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Hong Kong's leader Leung Chun-ying says there's room for 'more democratic' elections as talks begin
ABC Radio Australia - October 21, 2014
It is the first indication of a possible concession to pro-democracy protesters who have blocked city streets for weeks.
Mr Leung was talking just hours before the start of formal talks between student protest leaders and city officials aimed at defusing the crisis in the former British colony that returned to Chinese rule in 1997.
"There's room for discussion there," he told a small group of reporters. "There's room to make the nominating committee more democratic."
Mr Leung is not taking part in Tuesday's talks. Instead he has sent five envoys, including Hong Kong's number two official, chief secretary Carrie Lam. The talks are being broadcast live at the insistence of student leaders to make public the debate on democracy.
"This is an historic moment because it's the first time ever in Hong Kong that a group of protesters are able to sit on an equal footing with the government, to say: 'we don't agree with you, we want democracy'," said Nathan Law, a member of the Hong Kong Federation of Students.
Giant screens have been set up in protest zones to beam the talks to demonstrators.
The government cancelled talks scheduled for earlier this month after the students called for the protests to expand.
In August, Communist Party rulers in Beijing offered Hong Kong people the chance to vote for their own leader in 2017, but said only two to three candidates could run.
The candidates would first need to get backing from a 1,200-person nominating committee, which happens to be stacked with Beijing loyalists. The protesters decried this as "fake" Chinese-style democracy and said they would not leave the streets unless Beijing allows opened nominations.
Discussion of the potential concession from Mr Leung could only start later in the year, however, when the city government launches a new round of consultations for electoral methods, he said.
Streets calm after weekend protests
Hong Kong's high court has ordered demonstrators to leave protest sites which have been sealed since the student-led movement began three weeks ago.
The judge said the pro-democracy protesters had caused inconvenience to taxi drivers and bus operators and ordered the demonstrators to leave the neighbourhood of Mong Kok immediately.
The area was calm on Monday although scores of protesters remained on the streets. Dozens of people were injured in two nights of clashes over the weekend in the Mong Kok district, including 22 police.
Protests have sparked occasional scuffles between demonstrators and the police, who once fired tear gas on the crowd and have also used pepper spray and batons, but have not attempted to clear the streets.
Mr Leung warned, however, that such action could take place whenever the police see it as necessary.
"We are not tying the dialogue with the students to police actions... we have never said that while dialogues go on – and there will probably be several rounds of dialogue with the students – the police will not carry out necessary actions."
He declined to say if there was a deadline for clearing the protesters from city streets and said the government did not have "any instructions from Beijing".
But Mr Leung said he believed that people of Hong Kong were losing patience with the protests and could take matters into their own hands.
Besides Mong Kok, where demonstrators remain, about 1,000 protesters are camped out at the headquarters of the civil disobedience "Occupy" movement on Hong Kong Island.
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