The southern Chinese province of Guangdong, or Canton, is the country's most populous province, surpassing Sichuan in 2005; with a population similar to those of Russia and the Philippines, it is also the largest subdivision in the world outside of India, and has a GDP comparable with California, in no small part due to its close proximity to the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macau, which attracts sizeable Western financial investment. Politically, it has long been the biggest stronghold of the Kuomintang, never voting for another party for President and with fewer than a quarter of its 71 National Congress districts generally seeing competitive races, most of them being in Progressive-leaning poor areas of the eastern part of the province and inner city Shenzhen. At the provincial government level, however, the Kuomintang's political dominance has been slowly ebbed away in recent decades, something which culminated in the 2019 election result.
When provincial devolution was first bought to Guangdong in 1991, the local Kuomintang (one of the most insular and corrupt in the nation) created the Provincial Assembly as a chamber with the 123 counties and county-equivalents each electing one member by FPTP. This was despite the sizeable disparities in population between these counties, ranging from the island of Nan'ao on the eastern coast with just 60,000 people to over 4 million in the Bao'an district of Shenzhen. However, in every election from 1991 to 2007, the Kuomintang retained a majority (albeit narrowly in the 1999 election, held during a slump in Hong Kong and by extension Guangdong's economy thanks to the lingering effect of the Asian financial crisis); it was not until the 2007 election, held as the Great Recession was severely affecting China, that they were finally forced out of government.
The force to replace them was a ragtag grand coalition between the all the other parties- the Progressives, Economic Liberals, Loyalists, Communists and the lone Green PAM (Provincial Assembly Member)- and four of the five Independents elected that year. Due to the narrowness of their majority, the effort to create an impartial committee to redraw the FPTP seats into equal-sized districts did not pass, but a compromise measure that created additional PR seats, with members assigned to each constituency (based on the prefectures) at a rate of about one per 700,000, was approved, and with the help of that measure, the Kuomintang's resurgence in 2011 was significantly less than expected, winning 125 of the 229 seats compared to the 59 out of 123 they had won in 2009.
While they considerably bolstered their majority thanks to President Wang's coattails in the 2015 provincial election, by 2019 the tide in Guangdong was shifting considerably. The Wang administration had started duelling with the Governor of Hong Kong, Wu Chi-lai, for his social liberalism and allegations that China was seeking to issue tariffs on investors into Hong Kong; this has not been well-received by Guangdong residents who rely on their links to the city to shore up their own province's economy. The Progressives, who have more in common ideologically with Wu, asserted that they would not countenance allowing tariffs on investors in Hong Kong, but instead promote better trade links and focus their attacks on the 'imperialist' US. The Kuomintang's negative campaign in response to this was untactful to say the least; the use of the English slogan 'Guangdong over Hong Kong' was especially badly recieved and seen as confusing in motivation. To make matters worse, President Wang was caught on audio saying 'it's Guangdong, we couldn't lose it if we tried' when an aide expressed concerns about the provincial elections.
Despite this, the non-Kuomintang parties were not so united in their line as in 2009; the Economic Liberals criticized the move due to their steadfast commitment to free trade, the Communists pushed for a similar anti-US line to the Progressives but with more extreme spending commitments, and the Loyalists simply took a contrarian stance and argued for tariffs on Hong Kong. This was not so important as it had been due to the PR seats, though, and ultimately the Progressives pulled ahead of the Kuomintang for the first time ever in the polls towards the end.
What had not been foreseen was the scale of the Progressive victory. Not only did the Kuomintang take a hammering in the PR districts, falling to fourth in the popular vote in Shenzhen on the Hong Kong border and ultimately winning just over half as many seats as the Progressives, they couldn't even win more FPTP districts, with 55 electing Progressives to 54 Kuomintang. They were left with just 84 seats, and even if the Economic Liberals had had enough seats to ally with them, the party's leader literally laughed when asked by a reporter if his party would support another provincial Kuomintang government. Instead, the government formed was an alliance between the Progressives, Communists and Greens, the first unequivocally left-of-centre government in Guangdong history.
Whether this is a sign of a new chapter in Guangdong's history or simply a fluke has yet to be seen, but with a comfortable majority in favour of electoral reform at last, the FPTP districts will almost certainly not use the same boundaries or number as Guangdong's counties come the next election.