By MICHAEL FORSYTHE, CHRIS BUCKLEY and ALAN WONGJUNE 20, 2014
Members of the group Occupy Central with Love and Peace, which organized an unofficial referendum in Hong Kong, before voting began on Friday. Credit Vincent Yu/Associated Press
HONG KONG — More than 350,000 residents of Hong Kong did something on Friday that no one in mainland China can do: They participated in a free vote over their political future. The Chinese government promptly responded by denouncing the entire exercise in bottom-up democracy as “illegal and invalid.”
The results are nonbinding because the poll is not official: It is a referendum held by a civic group on how the 7.2 million people in Hong Kong, a former British colony, will elect their head of government. The voting on Friday was through computers and mobile phones, with organizers saying they would have been pleased if 100,000 people had cast ballots over the entire 10-day voting period, which ends June 29.
Leung Chun-ying, the Beijing-approved chief executive, said on Friday that none of the three proposals on the ballot, organized by the group Occupy Central with Love and Peace, complied with Hong Kong’s Basic Law, the rules that have governed the territory since China reclaimed sovereignty in 1997. Those rules give its people civil liberties like freedom of speech and freedom of assembly, rights that are routinely denied in the rest of China.
Leung Chun-ying Credit Dale De La Rey/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
The referendum’s organizers have vowed to disrupt the city’s central business district later this year with a sit-in protest, called Occupy Central, drawing on civil disobedience principles — Henry David Thoreau is often invoked — should the central government in Beijing and Hong Kong’s administration fail to come up with a plan for universal suffrage, promised by 2017, that meets international standards for free and fair elections. Mr. Leung, who took office in 2012, was chosen by a group of fewer than 1,200 Hong Kong residents.
From:http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/21/world/asia/in-hong-kong-an-unofficial-election-draws-beijings-ire.html?smid=tw-share&_r=1