“RAISE OUR SPIRITS”
Once an electoral reform advocacy group, the Civic Party was formed by four lawyers who were also lawmakers – Ronny Tong, Margaret Ng, Audrey Eu and Leong.
Aspiring to become a “governing party”, it recruited elites from different professions, such as civic engineer Albert Lai.
“It had then been a decade since Hong Kong’s handover, but Beijing had not realised its promise of universal suffrage for the city … that was the triggering point of the party’s formation,” Lai told AFP.
Hong Kong was handed over from Britain to China in 1997, with Beijing promising a wide degree of freedoms and an “ultimate aim” of having the city’s leader and lawmakers democratically elected.
But today, Hong Kong’s chief executive is still chosen by Beijing loyalists.
And, in 2004, Beijing created more hurdles for electoral reform, fuelling an already simmering row over Hong Kong’s “mini-constitution” – which governs the territory separately from China – and bringing hundreds of thousands out to protest.
“Hong Kong’s endurance has been tested to the limit,” Ng wrote in the party’s founding manifesto. “We must raise up our spirits again now.”
In 2010, the party collaborated with its more radical peer – the League of Social Democrats – to trigger a by-election with the resignation of five pro-democracy legislators.
The parties said they aimed to create a symbolic referendum, allowing voters to show their support for democratisation, a move Beijing condemned as “unconstitutional”.
Tong, a co-founder who defected from the party in 2015 to form his own group, said he was alarmed at the time by its “radicalisation”.
“It was an act of confrontation,” Tong, now a cabinet member, told a pro-government news outlet in June, “regretting” his part in creating the party.
Source: CNA
