Here’s what we know so far about this year’s Hong Kong leadership race
- Election for city’s top job is less than two months away, but field still has not taken shape – one kung fu master-turned-pundit notwithstanding
- This year’s poll will be the first since Beijing’s overhaul of city’s electoral system, raising questions about who will be able to take part
This year’s chief executive election will be the first since Beijing imposed sweeping changes to Hong Kong’s political system to ensure only “patriots” hold power, but so far, the only person to throw his hat in the ring is a political neophyte best known for producing kung fu films.
With less than two months to go before the March 27 leadership poll, incumbent Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor is still refusing to say whether she will seek a second term, and other, more conventional candidates have yet to step forward, though that has not stopped speculation from swirling around who might run.
This race, as with all leadership polls before it, will be decided by the city’s powerful Election Committee, a 1,463-member body stacked with Beijing loyalists.
Why is this year’s election getting off to such a sluggish start, what were past leadership races like, and how will this one be different?
Here is what you need to know about the contest for the city’s top job.
How have past chief executive elections gone?
The city’s first chief executive, Tung Chee-hwa, defeated two other candidates in the 1996 leadership poll: former chief justice Ti-liang Yang and real estate tycoon Peter Woo Kwong-ching. All three were deemed to have pro-establishment sensibilities. In the next race, in 2002, Tung was re-elected uncontested, but he stepped down three years later due to health problems. He was succeeded by his chief secretary, Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, who was similarly elected uncontested in a snap election in 2005.