Policy Advocacy

At the 20th Anniversary of Hong Kong SAR, Path of Democracy released its first report on its attempt to calibrate the current state of ‘One Country Two Systems’ (henceforth 1C2S). The Index serves anyone who is interested in the progress of 1C2S.

The 1C2S Index is developed based on a public opinion survey in Hong Kong on 1C2S, and also international indices that compare Hong Kong with other countries and territories in relation to human rights, various freedoms and democracy.

To complement our public opinion survey on 1C2S, we also introduced a 1C2S Mass Media Index (MMI) by making use of big-data to measure the sentiment of Hong Kong newspapers towards 1C2S since 1998 as news sentiment has very significant influences on public opinion.

It should be stressed that public opinion, international perception, and MMI are determined by perception and may or may not reflect the reality. Even so, changes in perceptions of 1C2S of the HK public, of international think tanks, and of the HK press are nevertheless important. We will analyse the reasons for the changes in these perceptions as they are crucial for the implementation of 1C2S.

Summary (2024 H1)

Index score

The performance of 1C2S implementation stands at: 6.17(+2.2%)

Public Opinion

The 1C2S Index for the first half of 2024 rose from 6.04 points in the second half of 2023 to 6.17 points. All twelve sub-pillars showed an upward trend in this round of the survey. The three sub-pillars with the largest increases were ‘Resolving via dialogue and negotiation’ (+10.0%), ‘ Self-conduct of administrative affairs’ (+7.1%), and ‘Hong Kong people administrating Hong Kong’ (+6.5%).

International Perspective
The score continued to rise from 6.82 in 2023 H2 to 6.89 in 2024 H1. Compared to the previous round, the scores for ‘economic openness’ slightly increased by 0.4% to 9.35 points, ‘civil liberty’ rose slightly by 0.3% to 6.26 points, while ‘democratic development’ remained unchanged at 5.06 points.

1C2S Mass Media Index (MMI)

In the first half of 2024, positive media coverage and public sentiment regarding Hong Kong significantly declined. The Asian Financial Forum 2024, held at the beginning of the year, and the visit by Xia Baolong, the Director of the Hong Kong and Macao Affairs Office of the State Council, garnered some positive media attention. However, the subsequent reintroduction of Article 23 to the legislative agenda attracted considerable international scrutiny and criticism, raising concerns about further erosion of Hong Kong's autonomy and civil liberties. By the end of Q2 2024, MMI had dropped to 133.7.

Methodological Notes

• 1C2S Index is the average of public opinion and international perception.
• The three pillars on public opinion, namely ‘high degree of autonomy’, ‘human rights and freedom’ and ‘Hong Kong-Mainland relationship’ are the evaluation by Hong Kong public on different dimensions of 1C2S.
• The three pillars on international perception, namely ‘economic openness’, ‘civil liberty’ and ‘democratic development’, are the evaluation by international think tanks on various aspects of freedom and democracy in Hong Kong.
• 1C2S MMI measures daily net sentiment of media reports from television and radio stations, daily newspapers and online-only media that were published since 1998.