More election excitement

The government announces that 100 candidates for the 2025 Election Committee Subsector by-elections have been screened and approved as suitably patriotic to take part in the September 7 exercise. Of the 100, 28 will take part in elections for 21 seats in six contested subsectors (such as ‘Architectural, surveying, planning and landscape’ and ‘Representatives of members of Area Committees, District Fight Crime Committees, and District Fire Safety Committees of Hong Kong and Kowloon’). Another 72 in 22 other subsectors are returned automatically because there is only one candidate per seat. Plus there’s…

…one candidate whose nomination for the Heung Yee Kuk subsector was ruled invalid by the CERC due to his death during the nomination period.

A complete list of these subsectors is here. The Election Committee officially elects the Chief Executive, who was unopposed last time, and 40 out of 90 seats in the Legislative Council, many of which will probably also have just one candidate per seat. So in essence, this is about people pretending to vote for people who will in turn pretend to vote for a ‘winning candidate’ CE already decided in Beijing or for a narrow field of carefully vetted prospective lawmakers. 

In the old days, a few of the subsectors had sizable electorates of normal people, so observers could detect signs of opposition – though the structure ensured that it wouldn’t make any difference to the result. But things have changed. As HKFP says…

…According to voter registration figures updated last month, there are 8,877 registered voters for the Election Committee polls, down from 257,992 in 2020.

And most of these voters – even those for ‘grassroots’ – are in fact corporate bodies or associations.

The budget is (if I recall) over HK$200 million? Why bother?

If Xi Jinping vanishes for a while, does it mean there’s a coup attempt underway? Is 2027 some sort of deadline for China to invade Taiwan? Lowy Interpreter on how and why outsiders find it easy to misread China…

In a system that rarely admits failure, silence can be seen as proof – a classic case of confirmation bias. These episodes show how stories can eclipse evidence, especially when they align with our assumptions. Analytical rigor means asking not just what we know, but why certain narratives stick.