City Beat | Hope for silver lining on cloud over reform

Everything is hard at the beginning, according to the Chinese proverb, and so it is for the first steps in Hong Kong's difficult road towards universal suffrage in 2017 - if it can be achieved.

Last week, as Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying submitted his report to Beijing to kick off the constitutional reform, he found himself being squeezed by both sides of politics: as expected, the pan-democrats attacked him for not favouring public nomination; and some from the pro-establishment camp were upset he did not give a definite "no" to the controversial idea.

There were various guesses as to why the government seemed not to be taking a position on this. But it could be that Leung was doing as much as he could do at this stage. After all, only the National People's Congress can officially rule out any proposal that it sees as breaching the Basic Law. On the other hand, it could also be a tactic by the government to put no more fuel on the already raging political fire created by Occupy Central.

Next month, the NPC Standing Committee holds its bimonthly meeting. It is widely believed that it will officially reject models that allow future candidates for chief executive to be nominated by voters or by political parties as Beijing believes they would inevitably undermine the nominating committee.

But just when many saw the chance of a deal getting slimmer, there were some interesting developments last week.

First, Lee Cheuk-yan, chairman of the pan-democratic Labour Party, said he still saw room for genuine universal suffrage since public nomination had not been explicitly ruled out in Leung's report. Then the organisers of Occupy Central, as well as pan-democratic lawmakers, said they wanted to meet Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor to further negotiate before the August NPC meeting "kills" public nomination. Sources say Lam has in principle agreed to meet them sometime this week.