Following the Legco election in 2004, The Economist, in an article titled “Suffrage on Sufferance,” had this to say about one of our lawmaker-elects:
“The unexpected election of Leung Kwok-hung, better known as ‘Long Hair’ – whose other main claims to fame are his Che Guevara T-shirts and rants against the chief executive... – suggests that many voters treated both the election and the toothless Legco as a joke.”
The British newspaper opined that Mr. Leung, with his fiery rhetoric and raggedy hairdo, is nothing more than an attention-grabbing troublemaker, and that by voting a clown into the Legco Hong Kong citizens must not have taken the election seriously.
The article led me to two thoughts.
First, whoever wrote it didn’t have a very good grasp of our political reality. Hong Kong has one of the most undemocratic legislative systems in the civilised world. Among the many anomalies, there is a political invention called the “functional constituencies” who take up half of the Legco’s 70 seats. Under the current rules, any government-proposed bill requires a simple majority from the 70 seats voting together. Bills introduced by individual lawmakers, on the other hand, are subject to the logic-defying “separate vote count” procedure and must secure a majority of votes from both the functional seats and the non-functional seats voting separately. Since none of the functional constituencies is democratically elected (they are picked by a small circle of voters within a trade or interest group) and nearly all of them are pro-establishment businessmen, you can see how the rules are custom-made to block any proposal made by the opposition, such as a motion to investigate C.Y. Leung’s corruption allegations.
What does this have to do with Long Hair? Pretty much everything. Our dysfunctional political system means that being a “moderate” Pan-democrat such as a member of the Civic Party or the Democrats is about as useful as a knife without a blade. Wagging their fingers at the government on the Legco floor may make these goody-two-shoes politicians look like people’s heroes on the evening news, but it does nothing to change the status quo. In other words, if the poker game is rigged, the player will only keep losing if he continues to play by the rules, no matter how hard he racks his brain.