Hong Kong optimism ebbing under China rule: poll

HONG KONG (Reuters) - Ten years after Hong Kong's return from British to Chinese rule, public optimism over its future under Chinese rule has dipped amid demands for direct elections, according to a survey released on Wednesday.

The survey by Hong Kong's Baptist University and the U.S.-based National Democratic Institute for International Affairs found 51 percent of those surveyed were optimistic about Hong Kong's future as a part of China in 2007, versus 60 percent in June 1997.

The figure had rebounded from a nadir in 2003 and 2004, when optimism dipped as low as 17 percent during a recession and when China's parliament ruled out direct elections in the city until at least 2012. The city's earnest but ineffectual pro-Beijing leader Tung Chee-hwa was in power at that time.

"Optimism and satisfaction with life and government performance have substantially recovered from very severe knocks," the survey report said.

"It's very clear when you look back through much of the data, that we had a serious systemic crisis in Hong Kong during the last 10 years," said Michael DeGolyer, a political scientist at Hong Kong's Baptist University who conducted the survey and who has charted Hong Kong attitudinal changes for more than a decade.

DeGolyer attributed the rise in optimism since then largely to current leader, Donald Tsang, who took over from Tung in 2005.

The survey also charted a noticeable rise in confidence toward local politics, while the proportion either supporting or strongly supporting direct elections for their leader, at 76 percent, has held fairly steady over the past four years.

"When you go through the data you realize there is a great deal of political sophistication among a lot of people in Hong Kong," DeGolyer told reporters. He said 86 percent of people had shown interest in televised debates during Hong Kong's first contested leadership election this March, won by Tsang.

"That was really a seminal event as far as people beginning to pay attention to the parties ... that had not happened before," he added.

There has not been much change in attitudes regarding Hong Kong identity and patriotism toward China, DeGolyer said.

"There's been no such shift in how people born in Hong Kong identify themselves."

Residents born in China had, however, become slightly more patriotic, he added. Between 1998 and 2007, the level of public indifference toward China's national day on October 1 decreased to 52 percent from 70 percent, the survey found.