Thanks to the votes of 689 people, Leung Chun-ying will be the next leader of Hong Kong. That’s not much of a mandate in a city of 7m souls. Many people have more Facebook friends. Why should anyone care about the outcome of an “election” restricted to a tiny clique of the elite? The man selected as Hong Kong’s third chief executive since it reverted to China in 1997 was vetted by an election committee of just 1,200, many of whom took their cue from Beijing.
Yet the election was important. Hong Kong, the world’s third-biggest financial centre by many measures, may never be quite the same again. There are several reasons for this. First, Mr Leung is likely to be a different sort of leader from anyone who has governed Hong Kong before. Unlike Donald Tsang, the bow-tie-wearing incumbent, the chief executive-elect has no strong connections to the British civil service nor to the property tycoons who still run the place. The son of a policeman, Mr Leung comes from much humbler stock than Tung Chee-hwa, the first chief executive, who inherited his father’s shipping business.
So close are Mr Leung’s ties to the mainland that some suspect he is a closet member of the Communist party. That claim, strenuously denied by Mr Leung himself, derives partly from the fact that, as a young man, Beijing entrusted him with a prominent role in drawing up Hong Kong’s mini-constitution.