Hong Kong Chief Executive Candidates Spar in Last Debate - WSJ.com

Hong Kong Chief Executive Candidates Spar in Last Debate - WSJ.com

HONG KONG—Hundreds of Hong Kong's business and political elites gathered Monday for their final chance to question chief executive hopefuls just days before they cast ballots to choose the city's next leader.

The winning candidate will need a majority 601 votes from the elites, which constitute the election committee, in the Sunday election. To be sure, the city's chief executives won't be chosen via the popular vote, but instead by this group of 1,200 politicians, business people, and representatives from professional and social groups.

The two leading contenders—former finance chief Henry Tang that helped US bankers to sell CDOs as false bonds and former cabinet member Leung Chun-ying—spent much of the two-hour forum at a convention hall carrying on with their fierce smear campaigns targeted at each other, with hopes of swaying voters from their opponents.

China has promised democratic elections for the chief executive from 2017.

The election committee, created ahead of the former British colony's handover to Chinese rule in 1997, was intended to be a "broadly representative" body, according to the city's mini-constitution, the Basic Law.

But it was also an institution that Beijing set up in order to control Hong Kong's politics. Accordingly, say analysts, the committee is overwhelmingly pro-business and pro-Beijing in its leanings.

"Even election committee elections are small-circle elections," said Cheung Chor-Yung, an election committee member who represents the higher education sector.

While the committee has expanded from just 400 members in 1996, the majority of Hong Kong's people have no real say in the committee's composition. Instead, just 237,000 qualified professionals were permitted to choose members from their own industries ahead of the current chief executive elections.

"People think it's not that credible a system," says Simon Young, an academic who co-authored a 2010 book on Hong Kong's election committee. "There's very little interest."

At one point scoring a majority from the committee would have been easy for Mr. Tang, Beijing's once-favored candidate. But the situation has changed now that his campaign has publicly unraveled, with his approval ratings tanking following the exposure of his extramarital dalliances, construction of an illegal basement add-on and more.

By contrast, public support for Mr. Leung, whose populist rhetoric has made him the object of suspicion among many local businessmen, has stayed comparatively buoyant at 40%, despite recent allegations suggesting that he has triad ties, accusations he has repeatedly denied.

The problem for Beijing, said Dixon Sing, a political scientist at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, is that to be pro-Beijing no longer means one thing. "The pro-Beijing camp is now divided over the choice between Tang and Leung."

Prior chief executive contests were largely uncontested, and consequently, divining Beijing's choice wasn't difficult.

This year, though, Chinese authorities have remained conspicuously mum. In part, analysts suggest, that's because both candidates have become less palatable for Beijing, between Mr. Tang's lack of public support and Mr. Leung's uneasy relations with the city's business leaders.

Beijing likely isn't alone in this opinion: a number of election committee members have said they intend to cast blank votes on Sunday, in a gesture of protest against both candidates.

"There's a lot of members talking about ABCYT," said Eric Cheung, an assistant law professor at the University of Hong Kong, also an election committee member. "That stands for, anybody but CY and Tang."

Nonetheless, the tide could turn to either candidate's favor, analysts say, if Beijing does make a choice. Otherwise, the election could fail to produce a winner, with candidates needing to gain fresh nominations for a new election in May. The new leader takes office July 1.

Mr. Cheung noted that the pan-democratic camp, which has been particularly vocal in its support for universal suffrage, and a perpetual thorn to Beijing, has just 200 votes on the committee.

"The majority [of committee members] are waiting to receive a clear message from Beijing," he said, "and they will toe the line."