Pan-Demic

Beijing keeps pressing Hong Kong hard. The question: will Hong Kongers press back harder?

With her pro-Beijing allies facing a wipe-out at the polls, Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Carrie Lam wants to postpone September elections for the Legislative Council elections by a year. The excuse would be a surging wave of Covid-19 cases during the last week.

Hong Kong did register a triple-digit rise of Covid-19 cases for the eighth day running to push its total above 3,000. Since January, there have been 24 deaths. That in a city of 7.5 million people, which is not that high. Hong Kong is 101st in the world in cases per million.

In April, South Korea held a successful election amid a Covid-19 outbreak. Given Lam is taking tough social distancing measures to get the medical situation under control, one year also seems like a very long-time for the delay as Hong Kong elections use long established procedures.

Hilariously, Lam would supposedly ask China’s rubberstamp parliament the National People’s Congress Standing Committee to give her decision a legal veneer. It’s funny because Beijing is now running Hong Kong, anyway. As we said, it brought in Luo Huining in January to run the so-called Liaison Office — which under the Basic Law is supposed to be a strictly consultative post between the Chief Executive and Beijing. But after a year of violence over Lam’s foolish extradition law, which she not only couldn’t contain, but made increasingly worse, Beijing brought in Luo to run the Liaison Office with orders to use it to run Hong Kong. Luo pulls Lam’s puppet strings. Postponing the election is his call.

There’s a few reasons. Beijing expects their allies, who currently have a majority in LegCo, to lose most of their seats. They got a preview in November, when the Pan-Democrats won a landslide victory in municipal-level district council elections. It ended any notion among Beijing’s stooges that a “silent majority” was sick of the protests, and wanted order imposed.

Keep in mind, the LegCo was engineered in 1997 to make it near impossible for the Pan-Dems to win a majority; they’ve never controlled the most seats. Almost half of the seats are “business constituencies” controlled by Li Ka-shing and his tycoon friends. If you want to understand the utterly Byzantine way in which members are elected, here’s a primer: (that the British had anything to do with setting-up this is a disgrace)

The Pan-Dems say any postponement would be “a political move” to keep control of the legislative agenda for another year, and spare their pro-establishment rivals from defeat.

“I wonder if the government will make use of this gap year to disqualify some of the candidates from the opposition camp,” Civic Party member Tanya Chan said.

That’s also certainly part of what Beijing gets by playing for time. Prominent democracy activist Joshua Wong was one of several potential candidates asked to respond to a series of questions from election officials looking for reasons to keep them off the ballot. Wong was banned from running in last year’s municipal elections.

With so many Hong Kongers looking to emigrate, Beijing may hope that demographic change is in its favor. Note that every year, it moves another 53,000 Mainlanders with no troublesome legacy views about democracy and political freedom into the city.

Ultimately, Beijing would rather not have elections at all. Even laughably rigged ones like this give people in Shanghai and Shenzhen ideas about participating in who governs them.

That’s why Beijing definitely would have made the LegCo go away when the Basic Law expires in 2047. Given it has all but done away with the Basic Law when it imposed the draconian national security law in the spring that ended political right of freedom and assembly in Hong Kong, and has taken the token international backlash, getting rid of LegCo is an obvious next step. The goal here may be to never hold another election in Hong Kong.

If you’re a Hong Konger who doesn’t want to leave home, if your right to vote in even rigged elections is gone, what choice do you have left to make your voice heard? Dark days ahead, indeed.