The pressure’s on Hong Kong patriots in the new political landscape

Beijing is cracking the whip to ensure the Election Committee produces the necessary political support for the chief executive it selects
With the opposition neutered, patriots will have no excuse if they can’t resolve the city’s social problems. Failure could spell the end of Hong Kong people running Hong Kong

Alice Wu

Published: 6:45am, 23 Aug 2021

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We are beginning to see how the new political system Beijing has tailor-made for Hong Kong will change the electoral landscape. With the nomination period for the Election Committee elections having closed uneventfully earlier this month, the curtain has been drawn.

Significantly fewer nominations came in than those received for the 2016 Election Committee polls. While there are 300 more seats than the 1,200 seats available in 2016, only some subsectors will be contested.

Even before the elections take place next month, we already have a pretty clear picture of what the set of the new political stage looks like.

The Election Committee – once tasked with the single but important job of selecting the chief executive – used to be considered a political construct of diminishing powers. Hong Kong had long been working towards realising what was written in the Basic Law, that is, achieving the ultimate goal of selecting the chief executive by universal suffrage.

The last time the city had a seat at the table for political reform discussions, the Election Committee was expected to be reduced to a nomination body for the chief executive.

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Since then, the committee’s status has been upgraded, and it will become the centre of political power. It will not only choose our chief executive, rather than only playing a vetting role, but it will now determine who can take part in elections in Hong Kong.

It has also been tasked with sending some of its own members to the Legislative Council as lawmakers. Election Committee members will fill 40 of the expanded 90 seats in Legco, twice the new number of directly elected seats in the geographic constituencies.

And so, with great power comes extraordinary responsibility. Beijing has tasked the committee with the job of holding things together in Hong Kong.

Members are expected to ensure the people they select to lead in government, whether at the executive, legislative or even local levels, are not only patriots, but patriots who can deliver results.

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Beijing no longer has the patience for political posturing. Instead, it is cracking the whip to ensure the Election Committee produces the necessary political support for the chief executive it selects. In this way, it is hoped, the government produced by this arrangement will resolve issues that have proved to be beyond previous leaders.

In the past, the opposition was always blamed for a lack of progress. The narrative has always been that we cannot do good things because the opposition is in the way.

So now, with Beijing having removed those obstacles, it expects Hong Kong’s issues and social problems to be resolved with lightning efficiency. Without a scapegoat in place, there is no distraction from the pressing problems the city has faced for decades, beginning with runaway home prices.

Our Election Committee members are well-versed on Beijing’s plans to make homes more affordable on the mainland. Just as the committee nominations closed, Shanghai city officials announced plans to build 220,000 rental homes by 2025 to rein in soaring house prices amid growing demand there.

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Hong Kong patriots will surely be expected to go all out too, once all the roles have been picked. They should also expect Beijing to look at overhauling our education system, and I am not talking about national education.

Again, look at what has been happening on the mainland, with some pretty extreme measures taken against after-school tutoring programmes and institutions. Our exam-oriented curriculum, especially at the primary level, will probably be scrutinised.

So, with the national security law in place and political obstacles removed, Hong Kong patriots will no longer be able to say that Hong Kong people have not been able to govern themselves because of the opposition.

If long-standing, deep-rooted social problems persist after this, that could spell the end of Hong Kong people running Hong Kong.

And if Hong Kong patriots cannot govern, then it is the people of Hong Kong who have failed “one country, two systems”. Those patriots who have signed up to be on the Election Committee do not have much political leeway to fail.

Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA