Politics

The president of Hong Kong’s legislature has urged fellow members to be “more rigorous in their conduct” to meet society’s expectations after a lawmaker resigned following his arrest on suspicion of drink-driving.Addressing the arrest for the first time publicly on Saturday, Legislative Council president Starry Lee Wai-king said William Wong Kam-fai’s resignation the previous day reflected his willingness to accept responsibility.“I fully understand and comprehend the high expectations that the public has for Legco members. [Wong’s] incident has already sparked intense discussion in society and as the [Legco] president, I have been busy dealing with this matter over the past few days,” Lee said.“Wong’s resignation shows his commitment to responsibility, and the case will probably be handle...

It’s unfortunate for Hong Kong Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu that his speech on July 1 marking the 29th anniversary of the handover and highlighting his government’s achievements may have been overshadowed by the outcry over an anti-drug video – or at least what was intended as one.The Correctional Services Department released the video, generated by artificial intelligence (AI), on June 26 before having to pull it twice, ahead of the anniversary.The video – featuring an appealing K-pop girl band dancing and at certain points singing the praises of the effects of narcotics – received a great deal of attention, with international news coverage and a slew of memes, sticker packs, fan pages, song parodies and selfies.This level of public engagement generated by a government department is r...

Last week, Xia Baolong, Beijing’s point man on Hong Kong and Macau affairs, made a two-day trip to the city to review the Hong Kong government’s progress across many areas.Everything seems to have been orchestrated with precision. Ahead of Xia’s arrival, the government launched its two-month public consultation on the city’s first five-year plan. The day after Xia concluded his visit, the government released its 200-plus page report on the impact of its targeted poverty alleviation strategy.The same day, the International Institute for Management Development released the results of the latest World Competitiveness Ranking. Hong Kong has risen one place to the world’s second-most competitive economy. All this offered a timely reminder of what the administration had accomplished.The result-o...

Hong Kong election authorities have stopped compiling voter turnout data by age and sex, citing a lack of operational need, in a move that has raised concerns about undermining the transparency of polls.Analysts and politicians said such statistics were valuable for election hopefuls in understanding voter demographics and formulating policy suggestions, while authorities could use the data to improve governance.The South China Morning Post asked the Registration and Electoral Office last month for voter turnout figures by age and sex from last year’s Legislative Council election under the Code on Access to Information.Such data had been routinely disclosed to the public since at least 2008, but the office said that it no longer saw a need to compile and maintain such statistics.The SCMP r...

The Chinese embassy in the UK has called on the British government to “stop its acts of slander and suppression” after a court jailed two men linked to the Hong Kong Economic and Trade Office in London for up to 10 years for spying on activists.Bill Yuen Chung-biu, a manager at the office, was sentenced on Thursday to eight years behind bars for assisting a foreign intelligence service, while co-defendant Peter Wai Chi-leung, a security firm operator and former part-time UK Border Force officer, was imprisoned for 10 years for the same charge and another for misconduct in a public office.Yuen, a retired police superintendent, was accused of passing surveillance requests from Hong Kong authorities to Wai while working at the trade office.Wai was said to have used his position as a UK Border...

China’s five-year plan responds to “great changes unseen in a century”, prescient words used by President Xi Jinping since 2018. Chinese policymakers have anticipated headwinds in the world system, underscored by the upending of the “rules-based world order” by US President Donald Trump’s “law of the jungle” and a world increasingly threatened by climate change.Recent China-US summits notwithstanding, great-power rivalry is likely to remain for a fairly long time, fragmenting trade, technological flows, supply chains and geopolitics. However, opportunities are opening up for cutting-edge technologies and closer relations with the larger world, including Europe and the Global South.The 15th five-year plan focuses on high-quality development with moderate but stable growth; technological sel...

The Hong Kong government has launched a public consultation on the city’s first five-year development plan, a blueprint aimed at aligning with China’s newly approved 15th five-year plan. Officials have promised a “macroscopic, strategic and forward-looking” road map that will guide Hong Kong’s economic and social development for the rest of this decade.That invitation to think in five-year horizons is precisely why Hong Kong must now think bigger about its place in the world – not only as “Asia’s world city” but as a serious contender to become Asia’s multilateral hub.A quiet but profound shift is under way in the architecture of global governance. It is not the product of a grand design but of a vacuum.The United States, long the anchor of the multilateral system, is stepping back at a sp...

Hong Kong is determined to expand into new markets while consolidating ties with traditional partners and “will not give up any markets” despite geopolitical pressures, the city leader has said.In an interview with the South China Morning Post reviewing his past four years in office, Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu said the United States remained an important market for Hong Kong despite volatile relations between Beijing and Washington, while also stressing the interactions would mostly be business-to-business.Conceding that Hong Kong, as an open economy, was exposed to global turmoil, Lee stressed the complex geopolitical situation would only highlight the city’s clear edge as a “safe, stable and secure society” for investors.“I will not allow external factors to change the fundamental ...

The recent enactment of a subsidiary legislation in Hong Kong regarding the appropriate procedure to be followed in cases of non-national security offences involving national security considerations not surprisingly spurred some to revisit the chief executive’s power, granted under the national security law in 2020, to issue a certificate as to whether an act involves issues of national security.That some people express concern that such an important task is left to the executive and not the judiciary is understandable only because they have failed to understand the governing rationale behind this distinction.Many common law jurisdictions accept that the court is not an appropriate forum to determine matters of national security. Note that I am referring to national security issues and NOT...

Hong Kong authorities have hit out at The Washington Post for making “groundless allegations” about amendments to the city’s home-grown national security law in an editorial, while stressing that foreign businesses have no cause for concern.The government issued a statement late on Saturday night in response to the American newspaper’s piece titled “Hong Kong’s nightmare gets darker”.The editorial described as “repressive” the introduction of a mechanism under the Safeguarding National Security Ordinance that allows the city leader to classify legal cases as national security ones.The government said the subsidiary legislation gazetted last week only aimed to clarify “other offences endangering national security” under the relevant legislation and to offer more certainty in their implement...