The passage of Hong Kong¡¯s national security law has marked the end of the city as we once knew it. However, Beijing is not seeking to turn Hong Kong into another Chinese city; there is little incentive for it to do so. Instead, China¡¯s leaders might be performing a ¡°grand experiment¡± of transforming Hong Kong¡¯s political ecosystem based on the model of Putin¡¯s Russia.
As laid out in William Dobson¡¯s ¡°The Dictator¡¯s Learning Curve,¡± dictators have realized that the most effective form of governance in the modern era is not an iron fist, but a birdcage with limited freedom. Such a system uses democratic disguises to claim legitimacy, yet the overriding premise is to keep the regime in power.
The key features of the Russian electoral authoritarian system (or so-called sovereign democracy) illustrate this ¡°birdcage democracy¡± and, when juxtaposed against recent developments in Hong Kong, shed light on how the city is seeing the end of fair elections.
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