Hong Kong’s decision to ban 12 pro-democracy candidates from running for office sets a radical precedent and may signal the end of significant political opposition in the city.
The group disqualified from contesting the upcoming city legislative council elections includes prominent student activist Joshua Wong, but also moderates and four incumbents, such as Alvin Yeung, who represents Hong Kong accountants.
More radical candidates have been barred from running earlier, and others have been barred from taking office after winning. But the latest rulings suggest that the authorities even want to remove moderate dissent from the corridors of power. Many had been selected in primary elections that attracted hundreds of thousands of voters.
“Clearly, the Chinese Communist Party decided to take this opportunity of the upcoming elections to show the people of Hong Kong and the rest of the world that they have redesigned the entire game,” said Kenneth Chan Ka-lok, a political scientist at Hong Kong Baptist. University and former pro-democratic legislator.
“It is no longer one country, two systems,” he said, referring to the system agreed upon before Hong Kong’s handover of British colonial rule, which was intended to guarantee the city substantial autonomy until 2047. “If the regime cannot even bear the moderates … we are moving very rapidly towards a one-party system in Hong Kong. “
The disqualifications were made by low-level returning officers, but probably sanctioned at much higher levels, said Kai Chi Leung, a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Journalism and Communication.
“In last year’s district council election, we had a returning officer who was unwilling to disqualify a candidate and had to ask for sick leave so that someone else could take his place (and sign the disqualification document)” , said.
“It is likely that steps have been taken to select the officers who return this round so that such an embarrassing situation does not happen again.”
Reasons for the bans included opposition to the controversial national security law that Beijing brought to the city last month and efforts to pressure foreign governments to impose sanctions for human rights abuses.
Those campaigns came before the national security law was in effect. But in a troubling indication of how widely authorities can apply it, a returning official said the previous legal conduct gave an idea of the “true intentions” of the candidates, leading to their disqualification.
“This is a scandalous political purge of the Hong Kong Democrats,” Chris Patten, the last British governor of Hong Kong, said in a statement. “Obviously, it is now illegal to believe in democracy … this is the kind of behavior that would be expected in a police state.”
There is little room for appeal; Previous attempts to void the disqualification were successful only for technical reasons, and authorities will have followed the procedure carefully this year.
The disqualifications came in the same week that a prominent tenured professor was fired for his campaign for democracy and the arrest of four young activists facing life in prison under the national security law.
There are also reports that the elections could be delayed, leaving more room for authorities to effectively dismantle the political system that has given Hong Kong a limited form of democracy and autonomy for 23 years.
“It could mean the end of the opposition within the system, as electoral laws could be completely rewritten so that it is impossible or irrelevant for the opposition to run again,” Leung said.
