My TakeStakes raised for Hong Kong's future in Legco election

For those with long memories, what's happening in Hong Kong this year must evoke a strong sense of déjà vu. Anti-Japanese protests over the Diaoyu Islands, worries about high-level government corruption and intense debates over the need to change school curriculums … That may sound like today's political landscape, but it was also the backdrop to a period of intense popular agitation from mid-1970 to mid-1973.

As Michael DeGolyer of Baptist University has pointed out, student leaders led rallies against the US handover of the Diaoyus to Japan. They also opposed Chinese history being taught only up to the 1911 revolution in school. Meanwhile, the arrest and high-profile trial of police superintendent Peter Godber exposed pervasive official corruption. The political agitation of that era caused the colonial government to become more responsive to popular demands.

Today, similar issues have returned with a vengeance, but with even higher stakes. They loom large over today's pivotal Legco election as the new batch of 70 lawmakers - 10 more than the previous Legco - will help to decide how the next chief executive is elected through universal suffrage in 2017. Key to this will be the five new district council functional constituency representatives to be chosen by 3.2 million voters.

Despite last night's announcement by Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying that the hugely controversial national education curriculum would no longer be imposed on schools, which can instead choose whether to teach it, protests of one sort or another look set to be maintained by pupils and some parents who demand the wholesale scrapping of the scheme. This controversy will no doubt boost the numbers who turn out to vote, but it remains to be seen if the upswing will benefit the pan-democrats enough to dilute the negative effects of their bitter infighting.

A recent pre-election survey by Professor DeGolyer finds that dissatisfaction among young voters with the Hong Kong and central governments, and their pessimism about the future, are reaching a very high level, if not yet the level reached around the time of the July 2003 march against the Article 23 internal security law. In other words, Leung could hardly have picked a worse time to introduce national education.

In the heated curriculum row and election skirmishes, guilt by association has become a favourite tactic via which to tar opponents and critics. Candidates have accused each other of associating with mainland authorities. For example, in a radio exchange between the two legal functional constituency candidates - former Law Society president Albert Wong Kwai-huen and Civic Party barrister Dennis Kwok Wing-hang - each accused the other of mixing with mainland official bodies. The reality is that anyone in a position of responsibility could hardly avoid dealing with mainland authorities.