From Xinhua News Agency, Dec. 21, 2021. Complete text:
Beijing – The West-led small circles are putting on a clumsy show after rushing one after another to groundlessly smear the election of the seventh-term Legislative Council (LegCo) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR).
With ridiculous statements, the “Five Eyes” intelligence alliance, the Group of Seven (G7), and some others continued to meddle with China’s internal affairs and chose to turn a blind eye to the democratic progress in Hong Kong.
Over 1.3 million people in Hong Kong went to the polls on Sunday [Dec. 19] despite the COVID-19 pandemic, the cold weather, and interference from individuals and forces associated with external forces.
The LegCo election, the first since the improvement in the HKSAR’s electoral system, was smooth and orderly with great enthusiasm and active participation from voters in Hong Kong, fully demonstrating the true will of the people while slapping the face of those bent on destabilizing the city and China at large.
The voters, fed up with meaningless infighting previously choking the LegCo and looking forward to good governance in Hong Kong, used their ballots to fill the seats with legislators who truly love Hong Kong and their motherland rather than pawns of certain Western countries.
Western cliques and bodies are trying to distort the facts by ignoring the diversity of new LegCo members, which include both natives and Mandarin-speaking “Hong Kong drifters,” as well as legislative veterans and newcomers, from a broad range of communities, such as business, politics, education, health care, law, and accounting.
The newly-elected Hong Kong legislators differ in backgrounds, ideas, religious beliefs, and demands of interests, serving as a good illustration that there is plenty of room to accommodate different political views and groups in the Chinese city.
It should be made clear to exclusive clubs like the “Five Eyes” and the G7 that actions have been taken to improve the HKSAR’s electoral system because there were loopholes that anti-China agitators had taken advantage of to extend tentacles to Hong Kong’s governance framework and interfere with its affairs. The 2019 unrest in Hong Kong revealed a severe lack of security in the special administrative region’s electoral system.
From the enactment of the national security law to the improvement of the electoral system, a new order of “patriots administering Hong Kong” has been established institutionally, clearing the way for the return of social security and political stability to the “Pearl of the Orient.”
The latest LegCo election has laid the foundation for good governance in Hong Kong, with strongly qualified and diversified representatives becoming part of its governance system.
The reason why certain Western countries have been sparing no efforts to nitpick the seventh-term LegCo election in Hong Kong lies in anxiety that they won’t be able to implant puppets through the previously-flawed electoral system. Their tricks of making trouble in Hong Kong appear to be unmasked one by one.
Western forces, as history and reality have revealed, doesn’t really care about democracy in Hong Kong, which had enjoyed no such rights during more than 150 years under the British colonial rule. What they really want is to use Hong Kong to contain China, with democracy as a pretext and a tool.
The process and results of the LegCo election have manifested that lies and smearing fabricated by the West are doomed to futility and that desperate efforts to suppress China by destabilizing Hong Kong are leading nowhere. It is high time certain countries and groups opened eyes and fairly acknowledged democratic progress in Hong Kong before further humiliating themselves in front of the international community.