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Lau Nai-Keung

Three years after the Manila hostage tragedy, the issue resurfaced when Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying met Philippine President Benigno Aquino at the Apec Summit in Bali. Survivors of the crisis and relatives of the deceased have demanded compensation and an apology from Aquino.

Along with the mandatory "one man, one vote", our dissidents have many prescriptions for the good governance of Hong Kong and the entire country. But with a general paucity of ideas, they invariably fall into the "US is best" category.

When reporters sought my reaction to British foreign office minister Hugo Swire's recent article on constitutional development in Hong Kong, I said, "Don't issue blank cheques"

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Let us for a moment assume there is no "pivot", that the US would sincerely welcome China as the dominant power in the world, and its re-entry into Asia is for the good of all parties concerned. Even all that would still not explain the behaviour of Clifford Hart.

Following the recent turn of the tide in public opinion against the pan-democrats, many dissident politicians have suddenly became dovish. Even the Civic Party, which previously blasted the Democratic Party for striking a secret deal with Beijing in 2010 that paved the way for the implementation of universal suffrage in 2017, has now publicly expressed its wish to meet central government officials in private. Can we trust these fickle politicians?

The dissidents made a big mistake by staging a mass confrontation on August 4. They stormed the stage of a pro-police rally organised in the wake of a political row sparked by a video. The video, which went viral, showed a schoolteacher hurling verbal abuse at police officers at an earlier protest.

Last week, the Facebook page of the pressure group Voice of Loving Hong Kong was suddenly deleted. This was the fourth similar incident in recent weeks, after the shutdown of the pages of three other groups, including Caring Hong Kong Power. The Voice of Loving Hong Kong suspected foul play and reported it to the police as a type of cyber-bullying.

I must say that it's really something for 66,000 people to brave the rain to walk all the way from Causeway Bay to Central. It is a sign of a lack of confidence that the organisers felt they had to grossly inflate the figure to 430,000. Or perhaps they felt a need to prove themselves to someone not present at the scene.

On March 26, Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying was finally pressured to "confess" to phoning Beijing ahead of announcing the new stamp duty for non-local homebuyers. "Notifying" Wang Guangya, director of the State Council's Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, was an act of "internal diplomacy", according to Leung, and he denied seeking approval from Beijing on this matter.

Unlike Occupy Wall Street - a "leaderless resistance movement" of the 99 per cent against the "greed and corruption of the one per cent", as it proclaims on its website - Occupy Central is more a campaign than a movement. It is not concerned with social and economic inequality, but with one-man-one-vote elections.

Anyone who dares to express an opinion that deviates from the anti-China, anti-government "intrinsic truth" will see their views silenced or twisted. Those very few whose views our dissidents cannot completely banish become targets of a lynch-mob mentality.