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Opinion | Don’t let Hong Kong’s political apathy become a ticking time bomb
- Political powerlessness fuelled the 2019 social unrest. Sweeping political changes since then have left Hongkongers disengaged, and deep trust issues remain
- With the ‘opposition’ Democratic Party facing an uphill task in the district council elections, the authorities must work on re-engaging the electorate
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Why you can trust SCMP
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The findings of a survey by the Hong Kong Institute of Asia-Pacific Studies at Chinese University on public interest in politics are both expected and disturbing. About 60 per cent – a 7.3 percentage point increase from last year – of Hongkongers said they were not interested in politics. In the past year, more than four-fifths have rarely or had never expressed a political opinion on social media, up 17.1 percentage points.
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These numbers suggest apathy is part of the new political reality. I don’t think many of us are surprised by that. There’s very little to be gained in expressing political opinions on social media, not since the deep fissures left by the 2019 anti-government unrest, which not only split communities, but severed lifelong friendships and tore families apart.
Hong Kong may have “walked out of a political quagmire”, as Zheng Yanxiong, director of Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong, said in June, but the trauma to our collective psych will take much longer to recover from.
In “fixing” the city’s politics, Beijing and the city’s leaders had focused mainly on purging. The improved political systems and reformed electoral arrangements took years to implement. The last piece of the puzzle, the formation and election of district councils, will be in place with the December 10 elections, and so many safeguards have been infused that there is little chance of a repeat of 2019.
Securing nominations for any election has been made so tough that only a few outside the pro-establishment camp made it into the last Legislative Council election.
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Against this backdrop, the Democratic Party has announced plans to field eight candidates in the district council elections. That is curious, given that the party fielded no one for the Legco election. Securing nominations for the revamped and powerless district council seats is no easier than for entering Legco.
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