Discuss Reform With No Preconditions: Ronny Tong

Executive Council member Ronny Tong has urged his former colleagues in the pan-democratic camp to send out a positive signal that they are ready to talk about political reform.

Mr Tong, a senior counsel who served as a Civic Party lawmaker, said the government had always been open to talks on reform. But he said the pan-democrats had not taken part because they insisted on having candidates for chief executive nominated by the public – not an election committee as the Basic Law stipulated and Beijing insisted.

Speaking on RTHK's Letter to Hong Kong programme, Tong said: "How best to answer the fervent wish of our young people and perhaps the vast majority of the people in Hong Kong if not to achieve democracy in our life time? You do not get democracy bestowed on you for doing nothing.

"And you do not get to be called democrats for doing nothing. Let us all get out of our respective ivory towers and try to do something. Something different. Something called talking. We owe it to not just young people, but the whole of Hong Kong to do just that."

The last attempt to introduce political reform, in 2014, would have seen the public select the chief executive from a list of two or three candidates selected by majority vote of a 1,200-strong election committee dominated by Beijing-loyalists.

Pan-democrats had said this condition, set down in a decision by the National People's Congress Standing Committee in August 2014, amounted to screening of candidates on political grounds. The proposal was voted down by the legislature in June 2015.

Tong said that since the 2014 reform attempt, there had been the "infamous" Occupy campaign and the recent "violent protests" against changes to the extradition law.

He said the extradition proposal was now "dead" but said that even accepting all the demands of those opposed to the bill would only delay rather than prevent further outbursts of "anger and disgust".