Opinion: why Hong Kong needs real champions to fly the flag of democracy
Chief executive-elect Carrie Lam should focus her energy on confronting profiteering property moguls, Michael Chugani writes
What was Occupy if not political? A street carnival? And what does timing have to do with it? There’s never good timing to charge fakes. If it was even a month after the election, they still would have said the prosecutions destroyed the atmosphere for Lam to build relations with the opposition. If they are charged after she takes office, they will say she is CY Leung 2.0.
If you do the crime, you do the time. If you call your crime civil disobedience, then plead guilty and accept the consequences. Maybe these fakes believe the law does not apply to those who paralyse streets and clash with police for 79 days. Yet they have the gall to say Hong Kong’s rule of law is eroding because a handful of police officers abused their power after being put through hell by Occupy protesters.
We have plenty enough democracy as it is. Where else would the police make arrests by appointment, as happened with the nine Occupy protesters on Monday? You can even pour smelly liquid on police, get a light five weeks in jail, and still demand special arrangements to vote for a chief executive. If that’s not democracy, what is?
We need to temper democracy with a dose of dictatorship. The last time I said that, I was put through a meat-grinder. But I’m not one to be silenced. Our years of fighting for so-called true democracy got us nowhere, but extracted a heavy price. We are a bitterly divided city in decline.
Yesterday I read a one-bedroom flat, barely 400 sq ft, is selling for more than HK$10 million. That sickens me. I want our new chief executive to spend her energy on confronting profiteering local and mainland property tycoons, not on true democracy. I want well-paying jobs for the young, care for the elderly, fair sharing of our wealth and an end to shameful subdivided flats.
Democracy can wait until the fakes are replaced with real champions who know how to go about achieving it, minus the whining.
