A long campaign against dissent crushes a final few democrats
Publicado en The Economist, el 3 de julio de 2025
TEARS ROLLED down Chan Po-ying’s face at the disbandment of the League of Social Democrats (LSD), the last functioning pro-democracy party in Hong Kong, on June 29th. Ms Chan, the party’s leader, spoke of the impossibility of operating amid “the omnipresence of red lines and the draconian suppression of dissent”.
The LSD looks like one of the final casualties in the authorities’ long campaign against civil liberties. It all began in 2019 after the government sought to introduce a law that would have allowed criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China. Pro-democracy protests erupted across the city in response and lasted over a year. At their height nearly 2m people, more than a quarter of Hong Kong’s population, took to the streets. Members of the LSD helped prevent a second reading of the extradition bill and it was eventually shelved.
But in 2020 the central government in Beijing introduced a sweeping national-security law that allowed it to dismantle the city’s democratic system. Opposition parties were barred from politics in 2021 and have since been forced to disband, along with at least 90 civil-society groups. In February the Democratic Party, the city’s oldest and biggest opposition group, said it would dissolve. Almost all prominent pro-democracy activists are now either behind bars or in exile. Fears grow that the Hong Kong Journalists Association, a small but punchy union, is next in the line of fire.
The government wants to show the central authorities in Beijing that it remains vigilant. In a statement for the national-security law’s anniversary on June 30th, it promised an “ongoing and endless commitment” to it. John Lee, the first chief executive drawn from the police, warned against lurking “soft resistance”. The intensity betrays Beijing’s concern. A white paper published by the central authorities in May claimed “external forces” were increasingly using “Hong Kong issues” to meddle in China’s affairs amid heightened geopolitical tensions. Hong Kong’s democrats may be defeated, but they are not yet dismissed.