Candidates celebrate after winning in the legislative election in Hong Kong on Sunday.Lam Yik/Reuters
Around a third of Hong Kong’s registered voters took part in a highly controlled election Sunday, held amid a renewed national-security crackdown that has followed the deadly Wang Fuk Court fire.
Beijing’s effort to tamp down unrest over the fire ahead of the vote extended even to foreign media, who on Saturday were issued a rare government warning to temper their coverage of the disaster.
While the streets around polling stations were busy Sunday with volunteers for various candidates, holding large placards and handing out leaflets as they exhorted passersby to participate, foot traffic at the voting stations themselves was limited. Turnout figures did slightly exceed the record low of 30.2 per cent in 2021.
That was the first election to Hong Kong’s legislature held under a new “patriots-only” system introduced in the wake of a massive national-security crackdown that followed pro-democracy protests in 2019.
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While the Legislative Council, a legacy of British colonial rule, had never been fully elected, the changes slashed the number of seats chosen by the public and introduced a vetting process.
Of the 90 seats in LegCo, as the body is known, just 20 are directly elected, while around half are chosen by a pro-government Election Committee – which also handles the candidate vetting – and the rest chosen by special-interest business and trade groups.
According to provisional figures, 31.9 per cent of registered voters cast a ballot on Sunday. That is still the second lowest on record, and from a smaller base of registered voters, which has declined by around 340,000, or 7.6 per cent, in the past four years.
The turnout in the New Territories East constituency, which includes Tai Po, site of this month’s deadly fire, stood at 30.15 per cent, the lowest across all 10 directly elected constituencies.
The authorities had initially considered delaying the election after the blaze – which engulfed seven buildings and killed at least 159 people in Hong Kong’s worst disaster in decades – but switched to urging people to elect a new legislature that can ensure a fire like this doesn’t happen again.
“My goal is to find out the truth and hold those responsible accountable,” Hong Kong’s Beijing-appointed leader, John Lee, said as he cast his ballot Sunday, urging others to “vote for reform.”
Bystanders look on as emergency workers search wreckage after the Wang Fuk Court apartment complex fire which killed 156 in Hong Kong.LAM YIK FEI/The New York Times News Service
“The Legislative Council has many powers; we need to co-operate on passing public budgets and lawmaking, plugging existing loopholes, making the city safer and assuring the public,” Mr. Lee said, according to the South China Morning Post.
There was open concern among officials, however, that most Hong Kongers would stay away, as the majority of voters have since the 2021 changes. Four years ago, ever-increasing political engagement was ended by Beijing’s imposition of a national-security law that has been wielded to dismantle Hong Kong’s once-vibrant civil society.
In the run-up to Sunday’s election, seven people were arrested for allegedly inciting others not to vote or to cast blank ballots, using a 2021 law that criminalized encouraging people to do so, even though the underlying action remains perfectly legal.
The law was introduced after the voting changes, which cut opposition parties out of the political process, in an apparent attempt to pre-empt any efforts to organize a mass spoiled-ballot protest.
As grief over the Wang Fuk Court fire has turned to anger about how the disaster was allowed to happen, some Hong Kongers have tried to organize to put pressure on the government to respond, in an echo of pre-2019 politics. In response, the city’s national-security apparatus has swung into gear, arresting several people and warning others not to test the government.
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On Saturday, the Office for Safeguarding National Security, a Chinese central government-run body that operates in Hong Kong, took the rare step of directly warning foreign media not to cross “red lines” in coverage of the disaster and Sunday’s election. Some media were also summoned to an in-person meeting where an official read out a statement to them.
According to the statement, “recent reports by foreign media concerning Hong Kong have disregarded facts, spread false information, distorted and smeared the government’s disaster-relief and post-disaster recovery work, attacked and interfered with the Legislative Council elections, incited social division and confrontation,” misled the international community and “hurt the feelings of Hong Kong citizens.”
“The Commissioner’s Office emphasized that ‘freedom of the press’ and compliance with the law are not mutually exclusive, and no media outlet may use ‘freedom of the press’ as a pretext to interfere in China’s internal affairs or Hong Kong affairs.”
The statement added that journalists in Hong Kong are bound to follow the territory’s laws, including the national-security law.