Driving wedges in Hong Kong fails to move Beijing
It's highly ironic that student activists, pan-democrats and their most hated business and ruling elites have all tried to isolate Leung Chun-ying and drive a wedge between the chief executive and Beijing.
Politics makes strange bedfellows. So it's highly ironic that student activists, pan-democrats and their most hated business and ruling elites have all tried to isolate Leung Chun-ying and drive a wedge between the chief executive and Beijing.
On Friday, the central government gave the same reply to pro-democracy activists as it did to our leading capitalists more than a year ago: support Leung, you support us. Oppose Leung, you oppose us.
At a closed-door meeting in Shenzhen, National People's Congress vice-chairman Chen Changzhi reportedly carried that message to a group of Hong Kong deputies to the national legislature.
Cheng Yiu-tong, arguably the city's most prominent Beijing loyalist who was at the meeting, described the statement by Chen as a "rare comparison". Really?
It was a reply to the student activists. The leaders of the Federation of Students and Scholarism, goaded on by pan-democrats, had tried to argue that the government's first report on the state of Hong Kong public opinion on democratic reform deliberately misrepresented the city and misled Beijing. As a result, Beijing responded with its restrictive but misguided August 31 reform guidelines. If only Beijing could listen to the "real" public opinion of Hong Kong as represented by Scholarism and the federation and restart the whole five-step reform process!
That was an amateurish and transparent ploy aimed at driving a wedge, as was the students' claim that those who demand Leung's head don't necessarily oppose the central government, never mind that they themselves have made it clear that they oppose the ideology of the central government.
As for Cheng's claim that Chen's "comparison" was rare, well, Beijing has done it before. The city's ruling and property elites were furious that their golden boy Henry Tang Ying-yen lost the last chief executive selection, and had opposed Leung and badmouthed him in Beijing for more than a year until the mainland honchos told them in no uncertain terms to shut up.
It may well be that Beijing is not so enamoured of Leung. But like it or not, the central government's prestige has now been invested in Leung completing his term and finishing the political reform task.
