The media reported that Beijing plans to abolish 117 district councilor seats on the 1,200-person Chief Executive (CE) Election Committee and that the relevant agenda will be discussed at China’s Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPCSC) as early as this week. The report also said that Beijing’s aim is to disable the opposition’s ability to influence the 2022 CE election. The seats will be filled by representatives from other sectors, or by Hong Kong members of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Beijing also plans to scrap the seats in the District Council (Second) functional constituency at the Legislative Council (LegCo), also known as “super district council.” In addition, in order to weaken the power of the pan-democratic District Councils (DC), Beijing plans to carry out large-scale disqualifications (DQ) of non-establishment DC members whose actions or speeches were deemed to have violated their oath of office.

In the face of the huge defeat in Hong Kong, Beijing is deploying a bottom-line mentality, imagining the situation to be at its “worst” and then dealing with these political risks in advance. From the perspective of Beijing’s bottom-line mindset, the important thing in Hong Kong is to strictly prevent unvented public opinion generated by the anti-ELAB movement from becoming a propellant and catalyst for the pan-democratic election. The landslide victory of the Democrats in last year’s DC elections was a shock to Beijing. Therefore, in order to prevent the Democrats from achieving a 35+ majority out of the 70 seats in the LegCo, Beijing postponed the LegCo election in the name of the epidemic to redeploy. The worst scenario for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is to lose the control of the LegCo and the power to control the CE Election Committee, and thereby be subject to local business power, which is tantamount to losing political power.

Two layers of defense have been formulated from this bottom line. The first is the comprehensive adoption of DQ that allows for the prosecution of breaches of oath during a member’s term of office. This is comparable to the Council of Guardians under Iran’s theocratic system with the Central Leading Group on Hong Kong and Macau Affairs as the highest authority to oversee and examine the qualifications of legislators at all levels, and to conduct oath checks whenever DQ is necessary. The second line of defense is to simply withdraw the democratic arrangement made after 1997, mainly the political reform promoted by Donald Tsang during his term of office, and the 2010 political reform package approved by Hu Jintao. The proposal at that time was to expand the political role and participation of elected DC members who have a broad electorate base. Aside from having District Councillors serve as members of the CE Election Committee, the five functional constituency seats would be nominated by elected DC members, paving the way for implementing universal suffrage.

Originally, the system of representative government proposed during the British administration was to conform to the trend of social development and to integrate the pressure groups and the new generation of activism that emerged in the 1970s, gradually turning them into the “establishment,” and successfully stabilizing the political order in the post-transition period. Beijing also recognized the need to develop democracy in a gradual and orderly manner. However, after the handover of sovereignty for more than a decade, Beijing was unwilling to give up its control over the LegCo and the CE after Donald Tsang’s fight for a timetable for universal suffrage. The Chinese government made a series of arguments about the right to comprehensive governance, national security, and one country before two systems, and then presented a birdcage democracy proposal. As a result, both sides moved farther and farther apart, and the unresolved issue of democratization has led to the ongoing political instability since Occupy Central in 2014.

Perhaps Beijing has concluded that the epidemic has quashed civil rights and made it difficult to revive any anti-government movement, so it is moving in full speed to implement the “Iranian model” in Hong Kong to establish a controlled democracy. The question is, will the epidemic last forever? Can an international city continue to operate in a state of near martial law after the epidemic is over? If the democratic system regresses back to the state it was in when sovereignty was transferred more than two decades ago, and the political system is unable to attract social forces or resolve political conflicts, it would only become a prolonged social movement on the streets. Unless the CCP believes it can maintain the current pre-martial law regime of “freezing” civil rights for the next five to ten years, Hong Kong will not return to normal order.

If there is any deep-rooted conflict in Hong Kong, it is the huge gap between obsolete politics and advanced society. After all, with the development of information technology and population intelligence, the backward and patchwork political system cannot accommodate the new age, resulting in the formation of political blood clots. Not knowing that Beijing would further narrow the blood vessels in order to achieve the effect of short-term control of political risks, the price would be a stroke and paralysis for Hong Kong.

(Lau Sai Leung, political commentator)

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