The Democratic Party in Hong Kong was for decades the city’s largest opposition party. It led protests demanding universal suffrage. Its lawmakers sparred with officials in the legislature about China’s encroachment on the region.
It was born in the 1990s of an audacious hope: that opposition politicians and activists could pressure Hong Kong’s iron-fisted rulers in Beijing to fulfill their promise of expanding democratic freedoms for the city of several million people.
On a rising wave of demands for democracy, the party grew to more than 1,000 members at its height in 2008. Its effort to maintain a moderate stance drew criticism, including from within its own ranks, from those seeking to push harder against Beijing. Yet moderation could not save the party’s leaders from being caught in the dragnet as China tightened its control over Hong Kong.
Now it is disbanding, one more casualty in Beijing’s suppression of Hong Kong’s once-vibrant political opposition.
Its leaders have been arrested and imprisoned on national security charges. Its members are effectively barred from running for local office, and routinely face harassment and threats. Raising money is hard.
“We have not achieved what we set out to do,” Fred Li, a founding member of the party who was not part of the most recent leadership, said in an interview, referring to democratization under Chinese rule. “Without money or resources, we can’t even survive ourselves.”
The party said Sunday that it held a preliminary vote and 90 percent of the roughly 110 members in attendance voted to authorize its leaders to dissolve the party. (The party plans to call another vote in the coming months before it disbands officially.)
Its chairman, Lo Kin-hei, had publicly indicated earlier that the political environment was too challenging to survive, but declined to go into details. Veteran party members like Mr. Li said that Chinese officials or their intermediaries had urged them to disband.
Other smaller pro-democracy parties and civic groups have closed since Beijing in 2020 imposed a national security law giving the authorities sweeping powers to quash opposition, part of a crackdown on free expression more generally. Even a polling group, the Public Opinion Research Institute, said in February that it would suspend all self-funded research after the national security police repeatedly detained the institute’s director for questioning. Critics of the Hong Kong government have been denied entry to the city, including a British lawmaker who tried to visit her newborn grandson this week.
The Democratic Party was established in the twilight of Hong Kong’s days as a British colony, as the city prepared to return to Chinese rule in 1997.
The party’s founders, Martin Lee, a legislator, and Szeto Wah, a union leader, led protests against the Communist Party after it sent troops to crush pro-democracy protests around Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989. They co-founded a political group that evolved in 1994 into the Democratic Party.
The Democratic Party sought to hold leaders accountable to two promises enshrined in treaties signed by Britain and China and outlined in the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution: that the city would retain a high degree of autonomy, and that it would eventually hold direct elections for its top leader.
“They tried to present to people in power: This is what you promised us, so you have to honor it,” said Victoria Hui, a political scientist at the University of Notre Dame, who drafted speeches for Mr. Lee in the early 1990s. “For so long, they took for granted that those words would protect us.”
The party became a thorn in Beijing’s side. Mr. Lee traveled abroad to press Western leaders to hold the Communist Party in check, prompting Beijing to brand him a traitor. His party organized protests to oppose security laws in 2003, eventually forcing the ouster of Tung Chee-hwa, the city’s unpopular leader.
But public discontent rose over unemployment, high housing prices and rising competition for jobs in Hong Kong. The political system was seen as dominated by the city’s business and social elite, and demands grew for greater democracy.
The Democratic Party became a target of criticism at times, including in 2010 when it negotiated with Beijing officials on a plan to expand the number of directly elected seats in the legislature. Other opposition lawmakers rejected the measure, saying it fell short of real democracy. The move also divided the party, leading many to quit.
Despite growing calls for democratic elections, Beijing did not give Hong Kong greater public participation in the election of its leader. People occupied neighborhoods in Hong Kong for about 10 weeks in 2014 in a protest called the Umbrella Movement.
Inside the party, a younger generation began to push back against the old guard, arguing more action was needed, along with talks. The party, which had been steadily losing votes, successfully fielded a crop of new candidates in 2016 including Ted Hui, Lam Cheuk-ting and Roy Kwong, expanding its foothold in the legislature.
Mr. Hui, who was a lawmaker until 2020, said that in the past decade, the party’s nonconfrontational approach began to encounter a more impatient public. “It was a difficult balance walking a moderate path within a radicalizing society, while also needing to get tougher,” he said in an interview.
The party was caught between conflicting political forces. “Their relatively moderate position didn’t really effectively improve the relationship between Hong Kong and Beijing over the past decade,” Ma Ngok, an associate professor of government at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said in an interview. “As younger people became more radical, the party’s influence has been on the decline.”
A major challenge came during 2019, when months of anti-government protests engulfed the city. Initially marches were family friendly, but descended into violence, with protesters throwing Molotov cocktails. Though the party had long advocated for peaceful protest, its leaders, seeking to maintain unity, hesitated to disavow the violent tactics of some protesters. Younger members of the party tried to mediate between protesters and the police.
After the pro-democracy camp held an unofficial primary in 2020, two weeks after Beijing imposed the security law, the authorities targeted the candidates who had taken part. Many Democratic Party members and leaders were swept up in mass arrests months later. Four former lawmakers from the party were convicted under national security charges and imprisoned. The government has also offered a bounty for the arrest of Mr. Hui, who fled Hong Kong in 2021 and lives in Australia.
No Democratic Party members have held elected office since Beijing imposed a drastic overhaul of the city’s political system in 2021, requiring candidates running for the local legislature and district councils to be “patriots” vetted by Beijing.
For a few years the Democratic Party held on, despite severe constraints. It sought to provide pro bono legal services for the public and to comment on current affairs and on government policies.
“In spite of the fact that we have no position anywhere, people continue to trust in us, and they come to us,” said Emily Lau, a veteran member and a former chairwoman of the party. “But still, under the circumstances, when people get arrested and so on, I think our members are very brave.”
