Hong Kong | Exclusive election body at heart of protests 

A pro-democracy protester rests at an occupied area outside government headquarters in Hong Kong’s Admiralty district

It’s among the most powerful clubs in this city of enormous wealth and influence. Only 1,200 people are allowed in, and they decide who leads Hong Kong every five years.
As thousands of protesters block city streets demanding democratic reforms, the future of Hong Kong’s exclusive — some would say purposefully opaque — election committee may prove key to defusing a high-stakes political standoff that has dragged on for nearly a month.
When Hong Kong and Chinese authorities launched the committee in 1997, they billed it as a diverse body where everyone from business leaders to fishermen to social workers would come together to choose Hong Kong’s top leader. In August, China’s powerful National People’s Congress picked the committee as the model for screening candidates in the city’s first election for chief executive in 2017. China agreed to hold elections beginning that year, with candidates named by a “broadly representative nominating committee,” in the deal that led the U.K. to hand over Hong Kong to China in 1997.
The problem, at least for thousands of student demonstrators, is both the committee’s track record and its labyrinthine rules for picking candidates.
In the three elections since its formation, the committee has chosen only chief executives loyal to the central Chinese government. Yet the city’s 3.5 million general voters have reliably cast more than half their ballots for pro-democracy legislative candidates critical of Beijing.
Demonstrators and even some committee members complain that business interests and pro-Beijing trade groups hold too much influence on the body.
Hundreds of seats are appointed rather than broadly elected. Though a wide swath of workers are ostensibly represented, in many cases it is their employers who choose committee members. Some Hong Kong tycoons, such as Asia’s richest person Li Ka-shing, can cast multiple votes because theirbusinesses touch on different sectors represented by the committee.
“This is a kind of gerrymandering of votes that’s off the Richter scale, designed to keep the establishment camp in control,” said Michael Davis, a law professor at the University of Hong Kong.
Protesters are demanding that Chief Executive Leung Chun-Ying resign and that Beijing allow open nominations for Hong Kong’s leader in 2017. There is little chance that either demand will be met, but with the protest in a sort of stalemate, the composition of the nominating committee has emerged as a possible point of compromise.
During a meeting with reporters Tuesday, Leung said such proposals could be hashed out in a second upcoming consultation on the 2017 vote.
“How we should elect the 1,200 so that the nominating committee will be broadly representative — there’s room for discussion there,” Leung said. “There’s room to make the nominating committee more democratic, and this is one of the things we very much want to talk to not just the students but the community at large about.”
Student protest leaders continue to demand completely open nominations, but at least some pro-democracy protesters on the streets are willing to consider reforms to the committee instead.
“At least we need to bring more people into the committee,” said Kate Chow, a 33-year-old logistics manager who joined thousands at the main downtown protest site. “If we can choose more of these 1,200 people ourselves, I would be comfortable with that.”
About 70 percent of committee members, from appointed representatives of commercial interests to seats guaranteed to the National People’s Congress, can be trusted to vote Beijing’s way, said Dixon Sing, a political science professor at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. The Congress’ August decision requires any candidate for chief executive to receive more than half of the committee’s support, raising the threshold from the current 15 percent.
Many of those pro-Beijing ballots come from trade groups representing a negligible fraction of the city’s population and economy who were added at the central government’s insistence and who appoint rather than elect members, said Ken Tsang, a committee member who elected to represent social workers.
“It’s difficult to find a fisherman in Hong Kong anymore, yet there are 60 of them within the 1,200, the same ratio as teachers, social workers and lawyers,» Tsang said. «That›s totally unreasonable and unfair and unbalanced. How can it happen like this?»
Scholars and protesters have proposed lowering the vote threshold for candidates, creating more groups within the committee that would represent more sectors of the city, and allowing all company employees to vote for committee members, rather than just their top executives.
Anson Chan, a former Hong Kong chief secretary who’s become a top pro-democracy advocate, suggested eliminating such “corporate” votes.
Willy Lam, a political analyst at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said room for compromise is shrinking, however, as protesters win more support.
“The stakes have become higher so even those moderate pan-democratic legislators who before the movement might have been amenable to this compromise might have become more radicalized,” Lam said. “They see the tide seems to be turning in favor of more democracy.”
Yet Davis, the law professor, said the city’s own laws and the National People’s Congress’ guidelines leave little room for negotiation. Diving into the nominating committee’s arcane rules and broadening its membership may offer the only way out.
“The only movable part is changing the constituency base of the nominating committee,” Davis said. “It’d be quite a lot of footwork, but it can be done.”

kenny g distances self from hong kong demonstrators

Smooth jazz star Kenny G insisted yesterday he’s not a foreign provocateur supporting Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests, after Beijing signaled its displeasure over his inharmonious visit and repeated concerns about meddling by external forces.
The American musician created a stir when he tweeted Wednesday about his visit to the semiautonomous southern Chinese city, where thousands of student-led protesters have occupied streets for more than three weeks to press their demands for greater democratic reforms.
“In Hong Kong at the sight of the demonstration. I wish everyone a peaceful and positive conclusion to this situation,” he wrote.
He took to social media again later to declare that he was not trying to defy the Chinese government, but rather had just happened to come across the protest zone while walking around Hong Kong as a tourist.
“I am not supporting the demonstrators as I don’t really know anything about the situation,” he wrote on his Twitter and Facebook accounts. “I only wanted to share my wish for Peace for Hong Kong and for all of China.”
Photos had circulated earlier on social media of the star by himself and with protesters at the main protest zone near downtown Hong Kong. Jack Chang and Kelvin Chan, Hong Kong AP