Communist Party members and business elite 'support Occupy Central'

Supporters of Occupy Central range from Communist Party members to senior managers of regulatory bodies, says a hedge fund manager who has lined up some 70 players in the finance industry behind the pro-democracy movement.

Edward Chin Chi-kin said these “high-flyers and ordinary people” wanted an answer to one key question: “Will Hong Kong still be livable in 2047?”

In April, Chin’s group wrote an open letter to President Xi Jinping bemoaning political cronyism, an influx of suspect money and suppression of press freedom which they say threaten the economic health of the city. They called for Beijing to allow an open election in 2017 without screening of candidates.

“It is the influx of red capital which worries us,” Chin told the Post in April, referring to the cash flooding in from mainland enterprises.

“The style of living of the privileged Chinese class is unimaginable,” he said. “They can be spending tens of thousands of dollars in the Mandarin Oriental bar every night and you cannot know where the money comes from.”

Chin said group members, a lot of whom are “over 40”, fear their children will have to leave Hong Kong before the end of the city’s post-handover transition period, as some of them had done before the 1997 change of sovereignty.