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John Lee is the brand new chief government of Hong Kong. The 64-year-old ran the one permitted marketing campaign to succeed Carrie Lam, the embattled head of the Chinese language territory who oversaw a dramatic degradation to democratic establishments all through 2019’s pro-democracy protests. Lee’s tenure will doubtless convey extra of the identical: a former deputy chief of Hong Kong’s police drive, he was instrumental within the brutal crackdowns on pro-democracy activists.
As the only Beijing-approved candidate to interchange Lam, Lee’s victory was all however assured as quickly as he introduced his candidacy. Whereas Hong Kong doesn’t have what Individuals would acknowledge as a democratic electoral system, earlier elections have seen a number of candidates vie for Hong Kong’s prime job. However this 12 months, Lee was the one particular person Beijing apparently deemed sufficiently loyal to China’s Communist Social gathering beneath its new electoral insurance policies for Hong Kong, unveiled final March. He gained handily with 99 % of the votes from the 1,500-member electoral fee.
Since 2019, the Chinese language authorities has instituted legal guidelines and insurance policies which have eroded the relative autonomy that Hong Kong loved after the territory was returned from the UK to China in 1997. Protests about adjustments to extradition legal guidelines, which might permit Hong Kong residents accused of crimes might be extradited to mainland China for trial, erupted throughout the area amid calls for for strengthened democratic establishments. These protests, though they had been efficient in indefinitely delaying the extradition legal guidelines, resulted in the end in a nationwide safety legislation being enacted. Below that legislation, many high-profile activists like Agnes Chow, a pro-democracy activist and member of pro-democracy civil society group Demosisto, in addition to opposition politicians and enterprise leaders, had been arrested. Since then, a “local weather of concern” has pervaded town and just about extinguished the democratic resistance motion, in response to a February 2021 evaluation by Thomas E. Kellogg and Lydia Wong of the Georgetown Heart for Asian Regulation. (Lydia Wong is a pseudonym for a scholar working within the Folks’s Republic of China.)
The federal government in mainland China additionally instituted a number of reforms to Hong Kong’s governing construction, which helped solidify China’s management over town, as Michael Martin of the Heart for Strategic and Worldwide Research outlined in a February report. Twelve pro-democracy candidates had been barred from operating within the 2020 Legislative Council (Hong Kong’s legislature, usually shortened to LegCo) elections, which had been then postponed till December 2021. For the time being, China’s Standing Committee of the Nationwide Folks’s Congress (NPC), with Lam’s assist, instituted adjustments to Hong Kong’s Fundamental Regulation — town’s governing constitution — assuring a larger proportion of seats on the LegCo would pleasant to China.
The Standing Committee of the NPC additionally created an establishment to vet potential political candidates, the Candidate Eligibility Overview Committee, or CERC. As of April 14, the CERC had solely 4 members — all unelected authorities officers — and three non-official members, in response to a authorities press launch. Lee, now poised to take over as Hong Kong’s chief government, was till April 7 the chair of the CERC.
John Lee will likely be Beijing’s enforcer
Previous to becoming a member of Hong Kong’s authorities as Chief Secretary for Administration — the second-most highly effective place within the authorities — Lee was the deputy head of the police drive and a profession cop, having joined the drive in 1977. He’ll be the primary chief government from the police drive within the 25 years since its handover to China, and can take workplace on July 1, the anniversary of that day.
Over the previous 4 many years, Lee rose by the ranks of town’s police drive to change into the Secretary of Safety, overseeing town’s police drive through the 2019 protests over the extradition invoice (for which, in response to the BBC, Lee was a robust advocate). Throughout his tenure, Hong Kong police had been strongly criticized for utilizing extreme drive, resembling deploying rubber bullets, tear gasoline, and water cannons, and infrequently utilizing dwell ammunition towards protesters. Lee defended the usage of drive and the response to the protest, together with the Nationwide Safety Regulation, saying it had helped “restore stability from chaos.”
Lee has additionally mentioned he intends to enact laws that can “prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition, subversion,” which is authorized beneath Article 23 of Hong Kong’s Fundamental Regulation, in a bid to rid town of “the ideology of Hong Kong independence, violence and extremism.”
Whereas his insurance policies and response to the 2019 and 2020 pro-democracy protests clearly happy Beijing, the US Treasury Division sanctioned Lee, Lam, and different authorities officers for “undermining Hong Kong’s autonomy and proscribing the liberty of expression or meeting of the residents of Hong Kong” in August 2020. Lee was particularly designated for his position in “coercing, arresting, detaining, or imprisoning people beneath the authority of the Nationwide Safety Regulation, in addition to being concerned in its improvement, adoption, or implementation,” in response to a press launch from the Workplace of International Property Management. Nonetheless, provided that the order applies solely to property which can be within the US or beneath the management of US individuals, it gained’t doubtless have an effect on his financial standing. It may probably elevate problems as Lee tries to salvage Hong Kong’s financial system after the Covid-19 pandemic and the Nationwide Safety Regulation pushed foreigners and worldwide corporations out of town, although.
Lee’s choice isn’t utterly with out precedent, both. Beijing has usually had a most well-liked candidate within the contest for chief government. However the uncontested run of the previous safety chief is sort of too on-the-nose after pro-democracy activism and requires Hong Kong independence threatened China’s grip on town. It additionally factors to the erosion of the civil service in Hong Kong. Lee’s not a part of the civil service and political class, or a enterprise chief, as previous chief executives have been. Reasonably, the precious experience he brings to the job is his loyalty to Beijing, Kenneth Chan Ka-lok, previously a pro-democracy lawmaker and affiliate professor at Hong Kong Baptist College, informed the Washington Submit in April, after Lee introduced his candidacy. “What issues most is that Lee is a cadre appointed by Beijing. So long as he can serve his grasp nicely, [Hong Kong’s] pro-establishment facet won’t have a voice that deviates removed from his,” he mentioned.
The truth that loyalty, fairly than competency, is crucial high quality for management in Hong Kong doesn’t bode significantly nicely for the long run, Ho-fung Hung, a professor of political financial system at Johns Hopkins College and an knowledgeable on the politics of Hong Kong informed the Submit. Hung predicted that Lee’s management factors to the “gradual erosion of professionalism spirit in Hong Kong in all quarters of society will likely be persevering with and even rushing up.”
Can Lee shore up Hong Kong’s battered enterprise sector?
Lee’s lack of expertise — both in authorities or in enterprise — places him in a tricky place with regards to one of many primary mandates of his management: rebuilding Hong Kong’s financial system after the one-two punch of the Nationwide Safety Regulation and the Covid-19 pandemic.
Hong Kong has occupied a center place over the previous 25 years, with a level of social and political autonomy far exceeding that of mainland China — encompassed within the “one social gathering, two techniques” philosophy that has ruled Hong Kong since 1997. That degree of Western-style openness and freedom, coupled with tax breaks, attracted worldwide corporations and hundreds of expats. Nonetheless, because the Related Press reported final 12 months, a survey from the American Chamber of Commerce final 12 months confirmed that 40 % of expats surveyed that Might had been contemplating leaving Hong Kong as a result of Nationwide Safety Regulation, and plenty of worldwide corporations moved their operations elsewhere.
Moreover, the Covid-19 pandemic shut off town, and breakouts crippled the well being system. The dynamic zero-Covid coverage employed by the Chinese language authorities has added to the exodus, with greater than 150,000 folks leaving for the reason that starting of 2022, in response to Al Jazeera. “It’s an unarguable undeniable fact that we now have a mind drain and a few senior administration of some corporates have left Hong Kong,” Lam mentioned of town’s Covid-19 insurance policies.
Lee is tasked with shoring up Hong Kong’s enterprise sector as soon as once more, however as a substitute of luring worldwide corporations again, maybe with a much less restrictive political ambiance and Covid-19 coverage, he’s proposing a distinct strategy altogether: Opening the border with mainland China and growing the northern a part of the island, the so-called Northern Metropolis, as an choice to alleviate town’s housing disaster — and shore up connections with the mainland.
“He could also be a decisive chief. He might make town perform higher. That’s true. However he’s not a businessman. He doesn’t have hyperlinks to enterprise,” Tara Joseph, the previous president of the American Chamber of Commerce in Hong Kong, informed Al Jazeera. “He has hyperlinks to the safety equipment.”
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