Leung should turn crisis into opportunity
Stephen Vines says boldness is the best answer to his legions of critics
The last time I looked, water was still flowing downwards in Hong Kong, a sure indication that big things work here much the same as they do in the rest of the world. This is why I am truly amazed that Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying thinks life can only get better now that the national education issue has sort of been resolved.
He is not alone; newspaper columnists and a small bevy of other commentators, who should know better, have declared that the time has come to move on and leave all this unpleasant history behind.
Well, it's not going to happen because, unless the entire history of how government and politics works is to be rewritten, Leung cannot possibly carry on as though nothing has happened. If he does, he is in for a nasty shock.
Few political leaders have suffered Leung's abysmal debut in office, quickly dispensing with a goodwill honeymoon and moving swiftly on to confounding problems that could have been solved, or at least tackled, with greater aplomb.
The stench of failure does not take long to attach itself to a politician who seems effortlessly able to attract mass mobilisations against his policies, who believes that assurances that all is well are substitutes for things actually going well and then starts, fairly or otherwise, to blame his predecessors for the mess he is now in.
Leung is in a deep hole; even the most shameless of the usual coterie of government supporters have grown restive and are thinking of ways of distancing themselves from him. Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai, now busying herself on various mainland committees, is a prominent member of this group and has already indicated her desire to break free of the current administration. This is important because she has an uncanny sense of the way the wind is blowing.
Rahm Emanuel, who served as US President Barack Obama's right-hand man in the White House, famously said "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste", adding that this "is an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before".