Thursday, January 13, 2011

A Sky Burial

By Chip Tsao | published Jan 13, 2011

It was like a Tibetan sky burial. In these rituals, the dead body is placed on a mountaintop and ripped open, exposing the heart and organs to circling birds of prey. A swarm of hungry vultures then flutters down to share the banquet. The body is soon reduced to a pile of broken bones. It’s the most ecologically friendly form of funerary.

There is a remote resemblance between the death of veteran democrat Szeto Wah and this Tibetan ritual. Almost unanimously glowing eulogies have suddenly been pouring forth on the former chairman of the anti-China alliance, who died of lung cancer last week, and was just about the lone, brave voice calling persistently for an end to communist dictatorship and an open trial of the June 4 massacre butchers.

Szeto Wah, a former primary school headmaster, had been branded a traitor for more than 20 years. He had been taunted with accusations of treachery from his political enemies, and has been the target of abusive name-calling by the pro-China press at a scale similar to what a black slave would have heard from the whites around him in Mississippi during the 19th century.

Why Szeto was lauded officially as a “stern patriot” and a “life-long lover of China and Hong Kong” immediately after his death by chief executive Donald Tsang remains a mystery. Rumors have it that Tsang is privately indebted to the old man for his support for the 2010 political reform bill, without whose influence Tsang would have been left looking fatally bad in the eyes of Beijing. Some suggested that they had been clandestine political allies, since Szeto was a devout Christian and Tsang is Catholic. And thus the conductor changed the emotional tone of the orchestra he leads. The pro-China musicians looked confused at first, then started playing a new toadying requiem to the man they deeply hated while he was alive. It’s not quite the same thing as Clement Atlee saying a few nice things about Winston Churchill at his funeral. For those who remember, that scene would have been as grotesque as Adolf Hitler transforming into Mahatma Gandhi overnight.

Because the beloved founder and former chairman of the Democratic Party once again rallied Hong Kong people with his death as he always had during the yearly June 4 memorial vigil, any politician will win some dividends by simply following the mourning mainstream, taking advantage of the forgetful Hong Kong masses. Since the veteran democratic leader never revealed a long list of his former political predators’ names, whose mourning he would dismiss and firmly decline as a tasteless show of hypocrisy, he instead offered his name as a buffet open to everybody for political gain, like a body exposed to the vultures of Tibet.

And the birds came flapping down for their food, as natural as an Oriental shopping crowd noisily grabbing at a limited number of LV handbags in Paris. For China-watchers, it’s just too familiar a scene.

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