Hong Kong | Record turnout in District Council poll

The results of Hong Kong’s fifth District Council election were unveiled yesterday.
The South China Morning Post reported that a pair of pro-democracy heavyweights were marginally unseated in a District Council poll generating a record turnout rate of 47 per cent and the emergence of fresh faces, some of them inspired by the Occupy protests. Losses by Albert Ho and Frederick Fung didn’t significantly alter proportion of seats held by pro-democracy and pro-government camps, as the latter continued to enjoy a numerical edge despite a drop in the number of seats compared to the last election, the paper noted.
Hong Kong’s largest political organization, the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong (DAB), was the biggest winner in the election, grabbing 119 seats out of the total 431 among the 18 districts across Hong Kong, the state-run Xinhua news agency reported.
Of the 431 seats, 68 were uncontested, while 867 candidates vied for the remaining 363 seats. The DAB fielded 171 candidates for the election and had a success rate of 70 percent.
But some newly elected politicians illustrated the continuing support behind last year’s Occupy protests, the SCMP added. Two of at least four successfully elected “Umbrella soldiers” remarkably defeated pro-establishment heavyweights such as lawmaker Christopher Chung Shu-kun, of the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, and Kowloon City district council chairman Lau Wai-­wing.
“The election results show that we have to listen to the voices of the young people,” Business and Professionals Alliance lawmaker Priscilla Leung Mei-fun told the SCMP, winning 2,314 votes and beating 24-year-old Yau Wai-ching, another “Umbrella soldier” of Youngspiration, by less than 300 votes.