An expanded panel dominated by Beijing loyalists will have the power to pick almost half of Hong Kong’s legislature, on top of its exclusive votes to select the city’s leader, under drastic political reform imposed by China on Tuesday.

The Election Committee is expected to include more pro-Beijing forces as it is enlarged from 1,200 members to 1,500, according to a proposal passed by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee in Beijing.

It will in future decide on 40 of the 90 seats on the Legislative Council, which is also being expanded from the current 70 seats, based on Beijing’s stipulations.

Those 40 seats are to form the Election Committee’s new constituency in Legco, and will be in addition to its conventional role of selecting only the Hong Kong chief executive.

Geographical constituencies in Legco will shrink in consequence: only 20 seats will be returned in direct elections, as opposed to the present 35. Six other seats occupied by district councilors will also be removed. Hong Kong’s district councils are overwhelmingly pro-democracy after a landslide victory, of 392 out of the 452 seats, in a 2019 election.

Functional constituencies in Legco, also known as trade seats, will have 30 members from professional and industry groups, slightly up from 29. The reformed electoral system will have corporate voters, instead of individuals, selecting 21 representatives. Only nine seats will be voted by individuals within their related sectors.

Individual votes will be abolished in some sectors where the pro-democracy camp has an edge, such as information technology and catering.

The Election Committee will have a new role here as well. Election hopefuls must secure two to four nominations from each of the five sectors under the committee, apart from 10 to 20 nominations from their own functional constituencies.

Beijing’s political reform also sets new restrictions on democratic groups, by requiring companies and other organizations to have been established for at least three years before being qualified as trade-seat voters. This will bar groups that were formed after the 2019 pro-democratic protests.

Some restaurant owners previously held votes in the catering functional constituency through their licenses, which are registered on an individual basis. They were worried about losing their balloting status to corporate voters, said Gordon Lam, convenor of an alliance of pro-democracy restaurants.

Herbert Chow, a retailer of children’s wear and a pro-democracy hopeful for a legislative election last September that was later deferred, said it would be hard to predict if he could secure nominations from the Election Committee required for the upcoming polls.

Another contestant, Wong Ho-wa of the IT sector, said the drastic reform marked a backpedaling of democracy that further narrowed the room for pro-democracy politicians to maneuver. The camp would also find it hard to field substitute candidates.

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