Hong Kong Leader Wins Re-election by an Expected Wide Margin
Donald Tsang celebrated after being re-elected by a wide margin as Hong Kong's chief executive.
HONG KONG, Sunday, March 25 — Donald Tsang was re-elected Hong Kong’s chief executive by a wide margin on Sunday, following a campaign that drew unexpected interest as the first contested election for the territory’s top job since its return to China in 1997.
Mr. Tsang prevailed by a vote of 645 to 123 over Alan Leong, a former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association who was the first democracy advocate to obtain a place on the ballot here.
Only a small group of electors were allowed to cast votes in the election. Slightly more than half of them had been chosen in voting last December by roughly 200,000 of the city’s seven million residents, while the rest automatically became electors because they held positions in the local legislature, local business groups or the National People’s Congress in Beijing.
With strong back from Beijing’s leaders, Mr. Tsang’s re-election was never in doubt. The electors are mainly wealthy businesspeople and politicians with close ties to the mainland. Many of them arrived at the election site, a convention center next to the city’s outlying airport, in their chauffeured Rolls-Royces, Mercedes and BMWs.
Though most of Hong Kong’s people did not have a say in the outcome, the election still caught the public’s attention.
During the campaign Hong Kong held its first two debates pitting a leader of the territory against an opponent actively promoting democracy. The campaign grew sufficiently contentious that mainland authorities temporarily blocked signals from CNN even when Mr. Tsang articulated his position on eventual democracy here.
People in neighboring Guangdong Province can receive television signals from Hong Kong and have been expressing envy to Hong Kong television crews over this territory’s limited liberties.
“They say, why don’t we have the same thing for the election of our governors?” Mr. Tsang said in an interview Friday, adding that he did not have a position on whether this was good or bad.
In the interview, with five foreign correspondents, Mr. Tsang said he wanted to introduce a democracy plan in the next five years that would satisfy the 60 percent of Hong Kong’s people who consistently tell pollsters that they want a system of one person, one vote.
But he declined to provide any details. He tried and failed in 2005 to fashion a consensus that would satisfy democracy advocates without upsetting Beijing’s leaders, who worry about losing control here, and without antagonizing local business leaders, some of whom warn that greater democracy could lead to demands for the introduction of a minimum wage and greater welfare spending.
Stephen Lam, the secretary for constitutional affairs, announced Sunday that the government would issue a report "by the middle of this year" on possible approaches to universal suffrage and would then solicit public comments for several months. “We will reflect those views very faithfully to the central government in the hope that we can make progress in the next five years,” he said, referring to China’s national government in Beijing.
Michael DeGolyer, the director of the Hong Kong Transition Project, a group of academics studying the evolution of democratic liberties in Hong Kong, said Mr. Tsang’s comments over the past five months of the campaign showed a discernible shift toward more enthusiasm for addressing the question of greater democracy here.
Mr. Tsang was considered virtually certain to win because he had Beijing’s backing and was nominated by 641 of the 796 electors. Only 132 electors chose Mr. Leong.
With unemployment falling and the economy booming, polls by Hong Kong University and other groups suggest that if the public could vote, they would overwhelmingly choose Mr. Tsang, who has four decades of experience in public service. Mr. Leong is a former chairman of the Hong Kong Bar Association who emerged as the pro-democracy candidate after better-known politicians decided that it was hopeless to run against Mr. Tsang.
The elections represent the first time that a secret ballot has been used to choose the next leader of Hong Kong.
Stanley Ho, an outspoken supporter of Mr. Tsang who controls many of the casinos in nearby Macao, caused controversy two weeks ago by saying there was a way to find out who cast which vote. Mr. Ho, an elector who arrived at the voting site in an immense silver Rolls-Royce with the license plate HK-1, later said that he had only meant to cite a local expression that every secret eventually becomes known.
Election officials have been issuing almost daily assurances ever since that ballots will be truly secret, with no photography allowed in the voting area and no serial numbers or other identifying marks on the ballots.
But as Margaret Ng, a pro-democracy lawmaker who is an elector and supported Mr. Leong, said on Friday, “It will leave some lurking doubt, so unless people have strong views, they will vote for Donald Tsang.”
In the end, there were 11 blank ballots and five ballots ruled invalid because they were unclearly marked.
Longtime democracy advocates in Hong Kong remain divided over the wisdom of participating in elections with rules that make it certain they will lose.
The two most prominent figures in the pro-democracy movement here — Martin Lee, the founding chairman of the Democratic Party, and Anson Chan, a former second-ranking official in the Hong Kong government — declined to run this spring.
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