Читать книгу Rebel City - South China Morning Post Team - Страница 33

Gary Cheung and Kimmy Chung

The pro-Beijing camp, always supportive of the government, paid a price for backing the extradition bill.

The pro-establishment Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions (FTU) was in an upbeat mood in early 2019 as its leaders assessed its prospects for the district council elections due near the end of the year. “We set the goal of ensuring the re-election of our 29 incumbent district councilors and winning at least another five seats,” FTU president Stanley Ng Chau-pei recalled in January 2020.

There were many reasons for that optimism, not least the labor and political group’s ample resources, its 420,000 members and strong grassroots network. “Under normal circumstances, the pro-establishment camp usually has an advantage in district council elections which are dominated by bread-and-butter issues,” Ng said. All 18 councils were dominated by the camp, and at the start of 2019, the opposition pandemocrats were in disarray and still smarting from back-to-back defeats in two Legislative Council by-elections the previous year.