Beijing needs to temper its high-handed attitude towards Hong Kong
Gary Cheung says the pro-establishment camp’s relatively poor showing in the Legco election and the rise of localism should ring alarm bells with the central government about the need to reach out to pan-democrat moderates
If mainland officials in charge of Hong Kong affairs trust the Legislative Council election reporting by the newspapers they fund, they must think that all is rosy.
On September 6, for instance, pro-Beijing Wen Wei Po splashed with “Pro-establishment camp achieve good results, outdoing opposition despite high turnout”. And a front-page headline in Ta Kung Pao read: “Pro-establishment camp claim victory against all odds”.
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In fact, the pro-establishment camp won 40 of the 70 seats, down from 43 in the 2012 election.
One inconvenient truth for Beijing is the fact that, despite the pro-establishment camp’s strong electioneering machinery and abundant resources for district work, its vote share in geographical constituencies dropped from 42.2 per cent in 2012 to 40.2 per cent.
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Beijing may find the pan-democrats’ victory in some functional constituencies particularly worrying. In the architectural, surveying, planning and landscape sector, Edward Yiu Chung-yim unseated pro-establishment incumbent and Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying supporter Tony Tse Wai-chuen by a comfortable margin. This is the first time since the handover that the functional constituency has gone to pan-democrats. Kenneth Leung and Charles Mok, incumbent pan-democrats representing the accountancy and information-technology sectors respectively, beat their pro-establishment rivals by a much bigger margin than in 2012.