MCLC: HK election results

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: HK election results
***********************************************************

Source: NYT (9/10/12):
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/world/asia/hong-kong-voting-for-legislatu
re-is-heavy.html

Pro-Beijing Candidates Outmaneuver Opponents as Hong Kong Votes
By KEITH BRADSHER

HONG KONG — Pro-democracy candidates won strong voter support in
legislative elections held here over the weekend but failed to capture
some key seats because pro-Beijing political parties with greater
financial resources proved more skillful in navigating Hong Kong’s complex
electoral system.

Pro-democracy groups appeared on Monday to have narrowly retained at least
one-third of the seats in the new legislature, the proportion they need to
block fundamental changes in the territory’s laws.

Voters thronged to polling stations across Hong Kong on Sunday, a day
after the local government backed down from a plan to introduce mandatory
pro-Beijing patriotic education in the territory’s schools.

Pro-democracy candidates won some votes at the expense of pro-Beijing
candidates and independents, who had tried to emphasize economic issues.
Discussions of international competitiveness or the minimum wage were
swamped in the last days of the campaign by the acrimonious education
issue and the difficult questions of national identity that it raised for
Hong Kong, a former British colony that returned to Chinese sovereignty in
1997.

But Hong Kong has a complex system of multiple-seat geographic
constituencies, in which voters choose slates of candidates. A “closed
list” system of counting votes makes it relatively easy for the first
person listed on each slate to be elected, but very hard for second and
subsequent candidates on each slate to gain seats.

The pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of
Hong Kong used this arrangement to its advantage, running multiple slates
in election districts across Hong Kong and using its formidable logistical
network to guide tens of thousands of supporters to vote for one or
another of its slates. As a result, the party won a series of seats for
its top-of-the-slate candidates despite a weak overall vote count.

In an interview after votes had been counted for half of the seats in the
legislature, Tam Yiu-chung, the party’s chairman, denied suggestions by
democracy advocates that his party had been heavily subsidized by Beijing.
Mr. Tam also denied accusations that his party had taken elderly people to
the polls on Sunday and had unfairly offered them various incentives to
vote for the party’s candidates.

Mr. Tam said that his party had relied on local fund-raising and that “the
elderly people support D.A.B. because they want stability.”

The poorly financed Civic Party, lacking a grass-roots network to guide
its supporters, ran a single slate in each constituency and tried to
persuade as many voters as possible to vote for it. The party’s best known
politician, Audrey Eu, and its rising star, Tanya Chan, listed themselves
second on slates in the New Territories West constituency and Hong Kong
Island, respectively. Both ended up losing their seats.

Their slates were the biggest vote-getters by wide margins, gaining more
than 70,000 votes in each case, compared with fewer than 45,000 votes for
the next-best slate. But they still did not garner enough votes for either
woman to be elected.

Ms. Chan said in an interview after her defeat that the party could not
have done anything differently.
“It’s quite difficult for us to estimate the supporters,” she said. “You
can see that the infrastructure built by the pro-establishment camp worked
professionally.”

The Democratic Party, whittled down for years by defections to more
radical political groupings, had the opposite problem from the Civic
Party. It did try to run separate slates, but lacked the resources to
coordinate voting by its supporters. The result was that several slates
lost entirely, and the party ended up with a handful of seats despite a
fairly strong vote count.

Albert Ho, the party chairman, announced that he would submit his
resignation at a meeting of the party’s central committee on Monday
evening, following a party tradition that the leader resign after an
election setback.

Democracy advocates did win three of the five new “superseats” in the
legislature, for which nearly all adults in the territory could vote.
While the new seats have no extra voting power in the 70-seat legislature,
the breadth of the voting for them could give extra influence to these
members.

Mr. Ho was among the three winners, but said that he would still resign
because his party lost at least three other seats. “This election was a
defeat for our party,” he said. In an interview, Mr. Ho said that Hong
Kong businesspeople with operations on the mainland had told him of
intense pressure from Beijing to give money to pro-Beijing parties in Hong
Kong.

Democracy advocates needed 24 seats to block major legislative
initiatives. They won 27, but three of them were captured by members of
the radical People Power party, which has refused to cooperate with other
pro-democracy parties.

On economic policy issues like raising the minimum wage, pro-business
candidates won 21 seats, and pro-labor candidates won 22 seats, while
centrists won the rest. Michael DeGolyer, a longtime pollster and
political analyst at Hong Kong Baptist University, said that the party
alignments among the centrists also made them likely to tilt toward
populism, and he predicted that Leung Chun-ying, the new chief executive
who took office on July 1, would move in this direction as well.

“The business community is not going to be happy,” Mr. DeGolyer said.

Only 40 of the legislature’s seats are elected by the general public; the
other 30 are chosen by industries like banking and by professions like the
law and Chinese medicine. These functional constituencies, as they are
known, are mostly dominated by people who have connections to mainland
China, many of whom have investments there; they tend to choose
pro-Beijing lawmakers.

The Hong Kong government retreated early Saturday evening from its
previous insistence that “moral and national education” become mandatory
in the territory’s schools by 2015. Instead, the government said, each
school would be allowed to decide whether to offer the subject.

The initial insistence that the program be mandatory touched off a 10-day
sit-in at the local government’s headquarters by students wearing black
T-shirts. By Friday night, the crowd at the sit-in numbered 120,000, the
organizers said, and on Saturday night, 100,000; the police’s estimates
were about one-third of those totals.

Scholarism, the student group that led the protests, decided Saturday
night to end the sit-in. By Sunday evening, students had packed up most of
their gear, although 20 tents remained at the protest site.

Heidi Ma, a spokeswoman for Scholarism who was helping to coordinate the
cleanup, said that those tents would also be removed, but she added that
the group could yet hold further protests because many members were
dissatisfied that the education program had not been withdrawn completely.

While the education plan antagonized many parents and students, it may
have also prompted some voters to support candidates who seek a stronger
local government and a closer relationship with the national government in
Beijing.

Walking the family dog, Edmond Chiu, a 53-year-old doctor, went to vote on
Sunday evening and said afterward that he worried that Hong Kong was
becoming too politicized.

“I want to vote in such a way as to prevent Hong Kong from becoming
ungovernable,” he said, while declining to say which candidates he
supported. “People are going to extremes. Parents are teaching their kids
not to negotiate, not to compromise, not to reason.”

Regina Ip, a former secretary of security who mounted an unsuccessful
effort in 2003 to introduce stringent internal security legislation, led
her nascent political group, the pro-Beijing New People’s Party, to win a
seat in each of two geographic constituencies in the new legislature, a
strong showing for a small organization. Flanked by supporters in dark
pinstriped suits, she said that she planned to expand her party.

By making it easier for small parties and independents to win at least one
seat, Hong Kong’s electoral system has fragmented the territory’s
political parties and limited the influence of the legislature. Over the
years, that has helped the territory’s chief executives and their
ministers to dominate the political process.

But in the last 10 days before the voting began on Sunday, the education
dispute seemed at least temporarily to curb the fissiparous trend in Hong
Kong politics. Political parties with clear positions on relations with
mainland China fared better, at the expense of independents who tried to
emphasize the economy.

Christine Fong, an independent who campaigned on economic issues but also
opposed the government’s education plan, attributed her defeat to the
public’s intense focus on the territory’s relationship with Beijing in the
final days of the campaign, “rather than on livelihood.”