My Take | Hong Kong protest calls are becoming ever more bizarre

Occupy protesters started off winning massive public and international sympathy. But now, with no real policy alternatives or endgame in sight, their demands have become increasingly bizarre. These include trying to get everyone to resign.

Initially, they wanted Chief Executive Leung "The Wolf" Chun-ying's head. Fair enough, as the buck stops with him. Over the past month, I was told by two members of the Executive Council that protesters had asked more than half a dozen Exco members to quit, either because they were perceived as too pro-Beijing, not doing their job or to show they supported democracy. Not content with just the enemies resigning, the student leaders now call on fellow pan-democrats in the legislature to resign in order to trigger a "referendum".

The idea, according to Alex Chow Yong-kang, secretary general of the Hong Kong Federation of Students, is that a mass resignation by pan-democrat lawmakers would prompt a by-election, which in turn would serve as a platform for people to express their views on the constitutional reform package yet to be proposed by the government for the 2016 and 2017 elections.

Not to be outdone, Occupy co-founder Benny Tai Yiu-ting said Leung should dismiss the entire legislature if the voting reform framework handed down by Beijing failed to pass in Legco. Tai's idea, presumably, is that after all the lawmakers are dismissed, Leung would fall on his own sword. Tai and the student leaders have said repeatedly that Leung's resignation is one way to send Occupy protesters home.

I have never understood why resigning from Legco and getting elected again amounts to a referendum vote. The act itself proves nothing other than that you have enough voters willing to send you back to Legco repeatedly. Don't referendums usually involve well-defined questions to be voted on by the entire electorate? There is also the small matter that, according to a recent HKU survey, some pan-dem lawmakers have hit rock-bottom in their approval ratings in the past two decades so they might not be voted back.

Do people like Tai and Chow really want to empty our legislative and executive branches so no one is left to do the work? That would be beyond gridlock.