Concession or control? Beijing’s electoral overhaul for Hong Kong and what it means for opposition strongholds

Name: China’s top legislative body passes sweeping Hong Kong electoral reforms
Uploaded: 2021-04-14T02:00:21.000Z
Duration: 2 min 34 s
Description: China’s top legislative body passes sweeping Hong Kong electoral reforms

Opposition camp squeezed with Election Committee presence curtailed, but some of its Legco heartlands spared under Beijing’s reforms in Hong Kong

New legislation unveiled by the Hong Kong government on Tuesday designed to keep the bloc firmly in check

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Beijing approved changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system last month. Photo: Winson Wong

Joyce NgandChris Lau

Published: 10:00am, 14 Apr 2021Updated: 10:37am, 14 Apr 2021

Traditional opposition strongholds in the Hong Kong legislature’s functional constituencies have been left intact by Beijing’s drastic electoral overhaul, but their presence on the Election Committee that picks the city’s leader has been severely curtailed, seemingly contradictory moves designed to keep the camp firmly in check.

These were among the legal amendments the city government unveiled on Tuesday that also wiped out any opposition hope in the Legislative Council’s other trade-based constituencies that the camp was eyeing in the run-up to last year’s now-postponed elections.

Analysts said it showed Beijing viewed the originally 1,200-strong Election Committee – which has been expanded to a 1,500-member influential group empowered to oversee key elections as part of the electoral shake-up – as an ultra loyal cohort requiring safeguards to a higher “safety coefficient”.

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China’s top legislative body passes sweeping Hong Kong electoral reforms

But they also said the seeming concession for retaining the opposition-controlled, trade-based functional constituencies was hardly reassuring as these candidates would still have to jump through hoops recently put in place to vet them before they could throw their hat into the ring.

Beijing’s decision last month to revamp the city’s elections to ensure only “patriots” can rule the city will expand Legco from 70 to 90 seats, while skewing the odds in favour of the pro-establishment camp by stipulating that 40 lawmakers will now be selected by the powerful Election Committee. Another 30 legislators will come from functional constituencies, which mostly represent various industries.

Only 20 seats will be filled by direct elections in the city’s geographical constituencies, down from 35 under the previous system.

Under the Improving Electoral System (Consolidated Amendments Bill) 2021, five professional sectors of Legco will be able to keep individual voting by practitioners in the relevant industries, rather than scrapping such votes in favour of corporate voting, as in other functional constituencies. These sectors include education, law, accounting, social welfare, and architectural, surveying, planning and landscape.

In the past, these sectors were won by the opposition camp in both the legislative elections and the polls for the Election Committee.