New South Korean president Yoon Suk-yeol will be inaugurated on Tuesday after winning an incredibly tight race in March. The conservative has promised a tough line on North Korea and likely will move the country closer to its key democratic allies, Japan and the United States.
The Philippines is holding its elections here on Monday, picking a new president as well as 18,100 other positions from the very top down to city councilor. Bongbong Marcos, son of the dictator deposed in 1986, is the runaway favorite to win and likely to continue his efforts to whitewash his father's past, as I explained on Friday.
And Hong Kong? Oh yeah, here in Hong Kong we have a new leader, too, former police officer John Lee Ka-chiu. Good luck to him. He's gonna need it.
This is a candidate who has mortified educated Hong Kongers, my wife among them, with his English-language slogan, "We and Us , A New Chapter Together." Looking at the Chinese, it appears he intends to say something like "Me and We," but instead selected a meaningless tautology. Lee has defended what is undoubtedly very poor copywriting, explaining "The message we want to spread is the sense of togetherness, without distinguishing 'You' or 'Me'," adding that his team discussed this issue many times -- before messing it up.
He faces far more serious problems than trouble with words. The city is hollowing out with record rates of emigration and is losing its position as Asia's free-market capital of finance. Stocks are performing horribly, many Hong Kongers are miserable, and the city stands stripped of its civic freedoms. There's not a lot to love.
The Hong Kong stock market is closed today in honor of Buddha's Birthday, a holiday invented to replace what had been a day off in honor of the birthday of the British queen. But the Hang Seng Index consistently has been one of the world's worst performers, taking that title outright in 2021 with a 14.1% fall for the benchmark index and dropping another 14.1% so far this year.
Lee was selected rather than elected in a race in which his only opponent was ... John Lee. A tiny coven of electors screened by John Lee himself picked him, the only candidate to come forward, and who was designated by Beijing to take power regardless of what happened. It's an upset that there were eight "not support" votes against him, with 1,416 votes in favor. The pattern fits votes in mainland China, where Chinese Communist Party decisions tend to be unanimous except for one vote against, to make it clear this was an entirely free and democratic process.
Under China's thumb
I've stopped writing much about the politics here in Hong Kong, the city I've called home for 21 years, because there's little point. There is no politics, only colonial rule by the Chinese Communist Party. The pro-democracy opposition resigned en masse after Beijing forced a draconian National Security Law on the city in July 2020, inserting it into the city's constitution without any input from Hong Kong. The vast majority of pro-democracy politicians are either in jail or exile now, while trade unions and other groups that could stand up to the government have been forced to disband.
There were elections for the Legislative Council, Hong Kong's congress, in December, but few voters bothered to take part. I certainly didn't. No opposition candidates ran for what's now a rubber-stamp government doing Beijing's bidding. The pro-Beijing camp got a massive shock in November 2019 when hyperlocal elections for district councilors turned into an enormous protest vote, delivering a landslide for pro-democracy candidates. Even with the game rigged in favor of Beijing, it looked dangerously likely that a pro-democracy camp could develop real power within "LegCo." So Beijing's lackeys in the Hong Kong government simply redrew the rules.
It is also dangerous to write about Hong Kong politics. Should I, for instance, suggest that Hong Kong should be independent, I could be sent to jail. Should I suggest that other countries sanction the Hong Kong and Chinese governments for gutting the city's civic protections and blatantly violating the agreement signed with Britain guaranteeing autonomy for the city for 50 years after its 1997 handover, I could be sent to jail. Should I wave a flag with the popular demonstration slogan "Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times," which clearly can have multiple meanings, I could be sent to jail.
The local free press has been shut down in Hong Kong. Thanks to threats and raids against their businesses, outlets such as the pro-democracy Apple Daily, the city's most-popular newspaper, and Stand News, a live-streaming upstart that did excellent work covering the 2019 demonstrations, have been forced to close. Writers and executives alike have been arrested for crazy crimes in a city that promises freedom of speech, the police invoking obscure statutes alleging "sedition" and other never-used crimes that, if used in the West, could result in a hefty percentage of the users of Twitter doing time.
From Lam to Lee
Lee, 64, joined the police at the age of 19 and has risen through the disciplined forces, most recently serving as Chief Secretary, the No. 2 official in the Hong Kong government, and the Secretary for Security before that. He lacks charisma, has a monotonous drawl as a public speaker, and has never held a role where he needed to cater to public opinion. Indeed, he was a key figure pushing a highly unpopular bill that would have led to the extradition of suspects into China's rigged judicial system, the trigger for the 2019 demonstrations. So he faces a tough task ahead.
The role of Chief Executive, as Hong Kong's leader is known, has shifted since it was first created in 1997, replacing the role of governor of Hong Kong, who was appointed by Britain to oversee the territory. The "CE" at first represented Hong Kongers to Beijing, presenting the city's desires and needs, and even standing up to the Communist leadership at times. However, with the election of C.Y. Leung and his successor, Carrie Lam, the Chief Executive has stopped representing the public in the Chinese capital and instead acts in the other direction, as a conduit conveying Beijing's orders to the people.
The outgoing Lam calls the changes forced on Hong Kong "electoral reform improvements," and pro-Beijing lawmakers have said it's great not to have any opposition in government because they can get so much more done.
What message will John Lee bring from Beijing? Both Lee and Lam have been sanctioned by the United States and Britain for their roles in trashing the city's civic protections, and overseeing its devolvement into a direct colony of Beijing. It is well on its way to becoming simply another mainland Chinese city.
Fewer and fewer people will receive whatever message Lee relays. A record 89,200 Hong Kongers left in the year through mid-2021, leading to the city's population shrinking 1.2%. The pace of departures has only picked up since the last official count, with the passenger traffic out of Hong Kong International Airport handily tabulated here by stock activist David Webb on his webb-site.com site. So far in 2022, there has been a net outflow of 128,391 travelers at the airport. In the last 12 months, there's been a departing deficit of 249,468 people, or 3.4% of the entire population.
Lee will take command of a city where his predecessor was incredibly unpopular, and where the government has done absolutely nothing to address the root causes of the 2019 protests, choosing instead to pursue criminal cases against participants. Investors could always be surprised for the positive, but there's little to suggest that Lee is any sort of transformative leader and everything to indicate he will be a functionary pushing the "mainlandisation" of Hong Kong. The Beijing leadership wants and needs Hong Kong as a Western-facing financial hub. It doesn't particularly want the restive, outspoken free thinkers that call it home. If emigration continues as it has, they just might get Hong Kong without the Hong Kongers, which would suit the Chinese leadership just fine.
