Beijing okays sweeping electoral reforms in HK

China's top lawmaking body yesterday unanimously endorsed sweeping electoral reforms in Hong Kong that will nearly halve the number of legislators directly elected by the public.

According to the amended annexes of the Basic Law, Hong Kong's mini-Constitution, only 20 members of the expanded 90-member Legislative Council (LegCo) will be directly elected by Hong Kongers. This is 15 fewer than the current 35 elected members.

The LegCo currently has 70 members.

The Election Committee in charge of picking the city's leader will be expanded by 300 to 1,500 members and will have powers to pick 40 LegCo members. The remaining 30 legislators will come from functional constituencies - members chosen to represent professionals in occupations ranging from law to education to construction.

The work on a committee in charge of vetting all potential office-holders will be led by officers from the national security department of the city's police force, which will then be reviewed by the Committee for Safeguarding National Security chaired by the territory's chief executive, the amended legislation stated, adding that decisions are final.

It is unclear how big the committee will be, but the local media has reported that there will be fewer than 10 members.

China's official Xinhua news agency said Chinese President Xi Jinping had signed off on the amendments, which will go into effect today.

The amendments were unanimously passed by the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress (NPC), said a lawmaker who attended the meeting.

"The meeting of the Standing Committee of the NPC has just ended, and the amendments… were passed unanimously to warm applause," Mr Tam Yiu Chung, Hong Kong's sole representative on the committee, told The Straits Times in a text message.

The amendments have closed loopholes in the current system while guaranteeing a "solid foundation" for the implementation of the "one country, two systems" principle, the Cabinet-level Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office said in a statement.

This was repeated by China's Foreign Ministry, which said that the "improvements" to the Hong Kong electoral rules are to create a political system that better reflects the conditions of the city today and all strata of society.

"Any attempt to intervene in Hong Kong affairs and put pressure on China will never succeed," it added.

These changes will now be promulgated in Hong Kong - which means the rules have to be adopted immediately, bypassing the local legislature.

Under the changes, a new body vetting whether potential political candidates are sufficiently patriotic would be set up, the Election Committee retooled and expanded, and the city's legislature expanded.

Officials insist this is to prevent "foreign interference" in the city's politics, which Beijing claims has been infiltrated by foreign forces aiming to sow chaos in the territory and, by extension, China.

Since the 1997 handover to China, the former British colony has been governed under the "one country, two systems" principle that allows for separate legislative, judiciary and executive branches from the mainland, and promises a "high level of autonomy" until 2047.

But in recent years, there has been growing frustration with a government many see as incompetent in dealing with bread-and-butter issues, compounded by a fear of Beijing encroaching on the city's relative freedom.

It resulted in historic and sometimes violent protests in 2019 that crippled the territory and infuriated Beijing.

The electoral revamp, emphasising the need for "patriots administering Hong Kong", is the latest in a series of moves in response to those protests.

Last year, a sweeping national security law was implemented in a similar manner, dealing a body blow to the city's hopes for democracy.