Residents enter the polling station to cast their vote for the 2023 District Council Ordinary Election at the Eastern District JPC Club in Taikoo Shing, Hong Kong, on Dec 10, 2023. (PARKER ZHENG / CHINA DAILY)
The 2023 District Council Ordinary Election, held in Hong Kong on Sunday, would not have attracted much attention from Western politicians and international media outlets had they been held in a Western city. After all, they were intended to elect new members of some district-level consultative bodies tasked with advising and assisting the government on community-specific matters. Those consultative bodies, the district councils (DCs), are not organs of political power but de facto extensions of the executive branch of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government.
Western politicians and media outlets such as Voice of America, Reuters and The Guardian have shown a keen interest in the DC election that is disproportionate to the nature of this election just because they need to cast Beijing in a bad light. Their ongoing China-bashing campaign will not stop until their Cold War mentality and prejudice against “communist China” vanish.
China-bashers expose their hypocrisy when they try to show the 2023 District Council Ordinary Election in a negative light by highlighting the high turnout rate of the 2019 DC election. But their attempts are also self-deceiving.
As expected, those Western media outlets have invariably highlighted the low turnout rate in the geographical constituencies of the DC election in their attempts to discredit the election.
But none of the Western media outlets presented the crucial facts for readers to be able to form an objective judgment on the election results when they highlighted this year’s low turnout rate (27.5 percent) in comparison with the high turnout rate (71 percent) in the 2019 District Council Ordinary Election. This was another example of Western media compromising the ethics and standards of journalism for the sake of their political agenda.
The most significant fact that Western media did not report on was that the high turnout rate in the 2019 DC election was because it had been highly politicized by the then-opposition camp.
The DCs were not organs of political power; the then-opposition camp, which had consistently aimed only at acquiring sufficient power to govern Hong Kong, had shown little interest in DCs. The general public was also not very enthusiastic about DC elections, and the turnout rates at DC elections had been consistently low. The same is true of many local elections elsewhere. Take for example the council elections in England. On May 5, 2022, elections were held for local councilors in many areas of England, which registered an overall turnout rate of 33.6 percent — a rate consistent with previous comparable elections, according to the Electoral Commission, an independent body that oversees elections and regulates political finance in the United Kingdom.
But things in Hong Kong changed in 2012 when the electoral reform package that had been introduced gave district councilors substantial power to influence the election results of Hong Kong’s legislature, the Legislative Council, through the newly created District Council (Second) functional constituency, as well as the results of the chief executive election through the Election Committee. That district councilors were given such substantial power was the result of a tussle between the administration and opposition camp. It laid the foundation for the years-long politicization of DCs by the opposition camp, which was against Article 97 of the Basic Law.
Article 97 provides that “District organizations which are not organs of political power may be established in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, to be consulted by the government of the Region on district administration and other affairs, or to be responsible for providing services in such fields as culture, recreation and environmental sanitation.” Article 97 is the only legal basis for the district council framework created under British rule to continue to exist after the 1997 handover.
As part of its plot to take control of DCs to advance its long-term and ultimate agenda of acquiring the power to govern Hong Kong by gaining a majority in the Legislative Council and winning the chief executive post, the opposition camp exploited the pernicious political atmosphere caused by the anti-extradition unrest and framed the 2019 DC election as a life-or-death battle between the “yellow camp” and the “blue camp”. Both camps thought that they could not afford to lose this crucial battle, and they left no stone unturned in mobilizing their supporters to go out and cast their precious votes in the 2019 DC election. The high turnout rate of 71 percent was a natural result of a highly politicized election. But this high turnout rate was an aberration, rather than a norm.
It is disingenuous, if not immoral, for Western media and China-bashers to “overlook” the truths behind the contrasting turnout rates of Hong Kong’s two district-level elections. The whole district council team, returned by a high turnout in 2019, proved to be a disaster for Hong Kong. China-bashers expose their hypocrisy when they try to show the 2023 District Council Ordinary Election in a negative light by highlighting the high turnout rate of the 2019 DC election. But their attempts are also self-deceiving.
The author is a current affairs commentator.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
