960411

China bars HK

dissenters from

pulse poll

HONG KONG: China barred two Hong Kong democrats on Thursday from a political pulse-taking exercise aimed at seeking local views on selecting the colony's leaders after its return to Beijing rule in 1997.

The overnight announcement that the representatives of a dissenting teachers' union would be barred from the "consultation" was the latest blow in a Chinese campaign against emergent democracy in Hong Kong.

The Beijing-controlled China News Agency said a committee working on the transfer of power took back an invitation to Hong Kong's Professional Teachers Union because it opposed China's plan to abolish the territory's elected legislature and install a new one in 1997.

At the same time, in a gesture likely to drive a wedge into the union, the Chinese body invited union members who did not oppose China's plans to send it their views and suggestions.

The union was among 100 organisations and individuals invited to join the three-day survey from Saturday to Monday.

The pulse-taking is being conducted by a special panel of China's Preparatory Committee, which groups Chinese officials and Beijing-anointed Hong Kong dignitaries and is crafting post-1997 political institutions.

The exercise is presided over by a leading Chinese policy maker on the British colony's handover, Lu Ping, who heads Beijing's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office.

The union would have been represented at the talks by its chairman and vice-chairman Szeto Wah and Cheung Man-kwong, both prominent pro-democracy lawmakers in the territory's elected Legislative Council, which China says it will scrap in 1997.

Beijing signalled as early as Wednesday it was unhappy about their participation when 20 pro-China teachers signed a statement, issued as an advertisement in local newspapers, attacking the two men as unrepresentative of the union.

China had already excluded the Democratic Party which the two dissenters belong to from playing any role in Preparatory Committee affairs.

Both men are also prominent members of the Hong Kong Alliance in Support of the Patrotic Democratic Movement in China, which Beijing brands as subversive because it advocates democracy in China.-Reuter