BEIJING -- China's ceremonial legislature will deliberate changes to Hong Kong's electoral system during its annual session, a spokesperson said Thursday, adding to concerns that Beijing intends to shut opposition voices out of the city's political process entirely.
National People's Congress spokesperson Zhang Yesui said the changes are aimed at ensuring that Hong Kong's political system will "keep abreast of the times" under the principle of "patriots" administering the city.
Zhang gave no details, although speculation has focused on the possibility of reassigning votes in the 1,200-member committee that selects the city's leader to deprive a small number of elected local district counselors from taking part.
Officials have also increasingly insisted that only those who prove themselves sufficiently loyal to Beijing and the ruling Communist Party may hold office.
The congress opens this morning with a lengthy address from Premier Li Keqiang reviewing the past year and spelling out priorities for the coming 12 months. The vast majority of the roughly 3,000-member body's legislative work is handled by a standing committee that meets throughout the year.
The crackdown on dissent in Hong Kong has intensified since China imposed a sweeping national security law on the city last year, bypassing Hong Kong's local Legislative Council, saying it was necessary to provide stability after widespread anti-government protests in 2019, as well as to inculcate love of country in the former British colony.
Critics say the law and accompanying crackdown are stripping the city of many of its rights promised by Beijing at the time of its 1997 handover to Chinese rule under a "one country, two systems" framework.
In other comments at a Thursday night news conference, Zhang promoted China's development of covid-19 vaccines and its provisioning of doses to developing countries, including 10 million donated through the World Health Organization's COVAX initiative.
China is seeking to protect global health without attaching "political strings" or pursuing a larger geopolitical strategy, Zhang said.
Questioned on this year's defense budget, Zhang declined to give a figure but said the spending level was appropriate for China's security needs and to meet its international obligations. China has the world's largest standing military and its defense budget is second only to the U.S., which sees in China's assertions of territorial and maritime claims an attempt to supplant the U.S. as East Asia's leading military power.
Meanwhile, a Hong Kong court Thursday ordered all 47 pro-democracy activists charged under the Beijing-imposed national security law to be kept in custody after the Department of Justice appealed an initial decision to grant 15 of them bail.
Thirty-one of the activists were denied bail outright, with the co-founder of the 2014 Occupy Central protest movement, Benny Tai, withdrawing his bail application after he was ordered held in a separate case.
The next hearing in the case will be May 31.
Information for this article was contributed by Ken Moritsugu, Zen Soo and Nicole Ko of The Associated Press.
