Protest in Hong Kong

Analysts said this was because of Beijing’s frustration with the inability of the city’s elite to quash anti-government sentiment in the city that exploded in pro-democracy protests in 2019. 

Beijing has traditionally relied on a loose network of pro-China lawmakers, tycoons and advisers to its parliament to help govern Hong Kong, telegraph its messages and to serve as a sounding board for new ideas before they are rolled out.

But Chinese officials are making sweeping changes to Hong Kong’s electoral system without consulting many of the city’s loyalists. Instead Beijing has looked towards its newly installed mainland representatives in the city and select older politicians for advice.

The changes, under which Beijing will further increase its control over who qualifies to be a lawmaker in Hong Kong via a new vetting system, were announced at the weeklong annual meeting of the National People’s Congress, China’s rubber-stamp parliament. At the opening session on Friday, Wang Chen, an NPC vice-chairman, said Hong Kong’s electoral system had “loopholes and deficiencies” that could allow “anti-China forces” to seize control of the city.

Regina Ip, a staunch pro-government lawmaker who has most recently supported China’s internationally condemned Xinjiang policy, suggested she was out of the loop and Beijing was changing who it listened to.

“I am not privy to any thoughts on the part of Beijing officials . . . maybe they have consulted the top most trusted advisers,” Ip told the Financial Times. “The former strategy of consultation [with Hong Kong elites] did not end well, it did not produce the results Beijing wanted.”

A member of the executive council who advises Carrie Lam, Hong Kong chief executive, said he did not believe any council member had seen a blueprint of the reforms a month before they were due to be announced. 

One pro-establishment lawmaker said he and many of his colleagues were excluded from a symposium in Shenzhen in February on the electoral changes, which was attended by the new officials, “old guard” politicians such as Rita Fan, a former representative to China’s legislature, and some businessmen. 

“What the central government is determined to create is not rubber stamps or loyal garbage, but virtuous patriots,” wrote Tian Feilong, the director of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies — a mainland semi-official think-tank in Beijing — in Ming Pao, a Hong Kong newspaper. 

In his first big intervention since taking office, Xia Baolong, the head of Beijing’s office that oversees Hong Kong and Macau, said the central government had to take charge of the changes, rather than Hong Kong officials.

The reforms would increase Beijing’s already significant role in Hong Kong politics. China can already determine who is elected chief executive as the candidate is chosen by a committee weighted heavily in favour of the financial hub’s pro-Beijing camp and tycoons who have traditionally supported the government.

Opposition parties used to at least have a chance of winning a majority in the city’s legislature but authorities have disqualified, or are prosecuting, opposition politicians.

Ho-Fung Hung, Johns Hopkins University professor, said China did not want to take the “slightest chance” of the elections not going their way

“[The Chinese government] are not sure they have full control of the elite [and] Beijing don’t fully trust the tycoons in the election committee post 2019,” Hung said, referring to the pro-democracy demonstrations that year.

The city was promised a high degree of autonomy in the 1997 handover from the UK. The electoral changes, however, would increase the tempo of Beijing’s direct interventions in Hong Kong’s affairs, which began with the imposition of a harsh national security law last year.

Jasper Tsang, a founding member of Hong Kong’s largest pro-Beijing political party, said the last time he had been consulted by Chinese officials was following the law’s introduction. “I’m not sure how much difference it [the consultation] made,” he said.

CY Leung, a former Hong Kong chief executive and vice-chairman of the mainland’s top political advisory body, is one of China’s most vocal advocates in the territory, but he said he had not attended any formal consultation sessions over electoral reforms.

Caught by surprise by the strength of the pro-democracy protests in 2019, Beijing signalled its displeasure at the lack of warning by replacing officials who represented the central government in the city.

Some of its new appointees are known for overhauling wayward provinces. Luo Huining, Beijing’s newly appointed head of the Central Liaison Office, rooted out corrupt officials in Shanxi province. 

Two pro-Beijing Hong Kong politicians told the FT that mainland officials appointed to the Liaison Office were keeping their distance from the city’s traditional elites.

“I think Beijing would like to have some new blood,” said Lau Siu-kai at the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies.

To that end, China has expanded its official presence in the city with a new National Security Department office based on Hong Kong island. “[Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s leader] will govern day to day, but the office is like a big brother with his arm around her shoulder,” one government official said.

Leung suggested Hong Kong lawmakers and elites had to accept Beijing’s greater role in the city’s affairs. “[Hong Kong] is a local government after all,” he said. “We are not Singapore.”

When public debate first broke out, Kimberly Wu, a 24-year-old sign-language interpreter, realized her deaf friends knew very little about the contested bill. Although the government claimed to have included all sectors of society on discussions surrounding the bill, such consultations did not include sign language interpretation. This was also the case for many events held by civil society, she said.

Since the community had to depend on lip-reading, written translations, and other means to keep up with the fast-paced news, many missed key updates and were excluded from the discussion. It was then that Wu decided to take matters into her own hands. With other interpreters, she organized a free workshop for the community, and invited legislators to discuss the bill.

From that workshop, a grassroots sign-language interpretation group was formed. Since then, they’ve continued to do front-line translations for various organizations and plan diverse events – all with the aim of making politics and human rights more accessible to the community.

“Before the first large-scale demonstration, most deaf people we knew didn’t know much about the amendment,” said Wu, who is now assistant project officer at SLCO Community Resources, an NGO promoting sign bilingualism, and is pursuing a master’s degree in human rights law. “Translation is a battlefield. We talk about connection and solidarity in the social movement, and I think it’s an important part.”

In Hong Kong, there are few official and reliable statistics on those with disabling hearing loss. About 2.2 percent of the population, or 155,200 people, suffer from hearing difficulties, according to a 2014 government report based on a survey by the census department in 2013. The report also indicates that only 2.5 percent of those with hearing difficulties and 6.9 percent of those with speech difficulties had learned sign language, which has become less prevalent over the years.

After the government promoted integrated education and began funding hearing aids – as well as cochlear implants – for those with difficulties, the number of schools for the deaf dropped from 13 in 1973 to just one today, HKFP reports. There were only 50 sign language translators before the launch of a sign linguistic studies program at the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2018.

Yet advocates and community members say that sign language remains crucial to the community. Interpretation is vital for people to gain full access to information and public discourse in all spheres of life, from the educational system to the private and public sectors, said Cat H.-M. Fung, a freelance interpreter and member of the group.

“If you support oralism over sign language, you are building the speech monopoly,” Fung said. “You can’t magically make a pill or device and make a deaf person hear. You just turn yourself into an oppressor if you refuse the provision of sign language interpretation service to the deaf citizens.”

Inclusion remains a key issue. Most organizations, including the government, often prioritize hearing interpreters over those in the community. A spokesman from the Information Services Department told Hong Kong Free Press last year that the government hires interpreters of all hearing levels, and had no hearing ability requirements.

Hong Kong has a unique and full-fledged sign language that is independent from the local spoken language of Cantonese, according to Wu. The language developed and emerged from the community, and is an integral part of Hong Kong’s local culture. “It is used by a group of minorities who have always been a part of Hong Kong,” she said.

Danny, a 38-year-old office worker who is deaf, went to a deaf school that used oral education, with the aim of training students to develop their speaking abilities. Many struggled and fell far behind their hearing counterparts in mainstream schools, whom Danny noticed graduated with stronger foundations in almost all areas of education. In the past, teaching materials specifically designed for the community were also insufficient and lacked complexity, which caused students to grow bored and lack motivation for studying, he added.

“A lot of students used to spend all day with their eyes wide open, working extremely hard to watch the teacher’s mouth and straining their ears to make use of the remaining listening abilities they had to guess what the teacher was saying,” Danny said. “Sign language is the main language for the deaf community, so interpretation is an important channel for communication. Unfortunately, the government and the outside world have never prioritized our access to information. As a result, our educational progress and knowledge attainment lags far behind hearing people.”

Sign language is also particularly vital in situations where lip-reading is not possible. Such difficulties have only been exacerbated by the pandemic, which has made mask-wearing mandatory. In the early days of the outbreak, the group shipped over expensive masks from the United States with a transparent window in the middle – revealing the wearer’s mouth – to use during events so that community members could lip-read.

In September, a 20-year-old man who had hearing difficulties was arrested during a demonstration and charged with assaulting a police officer. During the trial, the man, who did not know sign language, wasn’t able to lip-read since members of the court were all wearing masks, and had to rely on listening through a headset. After he allegedly misspoke due to hearing difficulties, the judge accused him of “lying” and providing contradictory statements, Wu said.

“We need to know our rights and our choices so we can tell people we have this need, please accommodate,” Wu said, explaining that few deaf people were aware of their rights and had access to such information. “When he was still in the correction center, I wrote him letters and mobilized some deaf people to write letters.”

The protester is currently out on bail and is appealing the case.

For Danny, the sign language interpretation group represents a step in the direction of greater accessibility. He recently attended a seminar by the group on the rights of deaf and hard of hearing people after arrest, which he said taught him a lot of important legal information.

“I thought to myself: If I had known more about the Basic Law (Hong Kong’s mini-constitution) before, I would have been able to better protect myself and my rights!” Danny said. “I believe that this group will help broaden our horizons. I don’t want to continue being an ignorant frog at the bottom of the well — I want to learn as much as I can.”

The timing looks ominous. As China remakes Hong Kong’s political system to remove the last vestiges of independent opposition, it is simultaneously engaged in an endeavor to make its narrative of events stick. The last thing authorities need is a Chinese-owned news outlet with global reach that continues to question whether, rather than “improving” Hong Kong’s democracy, Beijing is destroying it.

The English-language SCMP has an outsize importance in Hong Kong’s media landscape, having long served as a barometer for the state of a once free-wheeling news industry. Better-selling Chinese language papers such as Apple Daily are the staple source of news for most of the local population and arguably more vital indicators of how liberal the environment for free expression and critical journalism remains. But the SCMP’s international profile and dominance among the city’s professional and expatriate communities ensure that it continues to attract high-profile scrutiny.

Concerns that the SCMP would take a more compliant editorial stance date back at least to 1993, when Rupert Murdoch sold a controlling interest to the Beijing-friendly Malaysian tycoon Robert Kuok. Despite occasional controversies, predictions that the newspaper would soon turn into a pro-Beijing propaganda organ akin to the state-owned China Daily proved wide of the mark. The paper continued, for example, to feature the city’s annual June 4 Tiananmen vigil on its front page year after year — content that would be unheard of in China’s state media. (Disclosure: This writer worked for the SCMP for a decade starting in 1992, and many other alumni have been recruited by international news organizations, including the reporters who broke news on Alibaba’s media sales for the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News.)

Those concerns gained a fresh lease of life with the next change of ownership five years ago, which brought the SCMP not only directly into mainland Chinese hands, but into those of a Communist Party member: Jack Ma, co-founder of Hangzhou-based Alibaba. Once again, it proved a false alarm. Alibaba invested significantly in the newspaper, hiring, moving its operations into remodeled new offices, and expanding the digital offering. Individual editorial decisions in the Alibaba era have drawn criticism, and the newspaper has some vociferous pro-establishment columnists. Yet it has continued to function as a journalistic organization in the democratic mold, providing coverage based on newsworthiness rather than political convenience. That contrasts with the mission of media in China’s Communist Party-run society, which as President Xi Jinping has said is to advance the party’s program and protect its authority.

This time, the century-old SCMP may not be so lucky. Jack Ma has fallen out of favor with the party hierarchy, and has largely sunk from public view since regulators pulled what would have been a world-record $35 billion IPO for Alibaba’s Ant unit last November. The government has grown concerned over Alibaba’s influence over public opinion and wants the company to sell some media assets, Coco Liu and Lulu Yilun Chen of Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with the matter. Discussion about selling the SCMP began last year; the buyer is expected to be a Chinese entity, they wrote.

The causes behind Ma’s fall from grace are perhaps manifold and complex; the concern over Alibaba’s media influence may be driven more by an incident in the mainland involving an executive and social media. Yet Alibaba’s ownership of the SCMP has surely not helped his case.