Plan for district councillors to make up nominating body

The nominating committee for the city's top job should be solely made up of the 400-plus district councillors who look after mainly community issues, a group founded by former radio host Vincent Wong Wing has proposed.

But Wong, chief executive of social enterprise Solution-On-Wheels, said Beijing loyalist Maria Tam Wai-chu did not quite take to his plan for the 2017 chief executive election.

Tam especially noted that the requirement for "democratic procedures" enshrined in the Basic Law could mean that a person, if not sufficiently backed in the nominating committee, might not be allowed to stand for election even if he garnered enough nominations, he said.

But Wong believed the plan proposed by his newly formed group, which promotes solution journalism, could help the city achieve universal suffrage.

"The influence of district politics on the overall Hong Kong situation has been on the rise in recent years, including such important policies as the plan to enlarge landfills and the new town developments in the northeast New Territories," he said.

One possible nomination threshold would be for each candidate to secure at least 100 nominations from the 431 directly elected District Council seats in the term starting in 2016, Wong said. This meant up to four candidates standing in the election - a figure he considered would be acceptable to Beijing, he said.