Chinese authoritarianism

Democracy and freedom of the press have ceased to exist in Hong Kong.

A new security law passed in May 2020, legislative elections postponed 15 months with the excuse of covid-19, a restrictive electoral reform in March 2021 and a systematic repression against the democratic opposition have ended political pluralism, with their representation in the Legislative Council and with each and every independent media.

Everything has been done following the centralist and authoritarian principles of the one-party system that governs the People's Republic of China, but in contravention of the 1984 Joint Declaration signed by the governments of Beijing and London, which provided for the return of the sovereignty of the former colony to China and at the same time the preservation of its market system, public liberties and independent justice until 2049. The Declaration has the status of an international treaty, so that the rapid but inexorable annulment of self-government has occurred behind the backs of the institutions and the basic law of Hong Kong, but also international legality, an issue that has barely aroused a protest from the Government of Boris Johnson, especially concerned with Brexit and the pandemic.

Certainly, Hong Kong was never a democracy under the British Empire, but it was and has ceased to be a fully open economy, with public freedoms and legal security. The Joint Declaration traced the path to democracy, recognized the value of universal suffrage and supported it in the now-despised principle of "one country, two systems." The democratic aspiration was to expand the number of directly elected seats, while the regime has imposed a reduction to just over 20% and at the same time a disqualification of candidates who do not consider themselves sympathetic to the regime. The result is that in the assembly that came out of the December elections, only one deputy out of 90 does not respond to the discipline of Beijing. The statute of Hong Kong allowed to aspire to an extension of democracy,while the tax now cancels it.

Hong Kong has a modern civil society, which was expressed in the pluralism of its independent media and in its free cultural expressions, now all closed and reduced to zero.

A symbol of the loss of freedom has been the withdrawal, at night and taking advantage of the Christmas holidays, of the monument to the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre, an obsessive taboo for the regime, which wants to erase it from the collective memory.

The retired monumental sculpture, the work of Danish artist Jens Galschiøt and housed at the university, was known as the

and its absence points to the shameful character of Beijing's authoritarian performance.

More information

The closure of a third independent outlet exacerbates the deterioration of press freedom in Hong Kong