Hong Kong 2020: What to Watch

Our cover story this month focused on the events, trends, and people to watch in 2020. Those who read my section of the cover, focused on China, may have noticed an odd omission: Hong Kong. That’s not because it’s not important – on the contrary, it deserved more space than a brief summary allowed. Below, I delve into Hong Kong’s outlook for 2020 in depth. Think of it as a bonus addition to the cover: Three things to pay attention to over the next year in Hong Kong, specifically.

Arguably the biggest China story of 2019, the massive protests in Hong Kong will continue to reverberate into 2020 as well. While the flares of violence in Hong Kong started to quiet down by the end of the year, thanks in part to a massive (and cathartic) pro-democracy win in the District Council polls, the grievances that drove the turmoil remain unaddressed and protests continue.

The demonstrators have laid out five demands: formal withdrawal of the extradition bill that sparked the protests; an independent inquiry into the Hong Kong Police’s response to the demonstrations; retracting the designation of protests as “riots” (a semantic distinction that has legal consequences); granting amnesty to arrested protesters (over 6,000 as of mid-December); and ensuring universal suffrage for future Legislative Council and chief executive elections. Of those, only the first demand has been met, setting the stage for the showdown to continue well into 2020.

Carrie Lam’s Fate

The first bellwether to keep an eye on over the course of 2020 is whether Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, keeps her post.

“After the passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights & Democracy Act [in the United States] and the democrats’ landslide victory in the District Council election, China may find it politically difficult to further escalate police-state suppression,” Brian Fong, a comparative political scientist based in Hong Kong, told The Diplomat. “This may increase the chance of making concessions, including speeding up the replacement of the chief executive.” 

Lam’s term isn’t up until 2022 (and even then, she could theoretically run for re-election). However, her clumsy handling of the extradition bill has made her persona non grata among both pro-democrats and supporters of the establishment. Pro-democrats accuse her of being a “puppet” for Beijing, with little regard for public opinion in Hong Kong. The pro-establishment camp, meanwhile, sees Lam as responsible for the chaos unleashed by the protests. That combination makes for a deeply unpopular leader: Lam’s approval ratings fell to less than 20 percent in November 2019.

All that said, China’s central government will want to avoid being perceived as ousting Lam in response to the protests. As Suzanne Pepper, a Hong Kong-based American writer and author of Keeping Democracy at Bay: Hong Kong and the Challenge of Chinese Political Reform, explained to The Diplomat, “unless [Lam] does something really horrendous, I doubt Beijing is going to end her term in any way that seems like a concession to the protest movement. That would be seen in Beijing as compromising the center's sovereign decision-making power, and ceding it to the ‘people,’ in this case the voters.”

That’s why Chinese leaders, including President Xi Jinping, have made so many public pronouncements of support for the embattled chief executive – Beijing much prefers not to be seen giving in to protesters’ demands, lest it encourage more unrest in the future. Xi made a point of offering praise for Lam’s handling of the crisis during their latest meeting in December 2019.

But we have seen Hong Kong leaders ousted after past crises before, such as former Chief Executive Tung Chee-hwa, who was forced to resign in 2005 after a series of political scandals, including his own run-in with mass protests. Lam herself was heard saying in a recording leaked by Reuters that “the first thing [to do] is to quit” if she had a choice in the matter. That means it might be possible to frame her resignation as a personal act rather than a political one.

It’s possible, then, that Lam could step down – and one report by the Financial Times, based on anonymous sources, said that might happen as soon as March 2020. 

Lam “will probably be allowed to resign, but only when more order has been restored and when they find someone courageous enough to take her place,” Richard Bush, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of Hong Kong in the Shadow of China: Living with the Leviathan, told The Diplomat. 

Pepper predicts that if the protests continue, as she thinks is likely, Lam “probably will be allowed to finish her first term. The ‘concession’ would then come, as it did with the unpopular CY Leung, by making her another one-term chief executive.”

Legislative Council Elections

The second key marker to watch this year will come in September 2020, with the election of a new Legislative Council (LegCo).

LegCo, with its power to draft and review laws, can make or break Beijing’s agenda in the special administrative region. Lack of support in LegCo previously killed two bills that had been strongly backed by Beijing: the 2003 National Security Bill and the 2014 electoral reform effort. If the pro-democrats can take control of LegCo, they would be able to block government proposals and potentially force compromise.

That would be a tall order, though. Only half of LegCo’s 35 seats are directly elected through geographical constituencies (GCs). The other 35 are voted on by members of “functional constituencies” (FCs), trades and professions such as real estate, tourism, agriculture, and finance. These latter seats, many of which are voted upon by companies or trade bodies rather than people, are generally more favorable to Beijing.

Five of those FC seats, however, are elected by people with no vote in other functional constituencies – most of Hong Kong’s voting population – with the candidates selected from and nominated by District Council members. These are the so-called “super seats.” That’s part of why the pro-democrat’s victory in the District Council polls was so meaningful – it gives them a good chance to pick up extra seats in LegCo.

Even then, the pro-democrat camp would need a landslide victory in the GC and the “super seat” races to achieve a LegCo majority. “The District Council is the only level of election in Hong Kong that is fully characterized by universal suffrage,” Fong explained. “[...]Only 40 out of the 70 seats of the Legislative Council are selected by universal suffrage and such seats are returned by proportional representation system. The electoral system will make it much more difficult for the democrats to win a super majority within these 40 seats, let alone the 30 functional constituencies that are institutionally biased for the pro-China camp.” 

In the 2016 LegCo elections, for example, pro-Beijing parties won 16 GC seats, 22 more from FCs, and two of the five “super seats.” Pro-democrats won 19 GC seats and three “super seats” but just seven FC seats (the final FC seat went to an independent). That meant that, despite pro-democrats winning 55 percent of the total popular vote, pro-Beijing parties won a 40-to-29 seat majority in LegCo.

Fractures in the opposition camp also work against the pro-democrats, as often more than one candidate winds up battling for the same seat. Pepper noted that in the 2019 District Council elections, 30 pro-democratic candidates “insisted on running” in constituencies that already had another democrat in the race. The “LegCo election with proportional representation increases the temptation for many candidates to try their luck,” she said.

In the District Council elections, pro-democrats won 57 percent of the vote to the pro-Beijing camp’s 42 percent. Those figures aren’t drastically different from the 2016 LegCo results, meaning the pro-democrats have their work cut out to avoid a similarly lopsided result against them in 2020. As Pepper pointed out, to win an outright majority would probably take the pro-democrats winning around 25 GC seats, something that’s never happened before.

“But,” she added, “for [pro-democrats] to claim a ‘victory’ in 2020, they would just have to do clearly better than they did in 2016… if they win (and keep) several more seats that would be regarded as a victory, whether or not they can win majority status.”

China’s Hong Kong Policy

Third and finally, what happens in Hong Kong next year will to a large extent depend on how forcefully Beijing moves to push forward its own agenda. “The big question for me,” Bush told The Diplomat, “is whether Beijing will decide that 2020 is the year to do a national security law, and to use that to significantly abridge civil and political rights.”

China’s Communist Party included plans for Hong Kong during its fourth plenary session in fall 2019 – vague promises to “establish a sound legal system and enforcement mechanism for the safeguarding of national security” and “strengthen national education.” Similar initiatives caused two of Hong Kong’s previous mass protest events – in 2003 against a proposed National Security Bill that would outlaw subversion and in 2012 against the “Moral and National Education” plan.

In both 2003 and 2012, the Hong Kong government pushed forward with its controversial plans despite steep public opposition, until emotions boiled over into massive street marches. That’s exactly what happened in 2019 as well with the extradition bill. Should Beijing try to force through Hong Kong legislation to either “safeguard national security” or “strength national education,” it could be setting the stage for a repeat of 2019 – with potentially major ramifications for the LegCo elections, depending on the timing.

That would seem to be a self-defeating prospect for Beijing. If we know anything about Xi Jinping, however, it’s that he’s just as likely to double down as to back up when faced with opposition.