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City Beat | Hong Kong’s political reality laid bare by fugitive bill and housing issues: the city has no eternal allies, only eternal interests
- Recent developments show there is no guarantee that any group will automatically endorse the administration
- Government caught between powerful local groups and Beijing
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Why have the government’s political allies turned their back on the establishment?
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This must be the big question on the minds of officials on both sides of the border, and it requires some serious soul searching after studying the latest political developments in Hong Kong.
First, it was the business sector, which has long been categorised as a key component of the pro-establishment camp.
Business leaders took the whole city by surprise with their loud objections to the government’s controversial fugitive bill, which would allow the extradition of criminal suspects from Hong Kong to jurisdictions with which it has no such legal arrangement, including Taiwan, Macau and mainland China.
Strong resistance from those who have no faith in the mainland’s legal system caught the government off guard. Several business heavyweights even took their complaints all the way up to Beijing, eventually forcing the administration to back down and offer to exempt a list of white-collar crimes.
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