Gary Cheung, Peter So and Joyce Ng
South China Morning Post
February 24, 2015
Ideas put forward to expand nominating committee and add sectors for women and young people.
The electoral college for the 2022 chief executive election could be expanded from 1,200 members to 1,600 and new sectors such as women and young people could be added, a government source said.
The changes are among ideas being floated by the administration to win over pan-democratic lawmakers who have vowed to vote down the government’s proposal for the 2017 poll, the first time the city’s leader could be elected by universal suffrage.
In August, the National People’s Congress Standing Committee ruled that only two or three candidates who had clinched majority support from a 1,200-member nominating committee could contest the one-man, one-vote public ballot in 2017.
Methods for electing the committee, its composition and size, will be “in accordance with” those of the election committee that decided the 2012 poll. It will be divided between four sectors and largely chosen by about 250,000 individual and corporate voters in dozens of subsectors.
Pan-democrats, of whom at least four would have to vote in favour for the government proposal to pass, have vowed to veto any package based on the restrictive framework. Beijing has insisted that it will not retract its decision.
“Based on our recent meetings with some pan-democratic lawmakers, their major demands are a pledge to improve the method for electing the chief executive after universal suffrage is implemented in 2017 and the abolition of functional constituencies in 2020,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“A fifth sector could be added to the nominating committee in 2022 to include new sectors such as young people, civil servants and women,” the source said. “Representatives of sectors like young people could be elected by ‘one man, one vote’.”
The source said an option could be to allow all civil servants to elect their representatives in the nominating committee, similar to the 1995 Legislative Council election when civil servants were given a vote in one of the nine new broad-based functional constituencies. About 2.7 million people were given the vote in those functional constituencies.
“The government would try [its] best to overcome … legal difficulties if a political deal is reached between pan-democrats and the administration,” the source said.
The source believed that backing from more than 60 per cent of Hongkongers for a less-than-ideal version of universal suffrage might persuade pan-democrats to support the reform package.
The latest support rate in an internal poll commissioned by the government was 57 per cent, according to the source.
A person familiar with the government position said that the 2020 Legco election would mark the beginning of the process of achieving the ultimate goal of electing all lawmakers by universal suffrage.
Education sector lawmaker Ip Kin-yuen, who has been seen as one of the main lobbying targets in the pan-democratic camp, said he would veto any 2017 reform package under Beijing’s framework, even if the government promised an improvement in the 2022 election.
“We would continue to fight for genuine universal suffrage in 2022 after we veto the 2017 package. The two matters should not be linked up,” said Ip.
Another pan-democratic lawmaker, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said that the improvements being proposed for the 2022 chief executive election were “insignificant and not worth considering”.
