October 17, 2014 7:25 AM
How Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Is Elected
Hong Kong’s current chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, right, shook hand with Henry Tang, his opponent, after Leung was declared the new chief executive in March 2012.Associated Press
At the crux of the Hong Kong protests is Beijing’s decision to vet candidates for the next chief executive election by a 1,200-member nominating committee. The committee will be based on the existing election committee, whose sole task was to pick the current chief executive. But who exactly are these 1,200 people?
To begin with, there aren’t even 1,200 members in the committee. Since both local lawmakers and Hong Kong delegates to China’s legislature are automatically members of the committee and many people wear both hats, the election committee has never been filled to capacity.
The committee is also a hodgepodge of special interests. It comprises four equally divided areas: business; professionals; political; and labor, social services, arts and religion. These are further subdivided into 38 subsectors.
The distribution of seats among these subsectors, however, appears more arbitrary. The agricultural and fisheries sector, which accounts for only 0.1% of Hong Kong’s economy, has 60 seats, more than the seats of the finance and insurance sectors combined.
Around 40% of the seats in the current committee were filled without contest, either by members of office who are entitled to a seat or because of a lack of competition. Even for contested seats, the pool of eligible voters was generally small. In the hotel subsector, 19 candidates ran for 17 seats, with the top candidate receiving 58 votes. That was already a great turnout, considering there were only 101 eligible voters in that subsector.
Meanwhile, some companies have a vote in the election of committee members. Banks, but not their employees, are eligible to vote in the finance subsector. Though government-owned Airport Authority has a vote in the transport subsector, pilots and flight attendants have none.
It’s also worth noting that while Beijing has repeatedly criticized “foreign hostile forces” for meddling in Hong Kong’s affairs, some foreign companies actually have a vote in choosing committee members.
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Though a company or organization can’t vote twice in the election of committee members, no similar restrictions exist for company shareholders. A person can have multiple votes by controlling different companies eligible to vote. Imagine a tycoon who has business interests spanning various industries.
The idiosyncrasies don’t end there. The election committee allocates 60 seats to the religious subsector, but only six religions are represented.
To be sure, there are pockets of the committee’s composition that are more democratic. The professionals group, for example, allows practitioners of the profession, such as doctors and lawyers, to vote in committee-member elections. This is also the segment where most pro-democracy candidates got their seats.
– Jacky Wong
http://m.wsj.com/articles/BL-CJB-24510
