Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
electoral process for the chief executive and legislature to make the 2012 polls more demo-
cratic.
The clamour for democracy reached a crescendo in 2010 as two landmark political events
took place in successive months. In May five pro-democracy lawmakers were re-elected to
LegCo after they collectively resigned four months earlier in the hope that the resulting by-
elections would serve as a de-facto referendum on universal suffrage. The pro-Běijīng
parties boycotted the contests, however, and the quintet's campaign came unstuck, even
though they could claim to have been returned to the chamber by a respectable vote.
The pro-democracy parties had in fact been divided over the political strategy behind the
forced by-elections, and the long-running differences among the key players imploded the
following month when the biggest of them all, the Democratic Party, sided with the govern-
ment in a new political reform package that would see LegCo earn a slightly increased per-
centage of popularly elected seats at the expense of delayed universal suffrage for the entire
legislature and for the election of Hong Kong's chief executive.
The calls for democracy have continued since, most notably around the election - by a
1200-member body of predominantly pro-Běijīng notables - of the SAR's fourth chief exec-
utive in March 2012. Leung Chun-ying, a stalwart in Hong Kong politics with impeccably
close links to Běijīng, defeated the long-time hopeful and former civil-service chief Henry
Tang.
In June 2014, an unofficial referendum on making the election of the city's CE more
democratic garnered votes from over 787,000 Hong Kong residents - the equivalent of more
than 22% of the city's 3.5 million registered voters. Following this, on 1 July 2014, an es-
timated 510,000 people turned out for a pro-democracy protest march on the anniversary of
the handover, though the police put the figure at 98,600.
A measure of just how successful the handover had generally been came in a 2007 BBC
interview with Margaret Thatcher. Marking the 10th anniversary of the handover of Hong
Kong from Britain to China, Thatcher, to her own surprise, deemed China's overall per-
formance a success.
A Changed City?
Visitors returning to Hong Kong since July 1997 would see and feel little material difference
walking around the city today. Perhaps the most striking thing for returning visitors from the
West is the influx of a new breed of visitor: mainland Chinese, who now make up nearly
70% of the territory's visitor numbers.
