Although colonial Hong Kong had certain freedoms, it was never rated a full democracy [PDF] by international standards. And today, China is a one-party state that is reluctant to allow Hong Kong to hold free and fair elections. Experts note the ambiguity on this issue. The Basic Law states that the government’s “ultimate aim” is to have Hong Kong’s leader elected by popular vote, but it does not give a deadline for this to occur.
Since the handover, there have been no free votes by universal suffrage for the chief executive, who is the head of the Hong Kong government. The chief executive is instead chosen by an election committee composed of representatives from Hong Kong’s dominant professional sectors and business elite. Under the Basic Law, Hong Kong residents were previously allowed to vote for members of the legislature, known as the Legislative Council, or LegCo, as well as for members of their local district councils, which handle day-to-day community concerns.
But more recently, Beijing has curbed Hong Kong residents’ already-limited voting rights. It overhauled the electoral system in 2021 to make it easier for pro-Beijing candidates to be appointed as chief executive and as LegCo members. Beijing ruled that only “patriots” who “respect” the Chinese Communist Party can run in elections. Only one candidate was allowed to run in the 2022 chief executive election: John Lee, a hard-line former chief superintendent of the city’s police force. For the LegCo, prior to 2021, half of the body’s seventy members were elected by direct voting, while the rest were chosen by groups representing different industries and professions. Now, just twenty members are directly elected and seventy are chosen. In response to these changes, pro-democracy groups boycotted the 2021 LegCo elections, and all ninety seats went to pro-Beijing individuals.
In 2023, new election rules set by Chief Executive Lee reduced the number of directly elected representatives from 90 percent to 20 percent of the total council seats. The remaining seats must be appointed by the chief executive or indirectly appointed by an electoral college. Prior to the rule changes, the district council was one of the last systems in which voters had a direct, unrestricted voice in their elections. Due to broad dissatisfaction with the new restrictions, voter turnout for the 2023 district council elections plummeted to 27.5 percent of eligible voters, compared to 71 percent in the 2019 election.
Unlike China, Hong Kong has numerous political parties. They have traditionally split between two factions: pan-democrats, who call for incremental democratic reforms, and pro-establishment groups, who are by and large pro-business supporters of Beijing. The latter dominate Hong Kong politics, largely because pro-democracy parties have disbanded under pressure from Chinese authorities over the last couple years, including the party that led the city’s protests in 2019.
Although polling at that time showed only a small minority of Hong Kongers had favored outright independence from China, youth movements, mostly led by student protesters, had formed several political groups, including more radical, anti-Beijing parties such as Youngspiration, Hong Kong Indigenous, and Demosisto. Several of these parties have disbanded or remain inactive after Beijing cracked down on political opposition, and some members have been forbidden from running in elections or jailed.
How has Beijing eroded Hong Kong’s freedoms?
Beijing had been chipping away at Hong Kong’s freedoms since the handover, experts say. Over the years, its attempts to impose more control over the city have sparked mass protests, which have in turn led the Chinese government to crack down further.
In 2003, the Hong Kong government proposed national security legislation that would have prohibited treason, secession, sedition, and subversion against the Chinese government, but popular protests defeated that effort. In 2012, it tried to amend Hong Kong schools’ curricula to foster Chinese national identity, which many residents dismissed as Chinese propaganda. And in 2014, Beijing proposed a framework for universal suffrage, allowing Hong Kongers to vote for the city’s chief executive, but only from a Beijing-approved shortlist of candidates. The proposal led to protesters organizing massive rallies, collectively known as the Umbrella Movement, to call for true democracy.
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