Autocracy in Making: Evidence from Hong Kong

The literature on the state of democracy around the world has been overshadowed by the growing concerns about the proliferation of democratic backsliding or outright autocratization against the background of the Covid-19 pandemic. With reference to the extant literature on autocracy and authoritarian institutions, this paper presents the findings of one of the first attempts to study Hong Kong as one of the best-known episodes of abrupt and thorough autocratization in the past two years, which witnessed the end of the city’s liberal authoritarianism epoch and the onset of the so-called “patriots-only” governance under Beijing’s tutelage. Moving beyond the general perceptions of “mainlandization”, however, we attempt to account for the institutional choices by shedding light on how repression, power-sharing, electoral manipulation, and propaganda are designed and deployed to cement a new order, and to gauge the psychological effects at the mass level by delineating the contours of public sympathies / antipathies towards the regime, the leaders and selected policy fields with the help of longitudinal survey and observational data.