The assault on Hong Kong's district councils, dreams of democracy, and the truth in Hong Kong continues in earnest

  

Hong Kong under a gray cloud today --

both literally and metaphorically!

 

It's still Golden Week in Japan, and Mainland China too, but Hong Kong today returned to work after a protest-annulled May Day (that, interestingly, saw Hong Kong protest documentaries Inside the Red Brick Wall and Taking Back the Legislature take the number 2 and 3 slots of the Rotten Tomatoes streaming movies chart!) -- and saw more political hits rained upon pro-democracy dreams.  Specifically, Hong Kong cut the number of elected seats on its District Councils from more than 90 percent down to to (note: not by) 20 percent!*

As per an Agence France Press (AFP) report: Hong Kong dramatically slashed the number of elected seats in its local district councils..., effectively gutting the city's last remaining set of democratic institutions.  The change is part of a widespread crackdown by Beijing on political freedoms in Hong Kong following massive pro-democracy protests in 2019.  The last elections for Hong Kong's district councils were held at the peak of those demonstrations and returned a landslide win for the city's pro-democracy bloc."

 

As a member of a Hong Kong Twittersphere who goes by the moniker Dystopian Gordon observed yesterday, ahead of the official announcement by Chief Executive John Lee: "The District Councils of Hong Kong has been mostly a consultative body, its influence over the city's governance is insignificant but the Beijing still wants to [effectively] scrap its direct elections. I guess Beijing was very humiliated by the opposition's landslide victory in 2019."

 

As further reported in the AFP piece: "The percentage of elected seats is now lower than when the district councils were created in 1982 under British colonial rule, rolling back decades of democratisation efforts."  (To those Tankies who like to go on about how terrible the British colonialists were to not give Hong Kong democracy: what say you now about Hong Kong under the rule of the People's Republic of China?)

 

Quoting once more from the AFP piece: "Kenneth Chan, a political scholar at Hong Kong Baptist University, told AFP that the change "confirms the perception that a pathway towards democracy has ended for good.  It now looks like the district councillors... would just be the echo chambers serving mostly the administration rather than channelling bottom-up views and expectations from the community level.""

 

Still, if truth be, the District Councils have been under attack and disabled for a time now.  After China imposed a national security law on Hong Kong (on June 30th, 2020), more than 300 of the district council members who were democratically elected on November 24th, 2019 have been unseated or resigned -- with some fleeing Hong Kong.  Today's announced changes have just effectively dealt the death blow on the local government bodies that had been hobbled and unable to fully function for some years already.  

 

Actually, for many people, what's worse is the attempted gaslighting that John Lee indulged in at this afternoon's press conference.  When a reporter (the South China Morning Post's Natalie Wong) brought up the 2019 protests, Hong Kong's Chief Executive (who was the Security Secretary then) retorted that "It is not the 2019 protests. It is the black violence. It's the attempt to make Hong Kong independent, and the attempt to cause disaster to Hong Kong society as a whole."

 

As the Hong Kong Free Press' Tom Grundy was moved to Tweet in response: "Accuracy please. Independence was never one of the five demands of the protest movement."  Instead, here's serving a reminder that the "Five demands, not one less" that protestors made were as follows:

1) Withdraw the Extradition Bill (the only demand officially enacted but then...);
2) Revoke the riot claims (originally, this was specifically for the events of June 12th which had seen the police be a greater menace to society than the people who turned up in great numbers at Admiralty that day but it was widely understood to be a claim that protests in Hong Kong should not be considered illegal);
3) Amnesty for arrested protestors;
4) An independent investigation of police conduct; and
5) Genuine Universal Suffrage. 

And not only did the Washington Post's Shibani Mahtani Tweet that "It still stuns me to watch this distortion of memory and facts happen in real time" but she also provides links to such as a Hong Kong government press release from June 9th, 2019, commending the "peaceful" and "orderly" march as an example of [Hong Kong] people "exercising their freedom of expression"; with further receipts including a link to a government press release from August 18th, 2019, commending that day's march for being "generally peaceful" (see here) and another "from the 2019 anniversary of the Umbrella Movement, acknowledging [that] the protests were about *political reform* and *universal suffrage*, saying 'one person, one vote' is "enshrined as an ultimate aim in the Basic Law".  No mention of independence" (see here)!

 

And, really, this is what we need to do: not only remember but also remind people what's true, and call out errors and lies.  For, to be sure, attempts at memory erasure are taking place but the result is not a foregone conclusion -- and we (who experienced and bore witness to what happened in 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022 and into 2023) have the agency and a part to play to that ensure that it doesn't happen.

 

*Addendum: a good point made by lawyer-political commentator Kevin Yam over on Twitter: "More accurately, it’s slashed to 0%. The “20%” figure refers to candidates that have been vetted by Beijing on multiple levels and then put to the public for a vote. That’s not the definition of “democratically elected”."