HK candidates to tackle issues

Lam says many new faces have signed up for Election Committee election

Hong Kong's leader expressed confidence on Tuesday in a fair and successful election for the 1,500-member committee that will choose the city's next chief executive in March, as candidates running for the committee vowed to tackle deep-seated social issues.

On the fourth day of the weeklong nomination period, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor told a news conference she had seen active participation from various sectors in the city in the Election Committee election, which will be held on Sept 19.

As of Tuesday, 913 candidates had signed up to contest the 967 seats to be returned by subsector elections. The remaining seats will be nominated by leading organizations or filled by ex officio members.

The seven-member Candidate Eligibility Review Committee has been working around the clock to review whether the nominees comply with the requirement that they "uphold the Basic Law and bear allegiance to the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region". The vetting process will be completed on Aug 26, Lam said.

The election will be the first contested in the city since it revamped its electoral system to ensure that "patriots administer Hong Kong". It will be followed by the Legislative Council election in December and Chief Executive election in March. The new Election Committee members will elect 40 of the next legislature's 90 members.

Lam said that many new faces had signed up for election as a result of the expansion of the committee to include many new subsectors.

Lo Kam-yam, chairman of the Hong Kong Commerce and Industry Associations, submitted his nomination for one of the 15 seats in the newly founded small and medium-sized enterprises subsector.

He said the new political window would bring practical and beneficial policies for the city's SMEs, such as greater access to the mainland market through cross-border cooperation. He said he hoped they would help the business sector emerge from the difficulties it has faced as a result of social unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic in recent years.

Former Hong Kong Medical Association vice-president Doctor David Lam Tzit-yuen, a candidate in the merged medical and health services subsector, said that the improved electoral system had put an end to a turbulent social atmosphere that had deterred many patriots from entering politics.

He said a medical professional should not only fight for the interests of his or her profession but also seek to help the government address social problems, such as aging and insufficient community healthcare services.

Doctor Samuel Kwok Po-yin, president of the Association of Private Medical Specialists of Hong Kong, also submitted his nomination for the subsector election.

He said he believed the integration of healthcare resources in Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland cities in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area was a crucial step to resolve deep-seated conflicts and institutional deficiencies in the healthcare system. He said he would vote for a chief executive with such foresight if elected.

Also on Tuesday, Carrie Lam expressed support for the introduction of an anti-sanctions law in Hong Kong by adding it to an annex of the city's Basic Law, as local legislation could make it better fit the city's legal system and protect the rule of law.

She said the national law, which involves the imposition of countermeasures against foreign sanctions, is entirely a matter of foreign affairs and not within the purview of Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy.

It was the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region government's constitutional duty to safeguard national security and development interests and thus, before the local legislation was enacted, the government would act under existing laws to cooperate with anti-sanctions actions by the central government, Carrie Lam said.

The Standing Committee of the National People's Congress passed the Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law on June 10. In recent years, the United States and some of its allies have imposed a number of sanctions on Chinese individuals and organizations over alleged human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, Tibet autonomous region and Hong Kong.