Hong Kong saw a record-low voter turnout for Sunday’s closely watched District Council elections, after a process that saw only those with “patriotic” credentials allowed to run for office.
According to the Hong Kong elections website, voter turnout was just 27.5%. That contrasts with a 71.2% turnout in the last district elections in 2019, according to the Hong Kong Free Press, a Hong Kong-based activist news website.
It was the first District Council elections held after the Beijing government passed a stringent new security law for the onetime British colony, an attempt to rein in Hong Kong’s boisterous tradition of local democracy and the enclave’s rising resistance to control from the ruling Communist Party. A new requirement that candidates secure endorsements from at least nine members of government-appointed committees before being allowed to join the race led to a clean-sweep for pro-Beijing candidates Sunday.
The low turnout came despite significant efforts by authorities — including carnivals and free concerts — to encourage voters to go to the polls. A glitch in the electronic voting systems also led to the polls being opened an hour later than had been planned. Six arrests were reported.
The district councils, whose jurisdiction includes local issues such as building projects and approving public facilities, are Hong Kong’s last major political bodies mostly chosen by the public.
Watershed
Pro-democracy forces saw the turnout and the result as a watershed moment for Hong Kong. In 2019, the city was shaken by massive, disruptive and sometimes violent demonstrations opposing the extradition of local residents to face trials in mainland China, seen as a direct challenge to Hong Kong’s long-independent local institutions.
The protests empowered pro-democracy groups and activists, and that year’s District Council vote saw 17 out of 18 districts captured by pro-democracy candidates.
Beijing reacted. In 2020, the passage of a powerful “National Security Law” significantly chilled Hong Kong’s political climate. Changes to electoral districts and processes followed.
Some 88 seats out of a total of 470 in the District Council were up for grabs in Sunday’s direct election, with 4.3 million voters able to cast ballots. The number of directly elected council seats was a cut of 20% from the 2019 election.
Electoral boundaries had also been redrawn. Those seats that are not occupied as a result of direct vote are chosen by the city’s Beijing-friendly chief executive and government committees. There were significant vacancies as well: A large number of district councilors who declined to take a new oath of allegiance resigned from their seats in 2021.
With all the newly filled seats occupied by pro-Beijing candidates, the central government pronounced itself satisfied with Sunday’s results.
A spokesperson for the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region called the results “a fair, just, open and high-quality election with wide participation of the society,” the Chinese Communist Party-controlled People’s Daily reported.
The liaison office is the de facto representative of Beijing in Hong Kong, which, since handover from Britain to China in 1997, has been run as a Special Administrative Region, or SAR.
The spokesperson added that “this election has completely excluded anti-China rioters from the … governance system, effectively implemented the principle of ’patriots administering Hong Kong,’ and opened a new chapter in district governance.”
Hong Kong SAR Chief Executive John Lee told the Xinhua News Agency that the new councilors will be “patriots administering Hong Kong,” ensuring that the entire governance system complies with principle of “one country, two systems.”
But some said there was no way to sugarcoat the plunge in voter enthusiasm reflected in the low turnout numbers.
“The record low turnout must be hugely humiliating for the government and its allies given the unprecedented propaganda campaigns and ubiquitous mobilization,” Kenneth Chan, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University’s government and international studies department, told The Associated Press.
Party-centric ’patriotism’
Chinese President Xi Jinping has embarked on a campaign to promote “patriotism” across the land, with a law on patriotic education being enacted in October this year.
But some academics see the push by the powerful Chinese leader as party-centric nationalism by another name, designed more to cement the regime’s hold on power than to teach ordinary Chinese about their country’s past.
At a time when China is expanding economically and militarily around the region and the world, a key aim of patriotic education has been to remind the Chinese of the humiliations their country suffered at the hands of colonial powers in the 19th and 20th centuries. Foremost among them was Britain, which won Hong Kong as a colony after victory in the one-sided First Opium War in 1842.
After the U.K.’s historic lease expired, it handed the colony — by then an Asian powerhouse that was home to vibrant financial, service and movie industries — back to China amid great fanfare in 1997.
Hong Kong has since been ruled under the “One Country, Two Systems” principle that recognizes the differences between the city and the mainland. But the watershed year of 2019, and multiple events since, have cast doubts among many Hong Kongers and outsider observers about Beijing’s commitment to the principle.
Mr. Lee was the only candidate approved by Beijing for Hong Kong’s chief executive position in 2022. A former policeman and security official, he greenlighted the arrest of scores of pro-democracy figures in 2021.
The fallout from Sunday’s vote and the shrinking sphere for civil liberties in Hong Kong could have some aftershocks.
The events in Hong Kong are being closely followed in Taiwan. With relations with China dominating the campaign, the democratic island goes to the polls in January to vote for a new president.
• Andrew Salmon can be reached at asalmon@washingtontimes.com.
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