Pro-Democracy Forces Run Well in Hong Kong

When Carina Loo woke up on Sunday, she heard China tell her that voting in Hong Kong’s first broadly democratic election was a waste of time. Come China’s takeover of the territory in 1997, the state-run news agency said, Beijing will disband the legislature halfway through its term and replace it with its own handpicked lawmakers.

Loo, and 920,566 other Hong Kong citizens, voted anyway.

“I wanted to send a signal to China that Hong Kong people want to keep their freedoms,” the 30-year-old investment manager said. “I thought if enough people voted, it might influence the way China deals with us after 1997.”

Early results show that signal is loud and clear. Pro-democracy candidates won emphatic victories over rivals allied with China, and more people voted than ever before, under a franchise-expanding program introduced recently by Gov. Chris Patten. Still, the 36% turnout was three percentage points lower than in the last legislative elections here.

“Everyone in Hong Kong and out of Hong Kong will have to take account of what the voice of Hong Kong has said today,” Patten said early today.

Sunday’s race was Hong Kong’s first chance to elect, directly or indirectly, its entire legislature--some of the seats were previously government-appointed--and the last before Britain hands the territory back to China in 1997. With the turnover approaching, the vote has been seen as a referendum on Beijing’s rule and how much say Hong Kong will have in it.

In ordinary times, the issues might have been as mundane as ensuring a clean water supply. But this race pitched pro-Beijing candidates, who say it’s important to cooperate with China, against those who declare that Hong Kong must defend its freedoms, even though Beijing may consider them subversive.

Said outspoken independent Emily Lau, a democracy advocate who won her race: “If we think that to dismantle an elected legislature and replace it with a non-elected legislature of yes-men and yes-women is bad for Hong Kong, then we should say so. . . . It’s bad for business; it’s bad for prosperity.”

Despite Beijing’s promises that it will remove the legislators elected Sunday, officials and supporters of China here actively backed at least 14 candidates. Some played up their links with Beijing, saying that cooperation is better than confrontation with the future rulers.

“If we get a lot of seats, there’s a better chance that China will accept our suggestions,” said Cheng Kai-nam, a member of the pro-Beijing Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong, known as DAB. “We can minimize the shock.”

Such suggestions that China will go softer on Hong Kong if it has its own people in the legislature are “tantamount to blackmail,” said Martin Lee, a popular lawyer and chairman of the Democratic Party. He beat his opponent by a wide margin.

“These kind of intimidatory remarks are clearly calculated to sway Hong Kong voters from voting for us,” said Lee, recalling that Beijing issued a call to cast ballots for “patriotic” candidates on the eve of 1991 elections. In that race, pro-Beijing candidates didn’t win a single seat.

With most of the votes counted today, pro-democracy forces were headed to win 20 of the 25 seats for which they fielded candidates. In the 1991 election, they swept 16 of the 18 contested seats, capitalizing on anger over China’s 1989 bloody crackdown on Tian An Men Square demonstrators. Even pro-Beijing candidate Cheng Kai-nam marched in the streets with more than 1 million Hong Kong residents in protest.

But now, he says, though Hong Kong is still divided over China’s impending rule, more people have confidence in Beijing and are worried more about the economy than about politics.

“My team visited 1,000 people a day,” he said, campaigning Sunday in front of a crowded public housing complex with laundry hanging from every window. “People are more concerned with stability. No one talks about politics.”

While a slowing economy causes more concern with pocketbook issues, voters showed that if they don’t talk about politics, they certainly think about them. In the New Territories, an area bordering China, straw-hatted villagers were so eager to vote that they stormed two polling stations when their names couldn’t be found on registration lists.

And despite the pro-China camp’s well-funded campaigns, strong editorials and articles in China-backed newspapers, and coordinated busing of supporters to the polls, the DAB party and Beijing-linked independents won only a few of more than a dozen contested seats. “Hong Kong people will pay for this,” said Cheng, who lost his race.

But pro-democracy leader Christine Loh cautions that the election is about more than just China.

“It’s many things, like all elections. It’s a popularity contest, it’s about livelihood, it’s about who people trust to represent them, irrespective of whether China is there or not,” she said, leading a phalanx of tambourine-shaking supporters. “The important thing is that we’re putting in the nuts and bolts of democracy and opening up the decision-making process.” Loh beat her opponent, the Liberal Party’s Peggy Lam, resoundingly.

For Lam, who has been in public service for 30 years, there is a silver lining to Beijing’s promise to remove the latest batch of legislators from office.

“I’ll stand for election again in 1997,” she said brightly. “Why not?”