Beijing is pushing ahead with a proposal to overhaul Hong Kong’s electoral system and allow only “patriots” to govern the city, officials announced on March 4. Zhang Yesui, a spokesperson for the National People’s Congress, said the plan will be the seventh item on the agenda when China’s rubber-stamp legislature convenes on March 5. Events in recent years showed that Hong Kong’s electoral system needed “improvements” to “keep up with the times,” Zhang said in an implicit reference to the months-long pro-democracy protests beginning in the summer of 2019 in opposition to the regime’s growing encroachment on the self-rule and freedoms pledged to the city after the 1997 handover from the UK. Chinese authorities have moved quickly over the past year to tighten control, imposing a national security law that punishes any activities it defines as secession, subversion, collusion with foreign forces, or terrorism. Signals of the latest move had surfaced as …