HK Government Introduces Even More Measures to Ensure Preferred Election Outcomes
Posted by John Chan | Apr 13, 2021
The Hong Kong government has announced an umbrella bill to implement sweeping changes to the city’s electoral system, two weeks after the changes were approved by the National People’s Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) in Beijing. The measures will more than halve the number of democratically elected seats in the city’s legislature, while expanding the body and altering its selection mechanism to grant more influence to pro-Beijing figures. The NPCSC’s plan all but guarantees that Hong Kong’s pro-democracy opposition will never gain more than a handful of seats, still less the majority towards which they had been working. Nevertheless, the city’s government has now gone even further in its bid to control future election outcomes, announcing on Tuesday that it would make it illegal for anyone to encourage voters to cast blank ballots or boycott future el