LettersHong Kong’s protest deadlock can be broken – by allowing the Legislative Council to elect a ‘mayor of Hong Kong’

A Legislative Council-elected mayor instead of a chief executive appointed by the central government is a compromise that will not please the hardliners on both sides, but both Hong Kong and Beijing would benefit from such an arrangement

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Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping after she took an oath of office on the 20th anniversary of the city’s handover from British to Chinese rule on July 1, 2017. Photo: Reuters

Published: 7:25am, 17 Sep 2019Updated: 7:25am, 17 Sep 2019

As the protests in Hong Kong approach their third month, it has been difficult to reconcile the seemingly incompatible demands of the two sides. Hongkongers fear the loss of their local identity and seek more say over what happens in their city. Beijing will not allow threats to its political rule and seeks options that bring Hong Kong closer to the mainland in anticipation of full integration in 2047.

Hong Kong’s colonial legacy has made it particularly sensitive to political rule from afar, and the current mechanism through which its chief executive is chosen, with the formal appointment made by China’s State Council, is a particularly disliked artefact of that legacy.

Residents in other Chinese cities are governed by mayors approved by their local peoples’ congress representatives. Elsewhere in China, citizens vote for local peoples’ congress representatives who then elect their mayors and governors. Other Chinese mayors are thus accountable to constituents as well as to central government authorities in Beijing.

Therefore, a possible win-win resolution to Hong Kong’s political stalemate would be to transition the appointed chief executive position into a legislature-elected mayor of Hong Kong. So long as the election procedures for the Legislative Council are protected – thereby retaining Hong Kong’s distinct “two systems” model – the creation of a Legco-elected mayor could be viewed as a step in the right direction for both Beijing and Hong Kong.

Though such a system falls short of the “ultimate aim” of universal suffrage for the chief executive election, as specified in Hong Kong’s Basic Law, it could ensure that the people of Hong Kong have more say over who their chief executive is, and have more power to hold their leader accountable.