HK bankers add to calls for democracy from Beijing

A group of Hong Kong finance industry professionals are pledging to join an Occupy-style movement to protest growing influence from Beijing that they say is undermining the Asian financial hub's economy.
The bankers, traders, stockbrokers and others who make up Hong Kong's financial-worker class are notoriously apolitical.
But the group led by hedge fund manager Edward Chin, which currently numbers about 70 people, added their voices to wider calls for full democracy in an open letter to China's president Xi Jinping published this week in several newspapers.
The group, worried that Hong Kong's high degree of autonomy is being eroded, urged China's Communist leaders to stop interfering in the city's administrative affairs. They also expressed fears about growing threats to the city's freedom of speech and the press, rule of law and strong anti-corruption culture.

"Hong Kong's existing political system has become the stumbling block to the city's long-term social, political and economic growth, and is the root cause of social division and disharmony in Hong Kong," said the letter.
The group has joined forces with political activists who plan to occupy the city's financial district to press their demands for genuine universal suffrage.

Since it ceased to be a British colony in 1997, Hong Kong's leader, known as the chief executive, has been chosen by an elite committee of mostly pro-Beijing tycoons while some lawmakers are elected by voters, with others picked by business groups.

Beijing has promised that the next crop of leaders will be chosen through universal suffrage starting in 2017. But it has stoked resentment by signaling that only candidates friendly to Beijing will be able to stand as chief executive.
Chin, 46, said he was indifferent to politics but decided to become more active when he adopted a baby boy three years ago and started worrying about the kind of city his son would inherit.
"We don't want this city to die," he said. "There has been so much red influence in the system already in Hong Kong," he said in reference to Communists.