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Fanny Wong

THE battle is about to be joined and the contenders for the race to be Special Administrative Region (SAR) Chief Executive are out of sight, preparing for the first skirmish.

If top China adviser Henry Fok Ying-tung shocked many by his high-profile support for Tung Chee-hwa, Ann Tse-kai's open support for Leung Chun-ying as the first head of the SAR was equally surprising.

While many in the media - and in political and business circles - have joined the guessing game, the danger is that so many people will be carried away that they will forget one fundamental - the contest's rules.

The gestures by the usually low-profile Mr Fok and Dr Ann in openly endorsing the candidature of their proteges has attracted intense speculation over their motives.

 But when people start to calm down, they may well ask whether it was right for these powerful pro-China figures to so openly nail their colours to the mast.

Some Preparatory Committee members consider there is nothing wrong with the two vice-chairmen, who are also vice-chairmen of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), revealing their preferences in public, but others were more sceptical about their quasi-nominations.

In principle, it is not wrong for such people to name their preferred candidates. As some members put it, it is essential that names can be put on the public agenda for the community to consider. Time is short for people to learn about their potential leaders.

The naming of two possible candidates would also widen the base for selection and that would help a genuine election, some committee members maintain.

But what is problematic now is the question of the potential conflict of interest that occurs when the leadership of the Preparatory Committee takes such a high-profile stance in revealing their choices; men who also sit on the committee's vice-chairmen's panel.

Among the five Hong Kong vice-chairmen, the Ann-Leung team and the Fok-Tung partnership have already filled four of the chairs. The only person who has yet to openly indicate his preference is Simon Li Fook-sean, although he is said to have privately supported another contender, former Executive Councillor and Preparatory Committee member Lo Tak-shing.

What is worrying is whether these open appeals by the committee heavyweights, who in their capacity as CPPCC vice-chairmen enjoy the rank of Chinese leaders, will influence the final outcome, thus making a mockery of the so-called election and creating a degree of unfairness for other potential candidates.

It is true that, according to the Basic Law, the Chief Executive will be returned by a 400-member Selection Committee and the Preparatory Committee is going to set up the Selection Committee later this year.

Chinese officials have already made it clear that the first priority for the preparatory body is to draw up the rules and methods for forming the Selection Committee and to get it up and running so the new chief can be named during or after the summer.

Given the Preparatory Committee's heavy schedule and the tight timetable it is operating under, some newly-appointed committee members are worried that there is a real prospect they might be asked to rubber-stamp proposals put to them by the committee leadership.

If this happened, the question of conflict of interest would become a real problem.

 This is the reason why some committee members and many local political players have grave reservations about these unusual gestures by the CPPCC heavyweights.

It does not take an expert to wonder, with at least five of the nine vice-chairmen of the committee having a vested interest in the chief executive elections, whether the rules for the election will be so drawn that they might favour a certain candidate.

What about the possibility that simply because the vice-chairmen know ahead of other people how the rules will be shaped, that they will have more time to prepare for the contest, giving them a definite edge over other candidates?  Beijing should not just dismiss these questions as sheer nonsense. No matter how much Hong Kong people may want to trust the integrity of the vice-chairmen, inevitably these kinds of open endorsement will cast a shadow over the fairness of the election.

What makes people more suspicious is Beijing's present plan to enforce the rule of confidentiality and collective responsibility in the committee's deliberations.

How can the community be fully convinced that the rules for forming the Selection Committee and electing the Chief Executive have not been designed to favour one individual? How can local people tell that the rules are not imposed on individual Preparatory Committee members if they are not allowed to voice their personal views on the proposals the committee discusses? It is all very well for Chinese officials to maintain that open remarks by Mr Fok and Dr Ann will not influence the outcome of the elections, but they cannot deny that the failure by the two political heavyweights to be discreet has already done some damage to the process.

Mainland officials must be fully aware of the negative implications of the Preparatory Committee vice-chairmen's remarks and they have tried hard to distance themselves from their endorsements.

They refused to comment on them and the left-wing press in Hong Kong chose to take a low-key approach in reporting the remarks.

The last thing the Chinese Government wants is for the world to think that the election of the first SAR Chief Executive is not genuine and that the appointment was fixed even before rules for returning the nominee were drawn up.

The only remedy for this awkward situation is for the Preparatory Committee leadership to make sure that the election methods for the new chief are as fair and as open as possible.

Beijing cannot afford to get it wrong. To make it a success, transparency and accountability must be the rules of the game.



Finding a leader without fear or favour