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2 Farce and fashion in Hong Kong's
election By Kent Ewing
HONG KONG - At the end of a campaign that
included two lively televised debates in which the
challenger bested the incumbent, clashes over
democracy and lots of symbolic bow ties and pink
pocket handkerchiefs, this city's election for
chief executive concluded on Sunday with a
preordained result: five more years for Beijing's
anointed candidate, Donald Tsang.
The
verdict was as overwhelming as it was predictable,
with Tsang
garnering 649 of the 789
votes cast by the Election Committee. Rival Alan
Leong, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar
Association, received 123 votes, with nine of
the 132 committee members who had nominated the
challenger deserting him in the end. The remaining
ballots were unused, blank or deemed invalid.
Aside from the committee's electors, Hong
Kong's 7 million people were not allowed to take
part in the contest. Maybe next time, they were
told, in the 2012 poll for chief executive. Or, if
that's uncomfortably soon for the powers that be
in Beijing, there is always the 2016 election of
the Legislative Council, the city's 60-member
legislature, to look forward to. And so on.
The future of democracy in Hong Kong
remains uncertain, but Sunday's result has given
optimists more reason to hope. Beijing may have
been the winner, but for the first time there was
a challenge to the central government's candidate.
Tsang's decisive victory was a foregone
conclusion because the Election Committee is
packed with politicians, tycoons and other elites
loyal to the Chinese leadership. After the results
of the three-hour poll were announced, the chief
executive welled up with tears, bowed to his
supporters and said he plans to set a timetable
for full democracy in the city during his second
term. His challenger denounced the "rigged"
election and vowed to run again in 2012, when he
hopes all of Hong Kong's people will have the
right to vote.
Since everyone knew what
the outcome of the election would be before the
campaign even started, the biggest debate has been
over whether this exercise in political
predictability was good or bad for the city's
democratic development. This was the first time
since the British handover to Chinese rule in 1997
that Beijing's candidate had faced any opposition
at all, even a doomed one, and moderate democrats,
including the city's flagship Democratic Party,
saw Leong's quixotic challenge as a sign of
progress.
But more strident members of the
pan-democratic camp, such as The Frontier and the
League of Social Democrats (LSD), dismissed the
"small-circle election" as a farce and scorned
their fellow democrats' support of Leong's
hopeless candidacy. Frontier firebrand Emily Lau,
a legislator and former journalist, also attacked
the media for lending legitimacy to a rigged
election.
"In the current farce that is
called an election, the game plan is to give
credibility and legitimacy to an undemocratic and
unfair process," she wrote in the city's leading
English-language newspaper, the South China
Morning Post, which like other local media gave
prominent coverage to the campaign. "The media are
doing their level best to achieve this goal, and I
look upon them with nothing but contempt."
Lau joined other democrats in a protest
march a week before the election that drew between
4,000 and 4,700 people into the streets, according
to a University of Hong Kong poll. The protest,
organized by the Civil Human Rights Front,
underscored the promise of universal suffrage for
choosing the chief executive that is enshrined in
the Basic Law, the constitution agreed to by
Britain and China before the handover, and also
condemned the skewed system by which the chief
executive is currently chosen.
The turnout
at the protest, however, was disappointing,
reflecting general acceptance of Tsang as Hong
Kong's leader and of the "one country, two
systems" formula that is perceived to have served
the city reasonably well as it prepares for its
10th anniversary under Chinese rule. By
comparison, a pro-democracy march last July 1
inspired a turnout of nearly 60,000, and in July
2003, 500,000 people hit the streets to protest
the rule of Hong Kong's first post-handover chief
executive, the hapless Tung Chee-hwa. Tung
resigned in March 2005 and was replaced by his
then chief secretary, Tsang.
Diehard
dissenters also organized a three-pronged protest
- by land, sea and air - on Sunday. But the
election, held in the relatively remote
AsiaWorld-Expo Center near the airport, proceeded
without surprise.
LSD lawmaker Leung
Kwok-hung, known as "Long Hair" for his lion's
mane and radical views, provided his usual
histrionics, donning a pig's mask and gold
emperor's jacket and shouting: "I am Donald Tsang.
This is a fake election. I demand the [Hong Kong]
government return the votes to the people."
Leung, entitled to vote as a member of the
legislature, succeeded in briefly interrupting the
election count, but the democrats could not stop
Tsang from walking to an easy victory.
While Sunday's vote was a breeze for the
incumbent, the
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