kong by enacting such legislation, just as the central government did in imposing the national security law in June. The congress will discuss a draft plan for changes to the electoral system when it meets for a week-long session starting on Friday.
Electoral restrictions are likely to further stifle the opposition, which has been suffering from arrests and detentions since Beijing imposed the security law in June. On Sunday, in the most energetic use of the security law so far, the police accused 47 of Hong Kong’s most prominent democracy advocates of conspiracy to commit subversion after organizing the election primaries in July.
Democratic advocates hoped to win a majority in the local legislature in last September’s elections and then block government budgets, a move that could force Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam to step down. The government subsequently postponed these elections. But city prosecutors said the activists’ strategy of trying to remove the chief executive was tantamount to interfering with government functions, a crime under security law.
Opposition politicians have defended their tactics as legitimate and commonplace in democratic systems and argue that they are only fighting to preserve the relative autonomy of the city, promised under a policy known as “one country, two systems”.
But some of Beijing’s staunchest allies in the city have more broadly accused the pro-democracy camp of putting Hong Kong’s future at risk 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, former Hong Kong chief executive, said in a statement. “In Hong Kong, by pushing the envelope of democracy too hard and trying to destroy Beijing’s authority, for example, by appointing the chief executive, many of the so-called Democrats have in practice become separatists.”
Ronny Tong, a former pro-democracy legislator who now serves in the office of the Hong Kong chief executive, said he hoped Beijing would not make the candidacy of opposition figures impossible.
“If you overdo it, which is something I don’t want to see, we would become a one-party legislature,” he said. “This would not be in line with the spirit of a country, two systems and, therefore, I warned that there must be moderation for those who want to listen.”
Still, he acknowledged that Hong Kong officials have little role to play. “We just have to wait and see.”
Keith Bradsher reported from Beijing and Austin Ramzy from Hong Kong. Vivian Wang contributed with reports from Hong Kong.