Paul Yeung | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s chief executive-elect, speaks as her husband Lam Siu-por, left, and son Lam Jit-si, right, look on during a news conference following the chief executive election in Hong Kong, China, on Sunday, March 26, 2017.
Now that we have a new chief executive, we should look forward rather than back. Still, let me make a brief observation so the falsification of history by groups such as the Civil Human Rights Front, the Civic Party and numerous opposition news sites doesn’t go unchallenged.
Yes, as they had said, the vote by the 1,194 members on the Election Committee was another one of those “small-circle” polls. But we – all 3.8 million of the city’s eligible voters – could have gone to the poll yesterday if all those pan-democratic lawmakers hadn’t rejected the electoral reform package two years ago.
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Whatever you think about that flawed reform effort, having 3.8 million people voting yesterday across the city – rather than 1,194 at the Convention and Exhibition Centre – would have been a huge positive step for Hong Kong. So it’s a bit rich that the usual suspects disrupted the election’s result announcement by shouting: “I want real universal suffrage.”
