The voting system for the geographical constituencies
Hong Kong employs a proportional representation system of party-lists, in which seats are allocated on a “largest remainder” basis for the election of legislators in the geographical constituencies.
That may sound confusing, so we’ve created three infographics to explain how it works:
A record number of candidates are standing in the Legislative Council elections on September 4th, even after seven were disqualified and two withdrew. Here are the numbers:
and their geographical distribution:
Reporters: Fiona Chan, Rammie Chui & Jessica Li
Editors: Emily Man and Zoe Tam
Visitors flocked to remote Sha Lo Tung in Tai Po in February to take in sight of a sea of yellow – a field of canola flowers. But behind this ‘natural’ attraction rages a controversy over the use of the land.
Sha Lo Tung is an enclave area within the Pat Sin Leng country park.
Enclaves are plots of private land next to or surrounded by country parks that the government has excluded from the country parks’ boundaries. This is to avoid infringing on the legal rights of the villagers who live there or own the land. There are 77 such enclaves in Hong Kong.
Here is a potted history of how enclaves came into being:
This interactive map shows where the 77 enclaves are located. Click on the marker for more details about individual enclaves. The Sha Lo Tung and Hoi Ha enclaves are marked in red.
Whether and how enclaves can or should be developed is highly controversial and often sees villagers pit against conservationists. Sha Lo Tung is an important habitat for species such as butterflies and dragonflies. The villagers recent planted canola fields in the area to turn it into a tourist spot.
Hoi Ha Wan in Sai Kung is also an enclave. The area was covered by an Outline Zoning Plan in 2015. The Outline Zoning Plan sets out approved uses for the land and major road systems. Hoi Ha is an area of high ecological value because it is home to many precious coral reefs. However, the number of coral reefs has decreased recently. Some say this is due to the increasing level of development.
Environmental groups oppose development in enclaves because they say it will ruin the ecosystems and damage the environment. They urge the government to conserve the enclaves by for instance, incorporating them into country parks. However, villagers say they should have the right to decide how the land is used as they own it. .
A former country parks official and professor of geography, Wong Fook-yee says the demands of different stakeholders, including villagers, developers, environmental groups and the government have to be balanced. Wong says there needs to be more public education to raise awareness of the enclaves issue. He also suggests Hong Kong consider the setting up of a charitable trust to raise public donations to purchase private land that has high ecological value.
The law makes it hard to address a shortage of guide dogs with more training.
Editors: Jayce Lai, Julian Ng
Reporters: Rubie Fan, Eunice Ip, Gloria Lee, Megan Leung
Guide dogs made a comeback to Hong Kong in 2011 after a gap of 26 years; the territory’s first two guide dogs were sponsored by a Hong Kong resident who came from Germany. Currently there are fewer than 40 serving guide dogs in the city, or around one guide dog for every 4,300 visually impaired people; the International Guide Dog Federation says ideally there should be one guide dog for every 100.
Puppies have to be descended from at least seven generations of selectively bred guide dogs to be selected for training, so the lack of guide dogs in Hong Kong means the city relies on dogs donated from other countries. The two groups that provide training and guide dog services are Hong Kong Guide Dogs Association and Hong Kong Seeing Eye Dog Service.
The two groups are trying to localise the breeding and training of guide dogs so more of the visually impaired can get guide dogs.
But trainer Edith Lee Yuen-yan explains this doesn’t work without more volunteer host families to care for the puppies.
Host families have to care for guide puppies for months, giving them socialisation training before they go on to professional training. They have to walk the puppies in as many different places as possible so that the puppies become familiar with different environments.
Raising a guide puppy is very different from keeping a pet, and it’s especially challenging in Hong King due to the many constraints on day-to-day training.
The public may know about guide dogs but they generally don’t understand the training process, and this causes problems for walkers and their puppies during socialisation training.
For one, the Disability Discrimination Ordinance only acknowledges the rights of visually impaired people and their guide dogs, but not of people with normal vision who are raising or training guide dogs for the blind. That means guide-dog trainers have to deal with different daily challenges without legal protection.
“Guide dogs are not allowed in public housing estates so we will not accept any host family applications living there,” Lee says.
The Housing Authority says guide-dogs-in-training can’t live in public housing because the tenancy agreements say tenants cannot keep any dogs on the premises without prior written consent. As of now, only the visually impaired or tenants who need a dog for mental support can get such approval.
Also, most of the visually impaired in Hong Kong take public transport, so a guide dog has to be familiar with different forms of public transport. Lee says that most bus drivers welcome guide dogs but this in fact violates the Public Bus Services Regulations. The Kowloon Motor Bus (KMB) says training guide dogs can only get on buses if accompanied by a visually impaired person. On the other hand, City Bus says that while it is illegal to bring a training guide dog onto a bus during service, the company agrees to arrange trial rides for guide dog puppies and their trainers on a non-service franchised bus at depots to experience on-board travelling.
David Leung, Commissioner for Rehabilitation of the Labour and Welfare Bureau, said that it is challenging for guide dog training to reach the magnitude of other countries like Japan or New Zealand, as Hong Kong is comparatively smaller and more densely populated. He said while the government recognises this discrepancy, it still has to take into consideration, the different interests of society’s stakeholders. He says the government is working to improve the environment for guide dog training in Hong Kong, but it is still unavoidable that some training have to compromise to certain regulations.
“If the government can allocate more resources to encourage the public not to reject us and let us utilize every opportunity to carry out socialised training, it will be very helpful for us as guide puppy raisers,” Mok Kei-yee a guide puppy raiser, says.
How much do we know about Hong Kong’s history and who is writing the narratives?
Editor: Kelly Wong
Reporters: Maggie Suen, Verena Tse, Doris Yu
In March, National People’s Congress delegate Rita Fan proposed to set up an education centre to get people interested in Chinese history and boost nationalism. She said the centre would exclude controversial topics such as information on the 1989 pro-democracy movement in Beijing and the Chinese Civil War.
On the same day, a Hong Kong publisher was accused of deleting passages deemed critical of the Chinese Communist Party in a reprint of a late Kuomintang general’s book about the Sino-Japanese war.
Just two recent examples of how different narratives of history can stir-up political and cultural debates. Sometimes, it can seem like our history is deliberately hidden. For instance, Hongkong Post’s decision to cover up colonial insignia on mailboxes, to “avoid confusion”, which caused an outcry. Critics saw it as an attempt by the government to erase Hong Kong’s colonial history.
Other times, time and commercial pressures seem to be the culprits.
Lei Yue Mun is known as a hotspot for seafood restaurants. Few know about its past as a mining village and hideaway for drug-users. Likewise, Sham Tseng is associated with roast goose, but the district used to be a manufacturing and production centre.
Kwong Chi-man, Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University, says the mainstream histories of Hong Kong revolve around the narrative of the city’s economic evolution and success. But this paints a limited picture of the city’s development.
In recent years, “decolonization” has become a popular term in the discussion of Hong Kong’s history. However, John Carroll, a history professor at the Hong Kong University says “localisation” is what Hongkongers are seeking when they explore the city’s history.
Hong Kong weighs universal pension plan options but critics say government’s mind already made up.
Editors: Mavis Wong, Tiff Chan
Reporters: Chester Chan, Chloe Kwan, Stanley Lam
In December 2015, the government started a six month consultation period on a pension scheme, outlining two approaches towards implementing the scheme, a means-tested “needs-based” approach and a universal pension for the elderly “regardless of whether they are rich or poor”.
Under the “regardless of rich or poor” approach, every pensioner would get HK$3,320 a month. While under the “those with financial needs” approach, a single elderly person with less than HK$80,000 of assets and a monthly income lower than HK$7,340 would receive HK$3,230 each month.
The administration says either approach would require tax hikes to cover the additional spending. It says that the standard salaries tax rate may rise by 8 per cent and profits tax by 4 per cent under the ‘regardless of rich or poor’ approach. The corresponding tax rate increases under the “those with financial need” approach would be 0.9 per cent and 0.4 per cent respectively.
Officials suggest it is the young who will be burdened with higher taxes to support their elders. But Li Chi-Pang, an undergraduate student at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, disagrees.
Li supports the so-called scholars’ proposal of Tripartite Contributions, proposed by academics, in which the government would inject HK$100 billion as seed money and abolish the current subsidy schemes for the elderly. Employers and employees would contribute 2.5 per cent of an employee’s salary to the scheme, which is half of the current contribution level to the mandatory provident fund. An extra 1.9 per cent of profit tax will be levied for large enterprises.
Prof. Raees Begum Baig, one of the contributors to the scholars’ proposal, is disappointed and frustrated towards the government’s attitude, She says she wishes the government could be open to more workable proposals.
The consultation ends on June 21st.
You can now make a living from playing video games professionally (now called esports) but Hong Kong hasn’t caught up with this growing industry
Editors: Teenie Ho, Kate Kim
Reporters: Avery Tsui, Ryan Li, Li Sunpin
Lee Ho-hei is a 15-year-old secondary school student, and over the weekends he spends an average of seven hours a day playing video games. He is not giving up his schoolwork, but his dream is to be a professional esports player.
Some consider online gaming to be nothing more than entertainment, but esports players see themselves more as athletes who make a living off their quick reactions and strategic thinking. Some pros train for up to seven hours a day.
The most well-known companies in Hong Kong are Hong Kong Esports and Cyber Games Arena. Every year, they send their pro-players to Taiwan or mainland China for training camps, which are intensive strategy-planning sessions with coaches .
Chillyz Kong, a 21-year-old Hong Kong pro-player, says top players in mainland China can earn up to 100,000 yuan per month. That comes from tournament prize money, advertisements and live-streaming. Being able to entertain an audience can lead to bigger profits.
Last year, the average monthly salary for pro-players worldwide was around HK$40,000 but it’s just HK$5,000 to 8,000 in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Macau. If a popular game has no local servers here, which is the case for the hugely popular online battle game League of Legends, Hong Kong players have to join servers in Taiwan or mainland China to compete online.
Former pro-player Leo Chan says playing professionally is one of his most cherished memories, but he says he felt pressured into giving that up to pursue a post-graduate degree. He says that he still hasn’t told his family about spending two months training in Taiwan three years ago, and he certainly doesn’t bring up his former esports career during internship interviews.
In Korea, the final game of the 2014 League of Legends World Championship filled a World Cup Stadium in Seoul, and it’s not unusual for competitions to draw such large crowds. In Hong Kong, it’s mostly concerts that draw so many people. That leads aspiring and current esports players in Hong Kong to wonder if society will accept them as true professionals.
Hong Kong’s net bars in decline after glory days of the early 2000’s
Editor: Esther Chan
Reporters: Howard Yang, Lynette Cheung, Minnie Wong
Michael Choi Siu-yan used to spend up to 18 hours a day in net bars. They were an important part of his life during his formative years. He is still a regular even now, albeit one who has itnessed the “ups and downs” of net bars.
Like Choi, Stanley Yip Chun-kit also spent many hours in net bars as a teenager, but unlike Choi he sees no reason to visit them anymore.
Yip says that with instant messaging software such as Skype, he can sit alone at home and play games with his friends as easily as if he were sitting next to them in a net bar. Still. Given the choice, he would prefer to play in a net bar because of the stronger interpersonal connections. “You can shout in a net bar, and you have the desire to perform well,” he says.
Net bars cemented friendships not just among customers but also between customers and the staff. Lily Chu Lai-man used to work in a net bar and says she found the relationship between the regulars and the staff to be like the ties between family members.
But none of these memories and sentiments can save an industry that faces declining patronage. With the prevalence of personal computers, tablets and smartphones, the need for net bars is diminishing.
The net bars that are still operating – be they independent or chains – are seeking ways to survive. Alan Law, the owner of an independent net bar, says slow progress in moves to license net bars has stifled investment. While Alex Yeung, who heads a chain, Msystem, says his net bars will become E-sports centres to attract people to watch competitions.
In April 2010, Periscope looked at Hong Kong’s “Green Awakening”. Now, six years on we explore how far Hong Kong has travelled down the road of environmental awareness and protection.
