Hong Kong’s Protesters Earn a Victory. They Will Need More
— Officials in Hong Kong said they would suspend controversial proposed legislation. There will be other efforts to erode the city’s freedoms.
' Hong Kong, at present, is by no means a full-fledged democracy. The city has a free press and an independent judiciary, and is allowed to manage its own economy. But Hong Kongers are able to vote for only half of their legislators, the other half of which are selected by representatives from the territory’s business sectors, who typically work in or trade with China, and so tend to back Beijing. An election committee of 1,200 people, usually with pro-Beijing leanings, selects the chief executive. This has meant that since the 1997 handover, the Chinese Communist Party has loomed large over politics here. (Even by that standard, Lam has been particularly supportive of China. “You may say that it’s shoe-shining, but I have to say I find President Xi [Jinping] more and more charismatic and admirable in the things that he is doing and saying,” Lam told the Financial Times in an interview last year.)
“Time and again, successive Hong Kong leaders—handpicked by Beijing—have failed to defend Hong Kong’s autonomy, and Ms. Lam has been no exception,” Maya Wang, a senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, told me. Wang pointed to moves by Hong Kong officials to ban a political party, disqualify pro-democracy advocates from elections, and subject others to what she said were politically motivated prosecutions. “I think the Hong Kong and Beijing governments have cracked down on Hong Kong following the Umbrella Movement, to punish and tighten grip over the territory,” she said.
There are other challenges for those who oppose efforts to reduce freedoms here. Even if the extradition law never resurfaces, another, ill-defined bill awaits, which, if passed, could hand those who disrespect the Chinese national anthem a maximum fine of $6,400 and a three-year prison sentence—the anthem is regularly booed by Hong Kongers at soccer matches here. Activists fear other such efforts and, regardless of whether each individual move succeeds, the specter of 2047, when Hong Kong becomes eligible to be fully absorbed by China, is ever present.'
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