The party apparatchiks in Beijing must be looking at the “election” for Hong Kong’s next chief executive with horror. The exercise to choose the de facto mayor of the territory is meant to be rigged. Voting in a city of 7m people is restricted to an election committee of 1,200 that is dominated by pro-Beijing types. They will elect whoever China wants.

But next month’s election is not going to plan. Hong Kong is proving a hothouse of democracy, whatever the formal arrangements. That is largely thanks to its free press, which has scrutinised candidates with a ferocity that must have the mainland’s Communist party in a cold sweat.

Chief casualty of media ardour has been Henry Tang, a top bureaucrat and Beijing’s presumed choice for the job. The tycoons who run Hong Kong see him as a safe pair of hands. The son of one of Hong Kong’s richest men, he won’t be swayed by populist demands in a city riven by a sharp income divide. But to Hong Kong’s press, Tang is a bloodless bureaucrat, more interested in fine wine and real estate than in the social problems afflicting the territory.