Pan-democrats must work with Beijing's election model

I refer to the report ("'Beijing can't redefine what democracy is'", March 10).

Commenting on the 2017 election for chief executive, Professor Larry Diamond, of Stanford University's Hoover Institution, said, "Beijing has the power to impose constraints on the election process in Hong Kong. But it does not have the right to redefine what democracy is or is not."

This comment is contradictory and misleading. While Professor Diamond acknowledges Beijing has the right to impose some constraints in the 2017 election, he seems to imply that whatever constraints it imposes will make that election "undemocratic".

There is no one true democratic election model in the world. All Western countries' democratic elections have their own unique system. The US president is not elected by one person, one vote. Both parties' candidates have to go through primary elections, a process which is a form of screening. Primaries elect electoral voters and some of them are elected by caucuses, meaning they are not elected by the general public but by party members. This is reminiscent of National People's Congress voting methods. The US presidential election system is so complicated that I doubt even many ordinary citizens understand it.

It would not qualify as a truly democratic election according to the definitions suggested by of the Alliance of True Democracy, and the Occupy Central people.

Beijing has now made its stance very clear. Only the nomination committee can nominate candidates for the 2017 chief executive elections. What is still negotiable is the composition of this nomination committee and the threshold of nomination to become a chief executive candidate, nothing else.