In November 2019, Nixie Lam suffered the identical destiny as practically all of her pro-Beijing compatriots operating in Hong Kong’s native elections. The 2-term district councillor was roundly defeated by a prodemocracy candidate whose marketing campaign had been buoyed by months of sustained protests. A professional-Beijing “silent majority,” a lot talked about by supporters and pundits, proved to be nothing greater than a fallacy, and with document turnout, prodemocracy candidates parlayed the demonstrations into historic positive factors, capturing majorities in 17 of Hong Kong’s 18 district councils.
Though district councils have restricted energy, they’re the one instantly contested elections within the metropolis and are subsequently notable bellwethers for what Hong Kongers truly assume. The outcomes humiliated the Hong Kong authorities, Beijing, and its loyalists within the metropolis. Nonetheless, Lam tried to downplay the trouncing she and her get together members took. “You couldn’t win ceaselessly,” she advised me lately.
A few years after her defeat, Lam was tapped to run in Sunday’s legislative-council elections, the town’s mini-Parliament, and he or she accepted. Once I met along with her final week, she appeared assured in her probabilities at a political comeback on a much bigger stage—and with good cause. After 2019’s close to wipeout, the central authorities on the mainland didn’t simply change the foundations of Hong Kong’s political recreation. Like a petulant youngster bored with dropping, Beijing tossed the complete factor into the rubbish bin.
With reengineered election guidelines, Hong Kong’s already restricted democratic freedoms have been virtually solely stripped away. The variety of total seats within the metropolis’s legislature was expanded to 90, however the variety of instantly elected seats was slashed to only 20. (Beforehand, half of the 70 seats had been instantly elected.) Different representatives are elected by practical constituencies, that are small, largely industrial special-interest teams. Below a brand new coverage of “patriots administering Hong Kong,” candidates had been vetted by a panel headed by senior authorities officers and suggested by the police. Not that there would have been many candidates to contest the positions even when the foundations hadn’t modified; practically each notable prodemocracy determine has been jailed, fled overseas, or retreated from public life after the passage of a draconian national-security legislation final yr, one other aspect of a sweeping and unrelenting crackdown on Hong Kong’s liberties.
What’s left is “hegemonic authoritarianism,” Lee Morgenbesser, a senior politics lecturer at Griffith College, in Australia, advised me. It’s a system, he mentioned, that exists when “de facto opposition events are banned, fundamental civil liberties and political rights are overtly violated, the rule of legislation is arbitrarily breached, and the federal government has monopolized entry to media.” Crucially, any such governance construction permits locations like Hong Kong and different regimes, resembling these in Laos and Vietnam, to maintain up the veneer of democratic competitors however with the popular outcomes all however assured. “Finally, elections could also be allowed to exist,” Morgenbesser advised me, “however they stop to be an avenue for precise opposition events to achieve energy.”
This boded nicely for Lam and her fellow patriots. She ran to symbolize the newly shaped “election-committee constituency,” a strong physique made up of 1,448 pro-Beijing loyalists who chosen 40 seats of the legislature, the most important bloc. She received a seat with just one,181 votes. Not one of the metropolis’s main prodemocracy events fielded any candidates. A handful of hopefuls tried to pitch themselves as third-way moderates, and just one was elected. Turnout was traditionally low.
Authorities officers touted this as a part of an “improved” election system and requested residents to imagine them after they insisted it was truly extra consultant than earlier than. Somewhat than marketing campaign among the many common public, Lam shuttled between conferences with business teams and tycoons and held Zoom calls with voters in mainland China. Standing out in a subject of candidates whose beliefs are largely the identical generally is a problem, so Lam wore a dusty-pink pantsuit throughout her weeks-long marketing campaign. Cosplaying as a democratic politician on the marketing campaign path is outwardly difficult. “That is actually tiring, I let you know,” she talked about to me on a number of events.
Hong Kong’s vote got here as China was once more trying to redefine the concept of democracy globally. Beijing reacted furiously to the Summit for Democracy convened by President Joe Biden earlier this month. The central authorities printed its personal white paper, operating greater than 50 pages, that trumpeted the advantages of its model of democracy. A follow-up doc, and a deluge of anti-U.S. propaganda, identified the failings and decline of the American system.
“Democracy has been a dominant world norm, and it’s exhausting for Beijing to overtly problem such a norm,” Xiaoyu Pu, an assistant professor on the College of Nevada at Reno and the writer of the ebook Rebranding China, advised me. “As an alternative of delegitimizing democracy itself, Beijing has all the time emphasised democracy may take totally different kinds and their governance mannequin might be one of many official fashions.”
The central authorities’s efforts to alter Hong Kong’s mannequin have accelerated rapidly since 2019, however have been constructing for years as Beijing, relatively than tackle the grievances of the inhabitants, grew to become extra heavy-handed in its ways to quash dissent. Ka-Ming Chan, a doctoral pupil at Ludwig Maximilian College of Munich who research Hong Kong’s electoral programs, wrote in a lately printed paper that the disqualification of candidates within the 2016 election was a “prologue to the authoritarian flip.” With the imposition of the national-security legislation, “candidate-filtering is way more institutionalized,” he advised me. “When candidates move via all these filters, it actually implies that they hardly pose a risk to Beijing, for they’ve already obtained the blessing of the patriots’ sector.”
There was by no means any doubt that Lam’s patriotic credentials would move muster. She spent the 2 years since her 2019 loss growing a combative, hypernationalist persona with the assistance of her get together, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong. Citing her use of social media to drive her marketing campaign and form her private model, she advised me she was just like Barack Obama. Now she makes use of her social accounts to show the kind of performative enthusiasm that has grow to be extra frequent for the reason that passing of the national-security legislation. The jingoistic rhetoric from her and different youthful members of the pro-Beijing events is harking back to the incendiary feedback hurled on-line by Beijing’s abrasive diplomats, who’ve earned themselves the “wolf warrior” moniker.
On Twitter, Lam falsely accused Hong Kongers who had been pepper-sprayed and crushed by police through the protests of being actors. In on-line movies, she has raged towards fictitious international meddling within the protests, a well-liked conspiracy concept in Beijing. She is a go-to speaking head for Chinese language state media searching for an formally sanctioned sound chew on the grievance of the day. And she or he maintains that there was nothing flawed with the anti-extradition invoice that sparked the 2019 protests.
Lam was perturbed after I identified that the candidates, though coming from totally different backgrounds, had been largely interchangeable with reference to their political views. She insisted that that they had many variations, however in contrast to prodemocracy lawmakers, they didn’t hate China and their Chinese language identification or need to cut up Hong Kong from China. “One factor that’s the similar is that we’re Chinese language,” Lam advised me, referring to the crop of candidates. “I believe should you don’t imagine in that, there may be some downside along with your mind. If you don’t admit that, you might be Hong Kong Chinese language. When you declare Hong Kong is an impartial nation, there’s something flawed along with your data … for years a variety of opposition-party folks tried to push ahead that concept.”
The election overhaul turned the usually loud and colourful marketing campaign interval right into a extra staid affair. Banners strung up across the metropolis regarded largely the identical and carried slogans completely devoid of creativity. Outdoors subway stations and close to markets, geriatic volunteers in colourful windbreakers manned marketing campaign cubicles and half-heartedly tried to thrust flyers into the fingers of pedestrians, and recorded messages from their most popular candidates crackled over audio system in an infinite loop. In the meantime, inside the town’s courtrooms, prices towards prodemocracy figures continued to pile up.
Among the many candidates, discuss of democracy and democratic reforms was largely absent. As an alternative, hopefuls spoke largely about financial points. Wage inequality and excessive focus of wealth have solely worsened since Britain handed Hong Kong again to China in 1997. Of explicit focus was the town’s housing disaster, a difficulty that has but to be adequately addressed by Hong Kong’s 4 pro-Beijing chief executives or within the legislature, the place pro-Beijing lawmakers have all the time been within the majority.
The astronomical housing costs have grow to be a form of white whale for pro-Beijing figures, who ignored the precise 5 calls for of protesters in favor of the assumption that low-cost flats will rapidly repair what ails the town. The reality is that they “don’t need to deal with different extra necessary points … like politics, like democracy,” Yip Ngai-ming, a professor at Metropolis College of Hong Kong who research the town’s housing points, advised me. Blaming housing for the town’s issues, he mentioned, “is not only an oversimplification; it’s a deliberate misplacement of consideration.”
This purposeful shift in focus to housing and livelihood points is an try, Morgenbesser advised me, to show elections into “minor disagreements over coverage points, relatively than main disagreements over the political path of the nation.” He described it as an outdated trick and one hardly distinctive to Hong Kong, deployed in locations like Cambodia, Zimbabwe, and Azerbaijan. “By making an election an apolitical occasion, authoritarian regimes scale back the emotional and psychological significance residents connect” to elections, he mentioned. In so doing, the federal government creates stability, which “actually means longevity for these already in energy.”
Holding a stunt election will not be with out its difficulties, specifically getting folks excited a couple of contest the place the result seems largely pre-decided. Tam Yiu-chung, the one Hong Kong consultant in China’s prime lawmaking physique, the Nationwide Folks’s Congress Standing Committee, advised me through the run-up to the vote that he was not involved with turnout, estimating it could be about 40 %, nicely beneath earlier years. In 2016’s contest, 2.2 million Hong Kongers forged ballots for the instantly elected seats, a turnout of simply over 58 %. The turnout for the 2019 district-council elections was even greater, at greater than 71 %.
Carrie Lam, the town’s traditionally unpopular chief government who has by no means received a direct election, added her personal spin. Low turnout, she mentioned previous to the vote, would truly be an indication that persons are pleased with the federal government’s efficiency. “There’s a saying that when the federal government is doing nicely and its credibility is excessive, the voter turnout will lower as a result of the folks do not need a powerful demand to decide on totally different lawmakers to oversee the federal government,” she advised the Chinese language-state-backed World Occasions newspaper. “Subsequently, I believe the turnout price doesn’t imply something.”
Regardless of Lam’s proclaimed indifference to voter enthusiasm, the federal government made metropolis transport free on election day in an effort to encourage folks to go to the polls. Many appeared to make use of the free rides to go to the mall or the seashore as an alternative. At polling stations within the Wan Chai and Sai Ying Pun neighborhoods, turnout was sparse, consisting primarily of aged voters, and the environment on the road was marked by apathy and alienation. Few folks appeared within the closing push by marketing campaign volunteers who tried at hand out their final promotional supplies.
It was a stark distinction to the scenes of 2019, when traces of voters snaked down the sidewalks and other people waited in line for hours to forged their ballots. By late afternoon, it was turning into clear that turnout was lagging nicely behind that of earlier contests. Ultimately, turnout was simply 30.2 %, a document low for the reason that metropolis returned to Chinese language rule and greater than 10 % decrease than the earlier document. Candidates had been making excuses for the dismal turnout even earlier than the polls closed, blaming the federal government for poor messaging and the free transport for drawing folks away from the polls. Left unsaid had been the true causes for Hong Kongers’ unhappiness and disengagement: the whole absence of any significant political selection and the destruction of yet one more avenue via which they will specific their dissatisfaction with the federal government and the path of the town beneath the relentless crush of Beijing.
