Remember former lawmaker Elsie Tu’s steadfast commitment
The champion of the poor, who was laid to rest yesterday aged 102, always spoke her mind and never deviated from her fundamental stance
Elsie Tu understood what most pan-democrats and their even more uncompromising young activists do not: Hong Kong’s destiny lies with the mainland, not with the Anglo-American democracies.
Nor can Hong Kong exist on its own as an independent or autonomous city state, as some nativist scholars and their naive young followers are now aiming at.
Both propositions were perfectly clear and obvious to Tu, who was laid to rest yesterday aged 102. And, indeed, they would have been obvious to anyone who looked, with an unbiased pair of eyes, at a map showing the location and tiny size of Hong Kong against the vast hinterland.
In her old age, she freely spoke her lucid mind, writing in many publications, including the Post. And she never deviated from her fundamental stance. For this, she was roundly denounced by many pan-democrats, or her ideas were otherwise ignored as the politically incorrect thinking of a deteriorating mind.
But unlike many self-righteous activists and politicians, Tu had no ulterior motive other than the welfare of Hong Kong.
She was fighting for democracy and the rights of the local population when some of her later detractors were busy serving the colonial government and advancing their careers under it. Nary a word about democracy from those people then.
As the old saying goes, do not speak ill of the dead. This is why her old critics now praise Tu’s early work in fighting for social justice and welfare for the locals while downplaying her later conservative pro-China stance.
But her life and work, both early and later, were all of a piece. She championed democracy, but wisely advised Hong Kong against taking an anti-China stance. Back in the late 1960s, she was already fighting for there to be a few elected seats in the Legislative Council, but London ignored her.
As a lawmaker, she was castigated for voting against last governor Chris Patten’s unilateral democratic reform. It was obvious to her that without Beijing’s consent, his grandstanding plan would simply be rolled back after 1997, as indeed it was.
Tu was friendly to Beijing not because she had anything to gain from it, but because she believed that was the only workable path for Hong Kong to take.
