Hong Kong is trying to impose Tiananmen by stealth – Carrie Lam herself is now the enemy of the people

This isn't a confrontation between the government and rebellious youths. It is a clash between a lame-duck government imposing the iron will of Beijing and millions of citizens
By Stuart Heaver

The regular weekend street protests in Hong Kong have spilled over into pitch battles in the middle of the working day in the city's busy financial district, as Carrie Lam's beleaguered government gives the police a free hand to impose a Beijing style crackdown on all forms of dissent.
There may be no tanks, but the People's Liberation Army (PLA) troops are already here, disguised as Hong Kong riot police as part of a concerted policy to impose Tiananmen by stealth and create a climate of fear.
It can’t be verified but riot police in full body amour looking like stormtroopers from a science fiction movie, wear masks, show no official ID and are heard speaking in Putonghua dialect. 

They could be anyone. 

The average height of Hong Kong police officers appears to have increased by about 10cm since July and photos circulated online by the Demosisto party, appear to show Hong Kong police mustered inside a PLA barracks. 

Their primary job is to intimidate.
The tragic death last Friday, of student demonstrator, Alex Chow Tsz-lok, who fell from a multi-storey car park while fleeing police tear gas the previous weekend, presented an opportunity for Lam to call for reason and dialogue; to offer concessions and seek political solutions.




Instead of leadership, broken Hong Kong was offered only more lame condemnation and the promise of more crackdowns on the protesters she has described as “enemies of the people.”
Unfortunately for Lam, there is still widespread mainstream support for these so-called enemies, and Hongkongers are typically defiant.
During a peaceful unauthorized rally in Victoria Park earlier this month, which was subsequently broken up by police tear gas, I asked one attendee (not wearing black or a face mask) whether he felt intimidated or in fear for their safety.
“Of course, that is why we are here, once we stop coming, they have won,” he told me.
Lam’s uncompromising stance has only triggered new levels of anger and tension as the government provokes violence and then condemns it in a futile cycle which is destroying this once great city.
The resultant tense and febrile atmosphere has already led to a man being set on fire and an unarmed young protester being shot at close range by a police officer on Monday morning and left critically ill in hospital.
Carrie Lam announces anti-face mask law for Hong Kong protesters
There are widespread rumours and accusations of rapes, beatings and brutality in police custody which are impossible to verify. 

I have witnessed old folks collapsed in doorways receiving first aid for the effects of tear gas inhalation and parents holding wet towels to their children’s faces, rushing for shelter from the new brand of tear gas, manufactured in China. 

It penetrates most gas masks and burns the lungs, causing some to cough up blood.
Bankers and office workers were tear-gassed during their lunch hour in Central’s affluent business district for two days running this week, and students are being attacked by police with baton rounds on campus. 

Legitimate election candidates have been arrested or attacked, or both, and peaceful assemblies and rallies attended by families and children are broken up by armed riot police dispensing tear gas.
It is misleading to portray this crisis as a confrontation between the government and rebellious youths. 

It is a confrontation between a lame-duck government imposing the iron will of Beijing and millions of people in Hong Kong. 

If anyone is the enemy of the people, it is Lam, Beijing’s stooge.
Anyone wanting to experience the sudden imposition of a police state and white terror, try a short break in Hong Kong.

China Vows Tougher Security in Hong Kong. Easier Said Than Done.

Communist Party leaders said they would bring in “national security” legal measures to quell unrest in the territory. The pitfalls could catch them out.
By Chris Buckley

Riot police officers and protesters clashing in Hong Kong last month.

BEIJING — Beijing urged Hong Kong’s embattled leader on Wednesday to support a push to impose national security measures in the territory, which has been hit by months of antigovernment protests. The trouble is that what China’s ruling Communist Party has proposed is not clear and could be hard to enforce.
The party hopes that such "national security" measures will head off unrest in Hong Kong that has challenged its authority. 

But Hong Kong’s politicians have little appetite for security legislation that could set off more intense protests. 

Many experts also doubt how much Beijing can directly impose its will on the territory’s legal system without dangerously damaging trust in Hong Kong’s special status both there and internationally.
China’s latest warning to end the protests that have pummeled Hong Kong for 22 weeks was delivered by Han Zheng, a vice premier who oversees Chinese policy toward the territory, when he met Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s top official, in Beijing on Wednesday.
“This extreme violence and destruction would not be tolerated or accepted by any country or society in the world,” Han told Lam, according to footage of the meeting shown by Phoenix, a Hong Kong-based television service.
Han reiterated the support that Chinese dictator Xi Jinping expressed in Lam in Shanghai on Monday. 

But he underscored the Chinese government’s impatience with the protests, which he described as the worst trouble in Hong Kong since Beijing regained sovereignty of the territory from the British in 1997.
“Stopping the violence and disorder, and restoring order, is the most important task now,” Han said.
He cited a Chinese Communist Party announcement last week of planned "national security" measures for Hong Kong, and pointedly added that the idea had received support.

Hong Kong’s politicians have little appetite for security legislation that could set off more intense protests. 

Throughout the protests, the Chinese government has struggled to match its hard-line rhetoric with effective policies. 

That problem could deter or frustrate the push to drive through "national security" measures covering the territory.
Earlier, China’s suggestions that it could send troops to Hong Kong to help end the protests petered out, dismissed as unrealistic by experts and many Hong Kongers. 

Chinese propaganda outlets, which depicted the protesters as puppets of “hostile foreign forces,” seemed caught flat footed when Lam announced that she would formally drop the draft extradition legislation that ignited the discontent.
The central government has repeatedly expressed support for Hong Kong’s police force, but officers have struggled to drive back crowds of masked protesters by using tear gas, water cannons and live gunfire.
In mainland China, Xi has driven far-reaching changes through the party-controlled legislature. 

But Hong Kong’s British-derived legal system could complicate, even confound, any Chinese attempt to directly impose laws against "national security" crimes, several experts said.
Regina Ip, a pro-Beijing member of Lam’s cabinet, said she expected that Lam would make little progress on national security legislation. 

Ip was the security secretary for Hong Kong in 2003 when the government made an unsuccessful attempt to introduce such measures.
“It’s not something that can happen anytime soon,” Ip said of any new push for national security legislation. 

“But it’s clearly something that weighs heavily on the minds of the Chinese leaders.”
Just how heavily Hong Kong weighs on Xi and other leaders became clear in recent days.
Last week, Chinese Communist Party leaders approved a set of proposals for strengthening government, including one that said China would “build and improve a legal system and enforcement mechanism to defend national security” in Hong Kong.
The full decision from their meeting, released on Tuesday, also laid out proposals to support the city’s police force and expand education intended to promote patriotic loyalty to China, though the party has not issued details of its plans.
Hong Kong’s inability to pass security legislation has long irked Chinese officials. 

Article 23 of the Basic Law, the mini-constitution defining Hong Kong’s status under China, says the territory “shall enact laws on its own to prohibit any act of treason, secession, sedition and subversion” against the Chinese government.
But after the upheaval over the extradition bill, Hong Kong’s leaders and legislators would be reluctant to use Article 23, said Wei Leijie, a law professor at Xiamen University in southeastern China who studies Hong Kong.
“That road has been blocked,” he said by telephone. 

“The obstacles are immense.”
Yet the Communist Party leaders’ decision last week has kindled expectations among some that Xi could push Lam or her successor to enact a national security law. 

Comments in Chinese state-run news outlets have called for quick action, as have Hong Kong commentators loyal to China.
If Hong Kong “does not pass legislation on its own, and this keeps dragging out too long, that would also be intolerable,” said Gu Minkang, a Chinese researcher on Hong Kong law who teaches at a college in Hunan Province in southern China, said by telephone.
He has argued that China could force through national security legislation for Hong Kong if Lam or her successor failed to get the territory’s legislative council to approve a bill.
Although election laws ensure that the council is dominated by pro-Beijing members, they could waver in voting for contentious security legislation, as some did in 2003, when a previous bill failed.

Armored vehicles gathered in August at a sports center in Shenzhen, China, across the border from Hong Kong.

Some experts argue that under another section of the Basic Law, Article 18, China has the power to impose laws against at least some security threats in Hong Kong by putting them into an annex of the Basic Law.
But imposing any laws against political subversion and similar crimes on Hong Kong is much easier said than done, other experts said.
The Basic Law clearly indicates that the power to enact legislation covering major national security crimes, such as treason and seeking secession, belonged in the hands of Hong Kong lawmakers, Danny Gittings, an expert on Hong Kong’s legal status, said in a telephone interview.
Even Chinese laws lodged in the annex of the Basic Law must be approved by Hong Kong’s chief executive or its legislature to come into force, he said. 

That step could prove politically incendiary, and laws would be open to challenge in Hong Kong courts.
“It’s not enough to put it in the Basic Law,” Mr. Gittings said. 

“It’s got to go through the local process.”
Declaring a state of emergency in the territory could blast a hole through such legal concerns, Mr. Gittings said. 

But that step could inflame protests and shake global confidence in Hong Kong as a financial center.
If China declared a state of emergency to impose security legislation, said Professor Wei, the Chinese legal academic, “the situation in Hong Kong could be hard to clean up.”

Hong Kong’s Mask Ban Reveals Carrie Lam’s True Face

The city’s leader announced an emergency law to restore order. It was a deliberate provocation.

By Alan Leong Kah-kit

Protesters defied a new emergency law banning masks at public gatherings in Hong Kong on Saturday.

HONG KONG — This city has long prided herself on respecting the rule of law — the ultimate guarantee of Hong Kongers’ freedoms, human rights and way of life. 

It is one of the attributes that make Hong Kong stand apart from cities on the Chinese mainland. 

Our practice of common law, together with an independent judiciary served by high-caliber judges, has earned us the trust and the confidence of friends and trading partners all over the world. 

Our legal system’s predictability and its freedom from political interference guarantee that no one will fall victim to the arbitrary exercise of power by government authorities.
Or so it did. 

All of this changed last Friday when Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s besieged chief executive, unilaterally decided to invoke the Emergency Regulations Ordinance to prohibit face masks and other coverings at public gatherings. 

The new regulation — formally called the Prohibition on Face Covering Regulation and, more commonly, the face-mask ban — makes it a criminal offense punishable by one year of imprisonment for people to hide their faces in ways that prevent identification, even if they are participating in lawful meetings or marches.
Lam said the ban was designed to stop violence and restore order, but her move only added fuel to the fire. 

Thousands of people — in masks — took to the streets all weekend, even after service was suspended across the entire underground system. 

There were clashes with police. 

A 14-year-old was shot in the leg.
The ordinance is an archaic statute from 1922, when Hong Kong was a British colony and the acts of the city’s governor were regulated by the monarchy in Britain. 

Since Hong Kong reverted to Chinese sovereignty in 1997, it has had its own Constitution, the Basic Law, which is supposed to protect the city’s autonomy from China under the “One Country, Two Systems” principle. 

Acts of the chief executive should be reviewed for compliance with the Basic Law.

• Article 39 provides that the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights will continue to apply in Hong Kong after 1997. 
• Article 73 vests the legislative power of Hong Kong in the Legislative Council. 
• Article 8 says that any laws previously in force that contravene the Basic Law cannot be maintained.

On Friday, Lam violated all of these provisions. 

To take one example: She usurped the lawmaking function of the Legislative Council by bypassing the council altogether. 

LegCo is scheduled to reconvene on Oct. 16; Lam could have waited until then to propose her ban as a bill. 

She now claims that her regulation is subject to “negative vetting” by LegCo, or vetting after the fact. Yet it should not have come into force until after it was reviewed by LegCo.
Lam announced the ban by fiat, and with that, Hong Kong has just moved one step closer to becoming an authoritarian regime, ruled at the executive’s pleasure without institutional or systemic safeguards. 

We are moving away from the rule of law toward rule by law.
The invocation of the emergency ordinance is unlawful, and so the face-mask ban should be deemed inherently void.
Lam knows this fact only too well, and she knows that she may yet lose any judicial review of the law’s constitutionality. 

So why did she do this? 

She is reported to have initially been reluctant to pass the measure. 

But then, suddenly, she passed it — just three days after returning from Beijing, where she attended celebrations for the 70th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China.
Xi Jinping might well have given her the marching order. 

The Chinese Communist Party (C.C.P.) is haunted by the images of millions of peaceful marchers taking to the streets of Hong Kong to demand the freedom, the human rights protection, the rule of law and the preservation of Hong Kong’s way of life that they have been promised under the Basic Law but have been treacherously denied.
The authorities’ calculation seems to be that if masks are banned, future rallies will be smaller. 

Some protesters will not be deterred. 

But others — especially peaceful demonstrators who are civil servants and employees of government-funded NGOs, Chinese businesses or conglomerates that actively trade with China — will be reluctant to assemble or march. 

Already, the local airline Cathay Pacific has fired employees, including pilots, who had expressed sympathy on social media for the protest movement.
At the same time, the pushback by dedicated protesters this weekend was so predictable that it is impossible not to think that it, too, was a desired effect. 

The ban was also designed to provoke the more radical factions of the protest movement into escalating violence. 

Lam and the C.C.P. can then invoke any such deterioration, as well as, say, acts of arson — or even, some fear, crimes by agent provocateurs planted by the police — to call the movement a riot and its participants vandals.
One of their hopes is that more Hong Kongers may then distance themselves from the movement because of the increased social costs. 

Another is that the movement will lose some of the moral authority it seems to command with liberal democracies around the world.
A more sinister explanation is that further violence on the streets could become an excuse to impose a curfew, formally or de facto, and pass other extreme emergency regulations. 

Members of the major pro-government party are also said to worry about their prospects in the district council elections scheduled for late November: Chaos would be a convenient pretext to postpone or cancel those.
Legislators from the democratic camp have started a legal battle challenging Lam’s ordinance and are asking that it be reviewed judicially. 

The High Court refused this weekend to order an interim injunction to stop the ban from taking immediate effect but has said that the case could be heard in full before the end of October.
We already knew that “One Country, Two Systems” was dying; now we know that the rule of law is dying too.

Malaysia's Mahathir says Hong Kong leader should step down

By A. Ananthalakshmi

Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad addresses the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York City, New York, U.S., September 27, 2019. 

KUALA LUMPUR -- Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad said on Friday Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam should step down following months of protests against her government, Malaysian media reported.
Growing opposition to the Hong Kong government has plunged the financial hub into its biggest political crisis in decades and poses the gravest popular challenge to Chinese dictator Xi Jinping since he came to power in 2012.
Speaking at a conference in Kuala Lumpur, Mahathir, referring to Beijing, said Lam “has to obey the masters and at the same time she has to ask her conscience”, according to online news portal MalaysiaKini.
“I think best thing is to resign,” Mahathir said.
The protests in Hong Kong began over a now-withdrawn extradition bill, which would have allowed people to be sent to mainland China for trial, and have intensified markedly since June. 

They have also evolved into wider calls for democracy, among other demands.
Mahathir, 94, is one of Asia’s most experienced leaders.

He was prime minister for 22 years from 1981, only to come out of retirement last year to head a government after an opposition election victory.

Beijing's Hong Kong compromise is surely too little, too late

The incendiary extradition bill has been binned but protesters’ demands have grown
By Emma Graham-Harrison

Carrie Lam is seen on TV in Hong Kong announcing the formal withdrawal of the extradition bill that had provoked months of protests. 

The decision by the Hong Kong leader, Carrie Lam, to withdraw the extradition bill that provoked months of turmoil represents a major and unexpected concession from Beijing, but is certainly too little, and too late, to end the protests.
In June when millions first poured into the streets in peaceful protest, a promise to ditch the law might well have muted the burgeoning popular uprising. 

But Lam is only acting after months of police brutality, thug attacks on protesters, mass arrests, and aggressive threats of security intervention from communist China.

“This is a government which has backed police abuses, threatened to use unlimited emergency powers, banned peaceful assemblies and arrested more than 1,000 protesters,” said Kenneth Chan, a professor at Hong Kong Baptist University and former lawmaker. 

“Having gone through all this, few could thank Carrie Lam today.”
Over the last three months, a movement born out of concerns over one law has morphed into something much broader. 

Demonstrators have drawn up a list of five key demands, including a public inquiry into police violence, amnesty for arrested protesters and democratic reforms to bring universal suffrage.
Many protesters saw Beijing’s concession as meeting only the “easiest and ‘cheapest’” of their five demands, said Lokman Tsui, an assistant professor at the journalism school of the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
“In the last few weeks the bill hasn’t been on most protesters’ minds, actually,” he said. 

“Instead it’s the government’s response to the protests, the way they tried to silence and suppress the protesters – by using teargas, inappropriate levels of force, arresting people for protesting etc – that is at the heart of the ongoing protests.”
The law would have allowed any resident or visitor to Hong Kong to be sent to mainland China to face trial in opaque, politically controlled courts, in effect destroying the legal firewall that underpins Hong Kong’s economy and its political freedoms.
It spurred unprecedented protests because many in the city, including those who normally steered clear of politics, saw it as an existential threat to both their livelihoods and way of life.
The decision to drop it have been sanctioned by Beijing, which is balancing a desire not to look weak, and a fear that concessions will only embolden protesters, with concern over the political and economic toll of the protests.
Hong Kong is deeply embedded in the southern Chinese economy, and is an important portal to international financial markets for the whole country. 

The turmoil has also come as the trade war between China and the US deepens.

Hong Kong protesters vow to stay on the streets despite Carrie Lam concession.

News of Lam’s announcement revived the city’s main Hang Seng index, and demonstrators were quick to capitalise on market enthusiasm for the concession with memes such as one that asked: “Did you know? If you respond to one demand, the Hang Seng index will rise a thousand points. Respond to five demands, the Hang Seng index will rise five thousand points.”
The stakes are getting higher for both authorities and protesters as 1 October approaches, the 70th anniversary of the founding of communist China. 

Lavish national celebrations have been planned to mark the date, and Xi Jinping is unlikely to want them overshadowed by unrest in Hong Kong.
Demonstrators have not been deterred by police violence, mass arrests or threats of greater use of force, and so the decision to withdraw the bill may have been a first attempt at compromise. 

But there are also fears that Beijing may just be paving the way for the use of force, by allowing Chinese authorities to claim they tried and failed to compromise.
“My worry is that what she did is part of Beijing’s blueprint to prepare a heavy crackdown,” said Chan. 

“The state propaganda officials have on numerous occasions argued that the movement ‘is no longer about the law, its subversive and anti-China’.”

Hong Kong - China (1- 0)

Too little, too late: Carrie Lam to withdraw China extradition bill, but will it stop the protests?

BY RAMY INOCENCIO


Hong Kong — The embattled leader of Hong Kong announced Wednesday that she was withdrawing a massively controversial extradition bill that would have given Beijing the power to spirit people away into China's opaque legal system. 

It's the bill that sparked the huge anti-government protests, which are now in their third month. 

But abandoning it at this stage appeared unlikely to quash the unrest.
It was a huge U-turn from Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam; the Beijing-appointed leader of the semi-autonomous Chinese territory had previously said there was no room for compromise.
But protesters weren't celebrating the reversal on Wednesday. 

They called it too little, too late. 

Withdrawing the extradition bill is only one of five demands being made by the leaders of the pro-democracy movement.
"I'm glad it's finally done, but it's not sufficient," protest organizer Bonnie Leung told CBS News on Wednesday. 

"Five demands, not one less," she said.
They also want an independent inquiry into police brutality. 

Jarring images of Hong Kong police beating and pepper spraying terrified people in a subway, believed, but not confirmed to be protesters, have galvanized those calls.
The anti-government protests are now in their 14th week, and that may be one of the biggest reasons for Lam's reversal. 

Millions of people have hit the streets since June 9, demanding she revoke the bill.

The protests have become more violent. 

Extreme members of the movement have assaulted government offices in the city with firebombs, and others jammed the roads and rail links to the airport to gain international attention.
October 1 also looms large on the horizon; this year is the 70th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic of China. 

Every five years there is a massive military celebration in Beijing to mark the occasion.
China's Communist Party doesn't want anything to tarnish that day in the eyes of the world. 

Lam's climb-down could be an attempt to save face before Hong Kong's crisis tarnishes it even more.
Earlier this week, there was an embarrassing leaked audio of Lam admitting she would resign if she could. 

The implication was that she is firmly controlled by Beijing, something many Hong Kongers were already convinced of.Bonnie Leung, vice convenor of the Civil Human Rights Front (CHRF), is seen during an interview in Hong Kong, August 20, 2019.

The day after the audio was leaked to the Reuters news agency, she said she never tendered her resignation, and people came to distrust her even more.
"If an olive branch is given (by the Hong Kong government) then we will discuss openly with them," Leung told CBS News.
The protesters are also demanding that Lam resign.
"It would be good because she's hated. I don't like hating anyone, but she was lying from the (leaked) audio tape" that was leaked to Reuters, Leung said. 

She vowed that even if the government's decision to meet one of the demands calms the protests, she and the other leaders of the movement won't pack it in.
"If people decide it's enough then they will go home. It's the choice of the people," Leung said. 

"The movement may die down a bit. People may calm down, but we will still fight for universal suffrage."
That is another key demand by the protesters; to elect their own leader directly in an election where every citizen gets a vote. 

Right now, that power belongs to Beijing.

Joshua Wong walks free, calls on Carrie Lam to resign

AFP

Wong was sent to prison in May after he lost an attempt to quash a jail sentence over the huge democracy protests he helped lead in 2014.

Hong Kong -- Hong Kong democracy activist Joshua Wong called on the city's pro-Beijing leader Carrie Lam to resign after he walked free from prison on Monday, as historic anti-government protests rocked the city.
"She is no longer qualified to be Hong Kong's leader," Wong told reporters. 

"She must take the blame and resign, be held accountable and step down."
Wong was sent to prison in May after he lost an attempt to quash a jail sentence over the huge democracy protests he helped lead in 2014.
His release comes as Hong Kong is rocked by historic anti-government protests. 

They were initially sparked by mass public opposition to a plan to allow extraditions to China.
But the movement has since morphed into the latest expression of public rage against both the city's leaders and Beijing.
Speaking to the media outside Lai Chi Kok Correctional Institute, 22-year-old Wong called on protesters to continue their protests and civil disobedience campaign.
"We demand Carrie Lam to step down, completely withdraw the extradition law, and retract the 'riot' label," he said, referring to Lam's previous term to describe protesters earlier in the week.
He also condemned authorities for firing tear gas and rubber bullets during violent clashes between protesters and police on Wednesday.
"When I was in jail, I saw Carrie Lam crying on the live television broadcast. All I can say is, when she shed tears, Hong Kong citizens were shedding blood in Admiralty," he said, referring to the district where the clashes took place.

Rogue Nation

China to Select New Hong Kong Leader Amid Anger at China Meddling
By James Pomfret

People attend an election campaign by candidate John Tsang, former Financial Secretary, at the financial Central district, two days before the Chief Executive election, in Hong Kong, China March 24, 2017. 

HONG KONG -- A small electoral college chooses a new Hong Kong leader on Sunday amid accusations of meddling by Beijing, denying the Chinese-ruled financial hub a more populist leader perhaps better suited to defuse political tension.
The vast majority of the city's 7.3 million people have no say in their next leader, with the winner to be chosen by a 1,200-person "election committee" stacked with pro-Beijing and pro-establishment loyalists.
Three candidates are running for the top post, two former officials, Carrie Lam and John Tsang, and a retired judge, Woo Kwok-hing. 

Lam is considered the favorite.
"I hope we all remember on 24 March 2017, we Hong Kong people have all come together and given our most sincere blessings for a more united, a better Hong Kong," Tsang told a rally of thousands of cheering supporters on Friday night.
Mass protests are planned over the weekend denouncing Beijing's "interference" in the election amid widespread reports of lobbying of the 1,200 voters to back Lam, rather than the more populist and conciliatory former finance chief, Tsang.
Since Hong Kong returned to Chinese rule in 1997, Beijing has gradually increased control over the territory even though Beijing promised wide-ranging freedoms and autonomy under the formula of "one country, two systems", along with an undated promise of universal suffrage.
Many fear that Lam will continue the tough policies of staunchly pro-Beijing incumbent Leung Chun-ying, a divisive figure who ordered the firing of tear gas on pro-democracy protesters in 2014 and who wasn't seen to be defending Hong Kong's autonomy and core values.
The political upheavals with Beijing over the city's autonomy and democratic reforms -- that many hoped would have allowed a direct election this time round -- have roiled a new generation and weighed on the city's economy, ranked 33rd globally by the World Bank in 2015.
Political and social divisions, mainly over democracy and anxieties over China's creeping influence, have dominated political debate leading to some legislative and policy-making paralysis and the stalling of major projects, including a cultural hub and high-speed rail link to China.
Businesses have also faced growing competition from mainland Chinese firms in core sectors like services and property. 

Housing prices, now among the world's highest, are widely seen to have been jacked up by an unrelenting wave of buying from rich Chinese, intensifying anti-China sentiment.
Many observers, leading businessmen and politicians have warned Hong Kong can't afford another period of upheaval if the city is to regain its former capitalist mojo.
Beijing's shadowy detention of five Hong Kong booksellers in late 2015, and the disappearance of a Chinese billionaire this year, have also undermined confidence in "one country, two systems" formula.
While Beijing hasn't explicitly backed any candidate, senior officials have stressed certain conditions must be met including a new leader having the "trust" of China's Communist leaders.
"Just because a candidate is leading popularity polls doesn't necessarily mean you should vote for (that person)," said Leung Chun-ying on Friday.
Nearly 2,000 police will be stationed around the harbourfront voting center in case of any unrest.