The Director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, Xia Baolong, recently said that he needs to “refine” Hong Kong’s electoral system. Public opinion generally predicts that the National People’s Congress (NPC) would forcefully and drastically change the way elections work in Hong Kong to ensure that the pro-democratic camp’s landslide victory in the District Councils (DC), the Legislative Council (LegCo), and the Election Committee would never happen again. The fact that the system is proposed to be revised after their defeat in the elections inevitably makes people feel that they simply cannot lose. The sad thing is that in the history of Hong Kong’s elections, such operations have long been commonplace.

The city’s electoral system has always been inseparable from political factors in the macro-environment. Excluding the Urban Council elections before the 1980s when public participation was very limited, the electoral history of Hong Kong can be traced back to the DC elections in 1982. The establishment of the DC was a response to the advent of the “1997 deadline,” when the British administration of Hong Kong began to develop representative politics in the city. Also in preparation for “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong” after the 1997 handover, there was a widespread demand for the introduction of a direct-election system in the 1988 LegCo elections, but this was rejected by a secret agreement between China and Britain. In other words, it is not something new for the Chinese government to interfere with Hong Kong’s electoral system, as it has been doing so even before 1997.

Since then, Hong Kong’s electoral system has been closely tied to Chinese politics. The 1991 LegCo election was the first-ever direct election in Hong Kong history in which a two-seat constituency two-vote system was adopted with two seats to be filled in each constituency. In the end, people cast all two votes for the democrats under the fear brought by the crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing, giving the democrats a huge victory. In 1995, the last LegCo election under British rule, the single-seat, single-vote system was used. Under the political circumstances at the time, the pro-democracy camp was able to secure a large number of seats, winning for the first and only time in Hong Kong’s history a pro-democratic majority in the legislature.

After 1997, of course, the Chinese government did not want history to repeat itself, so it proposed to change the electoral system. The options under consideration at that time were the proportional representation and a multi-seat, single-vote system, the latter of which was abandoned by the rest of the world due to the numerous implementation problems. Ultimately, the SAR government ostensibly chose the proportional representation system, but over many years of operation, it was actually no different from the multi-seat, single-vote system. In other words, parties are allowed to submit multiple lists in the same constituency, and the candidate listed first on the selected top lists will be elected. The multi-seat, single-vote system which has been criticized by various foreign countries for its problems, such as the inadequate representation of public interests and strategic voting, has also occurred in Hong Kong’s LegCo elections.

Why did the SAR government opt for this type of electoral voting system in the LegCo, which is described as the proportional representation system but is in fact a multi-seat, single-vote system? Firstly, under this system, the winning power of seats depends on the ability to allocate votes, which is beneficial to the resourceful pro-establishment camp. Moreover, as the system incentivizes the splitting of lists, it also aggravated internal division within the democratic camp. There have been many analyses by Hong Kong election scholars on how this system has effectively suppressed party politics among democrats.

If this is the case, it is not difficult to understand why the Chinese government was so concerned about the democratic camp’s primary election. The primary election can bypass the issues of vote allocation and list splitting so that the system is ineffective in suppressing the democrats. The Chinese government wants to change the LegCo electoral system at this time because the democrats have finally learned how to counteract the system.

On the contrary, the single-seat, single-vote system has always been used in DC elections because the pro-establishment camp’s “freebies” can gain a relative advantage in small constituencies. After the democrats’ huge victory in the last election, the government may introduce another electoral system in the district councils, with the same logic behind it. As soon as the Democrats learned how to leverage the rules of the game, they would go and change the rules of the game.

It is not a bad thing that the electoral system is revised in response to practical issues. Hong Kong political scholars have long made proposals on the format of future universal suffrage for the legislature, agreeing that there are indeed problems with the current system. Reforms are supposed to make things better, not worse, but the arguments being put forward are hard to understand.

For example, using “patriotism” as a red line for candidacy is quite baffling when you consider that Article 67 of the Basic Law itself stipulates that non-Chinese citizens can serve as legislators. Do you expect a member of the council who holds a French passport to be patriotic? For China or France?

Article 79 of the Basic Law explicitly states the disqualification of members of the council who have violated the law, and there are precedents of the government using the National Security Law to prosecute political figures as well. If there is a need to set up a separate body to approve the eligibility of legislators, does it imply that China cannot even trust its own Basic Law and the National Security Law? How ridiculous is this?

Finally, since it is a fact that the system has crumbled, what else can the people of Hong Kong do? I hope the democrats can quickly come up with a proposal that addresses public sentiment and objective facts. If they still want to run in the election, they should make it clear that they are not doing so for the sake of “rebelling within the system,” which may not be very convincing in the eyes of the public. It would be better to declare that they will only run for elections in the future solely to use the resources from members’ subsidies to take care of those who have been arrested and that they will only hold a nominal meeting once every three months to retain their seats.

(Leung Kai-chi, current affairs commentator)

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