Because they couldn't win enough functional constituencies (which the British came up with by the way, not the communists. The worst you can say is that the latter were awkwardly okay with them in order to woo the city's businessmen and professionals) and can you blame the electors of these constutiencies (many of them independent, not even affiliated) for being with Beijing? The other side wants to keep the city away from the rest of the country when it pretty much depends on it. The communists could pretty much cut power to the city, seize the ports choking the city's exportations (and livelihood) with them and within a year Hong Kong will return to be the fishing village it was at the beginning. Hell with a GDP of half a trillion dollars it isn't even worth much anymore, the times when it constituted 30% of China's GDP are over. Now that it constitutes no more than 3% of China's GDP, it pretty much survives as an important center just as a favor when Guangzhou and Shenzhen are right across the river as manufacturing giants while Shanghai has the finance sector covered. China doesn't even need Hong Kong, Hong Kong needs China.
That they began to lose popular trust in the last elections (incidentally, the ones with the highest turnout so far, 58%) is also telling, it means that the people of Hong Kong have finally figured out that they need the rest of the country to survive.
Who knows, maybe with time, when the patriotic part of the population becomes a visible majority, they'll get what every township on the mainland already has: direct elections with universal suffrage.
Doesn't seem that willing to me if it hasn't done that yet.
Freedom of expression, plenty. Freedom of the press, functionally as much as in the West, with the exception that the censor there is the party in place of big business, and in the worst case you get sent directly to prison instead of being ridiculed and having your character assassinated.
Judging by the anti-corruption campaign and the dozens of thousands of party members arrested for excessive spending and not keeping up with the party's measures against extravagancy and misuse of party resources I can say without a shadow of a doubt that Xi's opponents are in large part crooks, and he's at the very least the lesser crook. What's wrong with getting rid of bad people?
Also the situation in Xinjiang is more
unsubstantiated by any evidence, and there's
plenty of documentation to clear up the reasons behind this black legend.
You haven't read the bill. Again, read it, it says very clearly what are the cases for extradition. None of them are political, they're all felonies that are such both in the SAR and on the mainland.
You haven't read the bill. The extradition case is supposed to be examined by Hong Kong judges first. And let's clean up once and for all what gets you extradited:
37 cases out of 46. Exemptions are largely economic crimes, quoting: