Missing voters

The Hong Kong government reports that the number of registered voters in the city has fallen for the third year running… 

…around 18,900 new registration applications were received for the geographical constituencies in the 2024 voter cycle… A total of 142,400 voters were provisionally removed from the electoral register [about 29,900 due to death and about 112,500 as a result of other inquiry processes].

The number of deaths in Hong Kong in 2023 was 54,400, so about 54% of them were registered to vote (presumably, their names are automatically taken off the voters’ register). But what about the other 112,500 missing voters?.

If my experience is anything to go by, the ‘other inquiry processes’ include attempts to update addresses when people move to a new home and don’t update their particulars with the Registration and Electoral Office. When a voting card or other communication is returned as undelivered, the authorities can send an email or SMS, if they have those contact details. And you get a stream of reminders (see right).

It’s not especially onerous to update your details, so if you don’t do it, it either means you’ve emigrated, or you’re making a conscious decision not to be on the electoral roll any more. Why would you decide not to vote in future? Perhaps because you don’t see any point. For example, maybe the candidates you used to support are now in jail, and today’s ballots have only a handful of unknown names with similar platforms. 

The Education Bureau releases curriculum guidelines for a new Citizenship, Economics and Society subject in Hong Kong secondary schools…

“[Patriotic Education] helps students understand the development of our country and the importance of the close relationship between the Mainland and Hong Kong to the development of our society, thereby cultivating students’ sense of nationhood, affection for our country and sense of national identity,” the document reads.

…Xi Jinping Thought is recommended for third-year secondary students as part of a module called “Our Country’s Political Structure and Its Participation in International Affairs.”

When asked how much students should learn about Xi Jinping Thought, Ranny Yau, the principle of TWGHs Kap Yan Directors’ College and chairman of a committee responsible for reviewing the new subject, told Ming Pao on Thursday that junior secondary school students were expected to know more about China.

“It is unnecessary to single out and highlight some content that may worry teachers,” Yau said in Cantonese.

What exactly is ‘Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’? Some observers see its aim as the ‘great rejuvenation of China’, or to enable the CCP to avoid the fate of the USSR. A recent ASPI Strategist article says…

It is a totalising ideology that enshrines the absolute leadership of the party over the state constitution. There is no state separate from the party. The decisive function of the market, a key aspect of the reform era, is now subservient to XJT and the party cells that are embedded in businesses and required to guide them.

In the Mainland, it is taught in primary schools – and many adults are expected to attend workplace seminars on the subject.

Some reading from the weekend…

Oz ABC on the remaking of Hong Kong…

In the past couple of years, more than 100,000 people have moved to Hong Kong, and the majority have come from mainland China. It’s not by accident. Hong Kong’s Beijing-controlled government is offering a raft of incentives to lure people to the city, after an exodus of skilled workers in the wake of the COVID pandemic and China’s ruthless crackdown on political dissent following the 2019 pro-democracy protests. 

PBS interview with the co-owners of Bleak House Books, formerly of San Po Kong, now in a village near Rochester, NY.

If you’re on Twitter: illustrated thread by @bauhiniacapital who’s renovating a smallish Hong Kong fishing boat as a leisure craft (presumably – though he also gets a gill-net commercial fishing permit as part of the deal)…

Decent-sized cabin. Sits 8-10 pretty easily. Not what one would call callipygian, but she’s got good bones.

Michael Pettis on Beijing’s difficulties in stimulating consumption…

Beijing’s reluctance to support consumer demand might not be as bizarre as it seems. Other countries in similar positions—most famously Japan in the 1980s—also said they wanted to boost the consumption shares of their economies but struggled to do so. Raising the consumption share of the economy is much more difficult than it may at first seem.

…direct and implicit transfers meant that China’s global competitiveness in manufacturing was the other side of the coin of China’s very weak consumption … China’s extremely competitive manufacturing—and the world’s best transportation and logistical infrastructure—should not be thought of as separate from the country’s extraordinary low domestic consumption. The former exists because of the latter, and one requires the other. 

Taipei Times op-ed on one way President William Lai is different from his predecessor… 

Lai’s speech touched on issues of Taiwanese nationality and identity, and vision for the future that he expects the (DPP) to take the lead. Meanwhile, at around the same time, his administration announced plans for a change in national linguistic self-identity.

The two moves are almost certainly connected. One is the Ministry of Education (MOE) announcing plans to change the labelling on language teaching materials from “Southern Min” (閩南語) to “Taiwan Taiwanese” (台灣台語). The other is Lai’s decision to give his entire speech at the DPP National Congress in “Taiwan Taiwanese.”

Lai was taking some political risks in his language choice. On one hand, it is quite likely that younger audience members and some older ones couldn’t understand his speech. The other is that traditionally the party has been dominated by Taiwanese speakers and distrusted by those who came to Taiwan from China after the Chinese Civil War, Hakka and indigenous peoples.

Mainlanders traditionally distrusted the DPP because they identified as Chinese, while Hakka and indigenous peoples had historically suffered at the hands of the numerically superior Taiwanese-speaking peoples who originated in Fujian. Tsai had actively tried to court those groups and de-emphasize any link to any specific group, with some success. For example, the DPP went from zero indigenous legislative seats to two out of six now.