China says referendum over chief executive election illegal

China said a ''referendum'' on how Hong Kong's chief executive was elected was not constitutional and would be considered illegal and invalid, according to a report by the Xinhua News Agency Thursday.

The Hong Kong government was considering proposals on how to elect its top official in 2017, with China saying candidates would need to be vetted by a committee.

The informal referendum, conducted through an online poll 20 June to 29 June, is being organised by a group of activists under the banner of Occupy Central, which had vowed street protests if electoral reforms failed to meet their demands.

The voting website, which opened yesterday, came down with ''severe'' distributed denial-of-service attacks, which saw hackers flood systems with information to shut them down, according to the poll organisers, in a statement dated 19 June.

Over 265,000 votes had been submitted as of 7 pm yesterday, the website showed.

The election procedure was not in line with Hong Kong's constitutional Basic Law, according to Xinhua, which cited the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of the State Council. The public nomination of candidates ran counter to the Basic Law, according to Xinhua.

Hong Kong was granted its own legal system and autonomy in most matters for 50 years under a ''one country, two systems'' policy following the UK returning the territory to China in 1997.

Meanwhile, Next Media Ltd, publisher of Apple Daily said in a press release, "A massive cyber attack on the websites of pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily originated from a heavy concentration of computers and ISPs located in China, internal and vendor records show.

At its peak, the distributed denial-of-service attack launched on 18 June flooded Apple Daily in Taiwan with more than 10 billion bogus DNS requests in a 24-hour period. Web logs from a separate, direct attack on Apple Daily servers show much of the traffic originated from IP addresses in China, though some traffic came from Russia and the United States.

In a typical DDOS attack, hackers use infected "zombie" computers under their control to launch an assault. IP addresses can be traced back to these zombie computers, although not the originator of the attack.

The cyber attacks came as the people of Hong Kong prepared to launch a referendum on how to negotiate Hong Kong's democratic future with China.

Apple Daily and Next Media Group believe that all people should be able to participate in free elections and have openly supported the referendum. The Chinese government has denounced the referendum as illegal.

The Apple Daily website in Hong Kong has returned to 90 per cent service levels, while the Apple Daily website in Taiwan remains hampered by the ongoing attacks.