Hong Kong’s Democratic Party will hold a meeting next month for members to vote on whether to support disbanding the party, its chairperson has said.
The party’s members will convene for a “special meeting” on April 13, chairperson Lo Kin-hei told HKFP on Tuesday.
The news comes more than a month after Hong Kong’s biggest pro-democracy party announced that it was inclined to dissolve due to the “overall political environment.”
In the upcoming meeting, members will vote on whether to authorise the party’s executive committee to proceed with the disbandment, Lo said. The motion will need to pass with a majority.
While the executive committee technically has the power to proceed with the disbandment even without a members’ mandate, they have decided to hold an “interim step” to allow members to participate and make the process “more democratic,” he said.
It will be the first meeting in which members are invited to discuss dissolution, the chairperson said, adding that previous meetings had only been among the party’s leadership.
The Democratic Party currently has around 400 members, down from more than 1,000 at its peak in “around 2008 or 2009,” Lo previously told HKFP.
As the city’s largest opposition group, the party marked its 30th anniversary last year. Seen as a moderate liberal party with less radical views than its localist counterparts, the party used to have regular meetings with government officials and maintained a significant representation in the Legislative Council.
In full: Explainer: Hong Kong’s Democratic Party through the years – from its founding to looming end
In recent years, however, it has seen less cooperation from the government. There are also no Democratic Party members in the Legislative Council or on the District Councils, following an electoral overhaul in 2021 that required representatives to be “patriots.”
At a press conference last month, Lo said that the party’s talks about disbandment followed the dissolution of other civil society groups, sparked by the national security law, which was imposed by Beijing in June 2020.
The Civic Party, once the city’s second-largest opposition group with a significant presence in the Legislative Council, officially folded in March 2024.
“Over the past few years, we see a lot of different groups and parties – all sorts of different civil society groups – dissolving… So every time, whenever any of those kinds of groups disband or discontinue, we will have that kind of discussion,” Lo said in February.
The party set up a task force late last month to handle financial and legal matters relating to the liquidation.
Veteran members of the party appear divided over the disbandment. Fred Li, one of the party’s founding members, said the party had “done its duty and shone its light on Hong Kong,” and that he was in favour of disbanding.
However, former party chair Emily Lau said she “did not really want to support” the dissolution, adding that she was surprised because the party had just held elections for a new executive committee last December.
