A Win-Win Election In Hong Kong

Yi Zheng Lian | NYT Syndicate

HONG KONG'S new leader will be selected on Sunday. Since Britain handed the territory back to China in 1997, the election of the chief executive which is performed by a special 1,200-member committee stacked in Beijing's favour has generally been a foregone conclusion. But this year China's leaders may not be able to dictate the outcome. A faction of powerful local business interests sidelined during the last election, in 2012, will come out on top no matter the result of the vote itself.
In December, the unpopular current chief executive, Leung Chun-ying, suddenly announced that he would not seek a second term. Leung, long regarded as Beijing's loyal henchman, apparently lost its favours after overplaying his hand. His hard-line rule precipitated the momentous pro-democracy Umbrella Movement of 2014. And although those protests failed to achieve their immediate goals real universal suffrage and Leung's removal from office they have spawned a bold separatist movement that has made headway in recent months, including in the local legislature.
The Central Liaison Office, Beijing's formal representation in Hong Kong, has nonetheless come out strongly in support of Carrie Lam-Cheng Yuet-Ngor, Leung's trusted and equally hard-line number two, as his replacement. China's leaders may want to reduce anti-Beijing sentiment in Hong Kong by adopting a softer line, but endorsing a more liberal candidate might come across as a tacit admission that choosing Leung in 2012 was a mistake, and may mean too great a loss of face for those supposedly infallible leaders.
Lam's two competitors include the dark-horse candidate Woo Kok-hing, a retired high court judge with a sharp intellect. Woo is admired by many for his fair, sometimes even democratic, views, but he lacks visible support from major political blocs. The more formidable challenger is John Tsang Chun-wah, Leung's former finance secretary, whose folksy style and smooth P R skills contrast with Lam's stern and strait-jacketed ways. Tsang has jokingly called the chief executive position a"thankless, rotten job." His tickling likeness to the mustachioed Pringles character has earned him the endearing nickname Uncle Chips. Tsang's platform promotes conciliation between the government and the various opposition forces, a popular view. He leads Lam by some 20 percentage points in many recent polls.
The pro-democracy camp, which has no credible candidate of its own but is eager to see Lam defeated (if only to spite Beijing), is firmly behind Tsang. And for once, it has a fighting chance of getting what it wants.
In the past, Beijing could comfortably count on some 1,000 of the 1,200 votes in the Election Committee a hodgepodge of people handpicked by local industry leaders, elected representatives from professional groups such as accountants and medical personnel, and proxies for the Chinese government like the local deputies of the National People's Congress. The sole pro-democracy candidate in the 2012 election garnered a paltry 76 votes. This time, however, more than 300 votes are in pro-democracy hands.
Known as the 'Democrats 300+', the pro-democracy voters on the committee may well derail Lam's bid for the chief executive job, partly by exploiting a cleavage within the local establishment that has become apparent since the 2012 election. That year the bigger faction, which included many of Hong Kong's top tycoons, saw its candidate, Henry Tang Ying-yen, lose out to Leung over a real estate scandal that turned out to be no worse than another one involving Leung.
The event solidified a growing split within Hong Kong's ruling class, between what became known as the Leung Camp and the Tang Camp. Each group is held together by interlocking business ties and sometimes family connections, and driven more by self-interest than ideological concerns. Li Ka-shing, the richest person in Hong Kong by far, is widely regarded as the Tang Camp's `minence grise.
With Leung now out of the race for chief executive, the Tang Camp has already won half the battle. The question is how much more it can gain.
The firmly pro-business Tsang is, logically, its preferred candidate for chief executive. Leung's supporters have staged a rear-guard action to smear him, pointing to Tsang's American background he graduated from Stuyvesant High School in New York and holds degrees from MIT and Harvard as evidence that he would serve United States interests. So far Tsang has seemed unlikely to get waylaid by the conspiracy theories, but were he to, most of his votes would likely shift to Woo. More interesting, even if he did lose ground to Lam, or lost the election itself, the Tang Camp might still win out.
Lam's critics call her 'C Y Leung 2.0', but with Leung supporters in disarray after his setback, the bulk of Ms Lam's campaign team is now made up of members of the Tang Camp, such as Lam Tai-Fai, an industrialist and vocal Leung critic, and Ronald Arculli, a lawyer and a former deputy head of the Liberal Party. Tang himself has stated his support for Lam.
Since Lam lacks a power base of her own, were she to win the election, she would be susceptible to the influence of the Tang people surrounding her, including perhaps even to Tsang's conciliation agenda. And all the more so because that outcome might sit well enough with Beijing: The presence of another hard-line leader in Hong Kong could help it save appearances even as, out of necessity, the new government would adopt a less confrontational ruling style. Whatever the result of Sunday's election, in other words, the Leung Camp can only lose, and the Tang Camp can only win. After five long years of Leung's painfully divisive administration, a reprieve may finally have come for the people of Hong Kong.

(Yi-Zheng Lian is a commentator on Hong Kong and Asian affairs.)