{"id":41849,"date":"2014-08-27T12:49:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-27T12:49:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1:10081\/?p=41849 "},"modified":"2014-08-27T12:49:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-27T12:49:00","slug":"41849-revision-v1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/?p=41849","title":{"rendered":"China moves to limit Hong Kong election could stir protests"},"content":{"rendered":"
HONG KONG Wed Aug 27, 2014 9:49am EDT<\/div>
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(Reuters) – China moved on Wednesday to limit 2017 elections for Hong Kong’s leader to a handful of candidates loyal to Beijing, local media reported, a move likely to escalate plans by pro-democracy activists to blockade the city’s Central business district.<\/div>
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Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule from British colonial administration in 1997, has been deeply polarized and hit by protests over how its next leader is chosen in 2017 – by universal suffrage, as the democrats would like, or from a list of pro-Beijing candidates.<\/div>
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The decision to allow only two to three candidates to run in the 2017 election and not to allow open nominations was carried in a draft resolution published during a National People’s Congress (NPC) meeting in Beijing, Hong Kong’s RTHK radio reported, citing an unnamed source.<\/div>
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While the document said Beijing still backed a direct election for Hong Kong in 2017, it would insist that all candidates needed to first get majority backing from a small nomination committee stacked with Beijing loyalists.<\/div>
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The high nomination threshold will effectively make it impossible for opposition democrats to get on the ballot, and is likely to prove a final trigger for the Occupy Central protests.<\/div>
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Beijing’s Communist leaders are unnerved by the possibility of an opposition democrat being voted into office and have often said any Hong Kong leader must “love China” and be a “patriot”.<\/div>
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Ma Fung-kwok, a National People’s Congress member at the meeting, declined to confirm key details, but said a 50 percent threshold for nominations from the committee was “reasonable”.<\/div>
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“I can’t disclose details right now,” he told Reuters by telephone, saying a formal announcement would come on Sunday.<\/div>
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The relatively hardline stance by Beijing, while not unexpected, seems now likely to stir pro-democracy activists to step up preparations for their Occupy Central civil disobedience movement to demand what it considers a real, not “fake” election in line with international standards.<\/div>
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Benny Tai, one of the organizers of Occupy Central, warned that if Beijing placed unreasonable demands on nominations, they would launch a “full-scale, wave after wave,” campaign. He declined to say, however, when this might happen given the risk of arrest for conspiring to organize an unauthorized assembly.<\/div>
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 Continue reading the original article<\/a>.<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

<div>Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese rule from British colonial administration in 1997, has been deeply polarized and hit by protests over how its next leader is chosen in 2017 &#8211; by universal suffrage, as the democrats would like, or from a list of pro-Beijing candidates.<\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-41849","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ChinaHumanRights","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41849","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=41849"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41849\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=41849"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=41849"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/minzhuzhongguo.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=41849"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}