Officials Ban Leaflets From Hong Kong Public Housing Over ‘Independence’ Content


2016.08.24
china-leaflets-08242016.jpg Activists holding a banner and US flags march during a rally against the banning of pro-independence candidates in the upcoming legislative council elections, in Hong Kong, Aug. 21, 2016.
AFP

As Hong Kong gears up for Legislative Council (LegCo) elections in which candidates who support independence for the city have been barred from running, housing authorities have announced a ban on political campaigners from handing out leaflets even mentioning the topic on public housing estates.

Housing officials at the Kai Ching Estate, one of the city’s largest public housing estates that houses more than 13,000 people, called the League of Social Democrats (LSD) party chairman Avery Ng, requesting that the party remove its leaflets from the premises without delivering them, Ng told RFA.

“The reason they gave was that the leaflets contained text relating to Hong Kong independence and self-determination,” Ng said.

Ng and a few dozen other LSD supporters staged a protest at the move, saying it would affect the party’s chances of being elected in Kowloon West constituency, where Kai Ching Estate is located.

“We now have 30-40,000 leaflets that we are not allowed to deliver to people’s homes,” Ng said. “They set out information on the viewpoints of the different candidates on self-determination for Hong Kong.”

“They have been rejected on the basis of that alone.”

He said the Electoral Affairs Commission, the body charged with ensuring the city has fair and constitutional elections, had yet to respond to his requests for an opinion.

“I think it’s pretty clear that what is happening here is censorship for political reasons,” Ng said.

The move comes after education officials warned that teachers in Hong Kong schools seen to be supporting independence could lose their teaching licenses.

Teachers have hit out at what they said is a politically motivated attempt to interfere with their professional autonomy.

Meanwhile, Hong Kong chief executive Leung Chun-ying has called for talk of independence to be penalized in the city’s schools in a manner similar to foul language.

"It's very clear that Hong Kong is an inalienable part of China, whether you look at it historically, politically, or constitutionally, in terms of the Basic Law. So what is there to discuss?" Leung said on Tuesday.

Veteran political journalist Ching Cheong said Leung is likely trying to burnish his image in the eyes of the ruling Chinese Communist Party as he faces a bid for a second term next year in elections decided by a Beijing-backed election committee.

“He wants to project an image of someone whose stance in the struggle against Hong Kong independence is firm and unyielding,” Ching told RFA. “I think there are some people in Beijing who are backing him for this very reason.”

“He may be hoping that they’ll swell the number of votes cast in his favor.”

'Fake universal suffrage'

Leung was elected in 2012 after winning just 689 votes out of 1,200, a number that came back to haunt him as a nickname used by pro-democracy protesters campaigning for universal suffrage in 2014.

Beijing’s proposals to vet all candidates while allowing all seven million voters a vote each were slammed by Occupy Central campaigners as “fake universal suffrage.” The plan was rejected in LegCo in 2015, and the existing voting system has remained in place.

Hong Kong Economic Journal columnist S.C. Yeung said most people in Hong Kong don’t support the idea of independence anyway.

“A great majority of Hong Kong people don’t support independence but they want to be left alone by Beijing,” he wrote in a regular opinion article.

“That includes central officials keeping an arm’s length from their children over patriotic education and Beijing police not meddling in Hong Kong law enforcement.”

He said Hong Kong education officials had “received instructions” from officials across the border on the ban on independence talk in schools.

“Under the Basic Law, Hong Kong is an ‘inalienable part of China’ but freedom of expression is protected by Hong Kong’s mini constitution,” Yeung wrote.

Under the terms of the 1997 handover to China, Hong Kong was promised a high degree of autonomy, the continuation of its existing freedoms for 50 years, and progress towards universal suffrage.

But the cross-border detentions of a number of outspoken publishers and journalists for selling “banned publications” to Chinese readers have led many to believe that the city’s freewheeling days are numbered.

Meanwhile, a recent opinion poll found that 40 percent of young people in Hong Kong favor independence for the city in 2047, when existing arrangements with China expire.

Reported by Lam Kwok-lap for RFA’s Cantonese Service. Translated and written in English by Luisetta Mudie.

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