Governor Patten's Reforms

Governor Chris Patten was the first Hong Kong governor to begin his tour of duty after the fallout from the 1989 turmoil, and the last governor of Hong Kong before the handover. Governor Patten's predecessors struck several unpublished gentleman's agreements with Beijing, in which they committed to going slow on democratization in exchange for assurances from Beijing that the modest democratic gains in Hong Kong would not be lost after the change of sovereignty. In the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre, however, Patten was sent to Hong Kong with a mandate from London, as well as from the Hong Kong people, to accelerate the democratization process.

In June 1994, following 17 rounds of unsuccessful talks between Britain and China, and despite Beijing's strong objections, the Legislative Council approved Governor Patten's proposals to lower the voting age, open all LegCo seats to election, and increase significantly the number of voters selecting LegCo seats through indirect elections. But Beijing considered Hong Kong's new election law to be inconsistent with the 1990 Basic Law, and vowed to disband the council on July 1, 1997.

The Provisional Legislature's Revised Election Procedures

True to its word, Beijing replaced the Legislative Council that was elected democratically in 1995 with an appointed provisional legislature that would sit until elections could be held for the new LegCo in 1998. This placed Hong Kong's democratic transition in limbo for an entire year.

The concerns surrounding the upcoming election have roots in the questionable legitimacy of the provisional legislature and the nature of the changes it made in Hong Kong's election law. Since the provisional legislature was not constituted by elections and was not even mentioned in the Basic Law, it has remained in a shroud of controversy since its inception. Adding to this controversy, the newly appointed chief executive, C. H. Tung, gave the unelected body the authority to enact revised electoral procedures in order to undo the "damage" caused by Patten's reforms and allegedly to restore Hong Kong to the "gradual and orderly" democratization process outlined in the Basic Law.

The provisional legislature passed its revised election law on September 28, 1997, and set the date for the upcoming elections. Critics charge that the new election guidelines limit the democratic franchise in Hong Kong and are deliberately aimed at restricting the number of democracy advocates in the legislature. To evaluate the basis for these charges, a basic knowledge of the changes made in the election law is needed.

First, the 1998 Legislative Council is to be created by the direct election of 20 geographic seats and by the indirect election of 30 functional and 10 election committee seats. By 2004, the SAR government plans to increase the number of directly elected seats and phase out all of the election committee seats, leaving half of the legislature elected by geographic constituencies and half by functional constituencies. Although the distribution of constituency seats in the new LegCo will be the same as it was in 1995, significant changes were made in voting procedures.

The provisional legislature changed the number of voters who are allowed to elect representatives from the functional constituencies and the election committee. In the end, only one-third of the new LegCo will be elected directly by the full voting population of 2.8 million; the remaining two-thirds of the legislature will be elected indirectly by a mere 140,000 voters who are eligible to cast a second ballot--over a million fewer than under the previous election law, and only 5 percent of the total number of eligible voters. In 1995, half of Hong Kong's electorate were eligible to cast a second ballot for a functional constituency or election committee representative.

Because of these changes, election watchers around the world are interested in two aspects of the election on May 24: voter turnout and the final party line results. Voter turnout could be depressed by the fact that only 5 percent of voters have a say in who will fill two-thirds of the seats in the legislature. The new procedures may produce a legislature that includes many fewer advocates of democratization than the 1995 legislature held.

The three constituencies, and how they are determined, are as follows:

1. Geographic Constituencies
   In 1995, Hong Kong was divided into 20 geographic voting districts, each returning a single representative to the legislature. Every registered voter was eligible to cast a vote in his geographic constituency, and the candidate receiving the most votes won the seat. In 1998, every registered voter remains eligible to cast a ballot in his geographic constituency, but Hong Kong will be divided into five geographic voting districts instead of 20, and the seats within each district will be distributed to candidates on party lists according to the proportion of the vote each party receives. Advocates of this form of proportional representation claim that this system will return a legislature that reflects the preferences of the electorate more accurately. But it is unclear how this system can possibly fulfill a promised equitable distribution of seats, because two-thirds of the legislature will have been elected indirectly by the other constituency groups.

2. Functional Constituencies
   In 1995, more than 1.1 million (out of 2.6 million) eligible voters cast a second ballot (in addition to their geographic constituency) to elect a representative in their functional constituency. This was an improvement over 1991, when only 69,000 voters were eligible to vote for functional constituency representatives. Since half of the legislature's 60 seats were allotted to functional constituencies, Governor Patten sought to make LegCo more representative of the voting population by vastly expanding the number of eligible voters in these constituencies. The current guidelines, however, return to the exclusive nature of the functional constituency franchise, with only 139,000 voters eligible to cast a second ballot in 1998.

3. Election Committee
   In 1995, 283 directly elected local government officials representing their constituents voted to fill the ten election committee seats. In 1998, a complex procedure was put in place to select an 800-member election committee which would in turn elect the ten election committee seats. In 1995, every registered Hong Kong voter was eligible to vote for the local officials who would represent them on the election committee. In 1998, however, only a small subsection of the electorate was eligible to participate in the selection of the election committee several weeks ahead of the general election. The complexity of the new procedures and their similarity to the functional constituency procedures confused many of the 23 percent of eligible voters who participated in the selection of the election committee in April 1998.

The New Legislative Council

Under Hong Kong's executive-led political structure, the legislature and administration are not coequal branches of government. The Legislative Council is charged with enacting laws, controlling public expenditures, and monitoring the performance of the government by forwarding questions on matters of public interest. But these powers are limited by Article 74 of the 1990 Basic Law, which prohibits LegCo from introducing bills that involve "public expenditure or political structure or the operation of the government." Legislators can introduce other bills only with the consent of the chief executive. These powers were granted to the legislature only recently.

Although few predictions can be made about how the new council will work to achieve democratic reforms, observers are somewhat wary because the council will have been elected under a law that was revised by the new SAR government and passed by the unelected provisional legislature. The controversy surrounding the provisional legislature and the new election law has its origins in the standoff between Beijing and London over the pace of democratization in the former British colony before the transfer of sovereignty to China. The fruit of this standoff--the new election law--complicates an already complex election process and may produce a LegCo that is less representative of the Hong Kong people than the council elected under British rule in 1995.

Most analysts expect the upcoming election to be carried out in strict accordance with the law, but many in Hong Kong and abroad charge that the revised election procedures passed into law by the provisional legislature are flawed. They suggest that the procedures themselves may threaten Hong Kong's path to democracy.