Thursday, June 10, 2010

Where the White T-Shirts Go Wrong

By Chip Tsao | published Jun 10, 2010

Chief executive Donald Tsang and his senior officials’ road show last week promoting the government’s democratic reform package was drowned out by boos, abuse, and accusations of selling out Hong Kong. It was quite the farcical scene as the aristocratic chief secretary Henry Tang, a wine collector and billionaire, had his “Act Now” T-shirt yanked on by an angry demonstrator in a scuffle at a shopping mall, while the chief executive and other officials were given the thumbs-down by LSD supporters.

Despite this good but desperate effort to look like global leaders such as David Cameron or Barack Obama, Tsang and his entourage are simply not made of the same stuff as Western politicians. By heading out into the public surrounded by a solid fortress of bodyguards and armed police, they assumed the “people” they were trying to “communicate” with were a mob and a potentially violent threat. This distrustful and hostile gesture would become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The show was badly handled as Tsang got his focus wrong.

All the government needs is three extra votes in the legislature to have an overall majority necessary to pass the reform proposal. The battlefield is thus inside the four walls of the Legislative Council building in Central, not in the shopping malls of Tseung Kwan O or Kowloon Tong. The chief executive doesn’t need to hand out flyers to passersby as would be necessary in a campaign for either a general election or a referendum. Compared with president Obama’s pushing of the national health care bill through Congress, winning a measly three votes out of 60 in Hong Kong is an easy job. You identify possible fence-sitters in the pan-democratic camp—legislator Kam Nai-wai for example. You invite him for tea at Government House, and tell him he has been deserted by his party long ago when the democracts called for a “public hearing” and even asked for his resignation over his alleged sexual harassment scandal last year. ”With friends like these, you won’t be re-elected anyway,” Sir Donald could explain while dishing out a five-year company director contract with an annual HK$5 million salary from, say, Sun Hung Kai, or another company that acts as a loyal proxy for the government.

Add a PLA commander lounging quietly on a sofa in the back of the room, pretending to read the People’s Daily with a Pekingnese poodle asleep on his lap and his gun sitting beside a cup of hot tea, and the message becomes crystal clear. With a behind-the-door stage show like this, Tsang would get his three votes as easy as making a pot of oolong tea. This is what parliamentary democracy, apart from all the spectacle the Chinese are so far familiar with, is all about.

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