It is always to be regretted that any author of a column which by appearances represents an attempt at conveying informed opinion (Danny Gittings, Inside Track, Sunday Morning Post, December 7) should resort to picking and choosing among fact and law to promote a partisan viewpoint.
The restoration of Hong Kong to the sovereignty of China was never intended to be an excuse for a swing in the pendulum of the thankfully long-defunct (and outlawed) racial politics of the colonial era to some opposite anti-foreigner equivalent in the post-colonial era.
The words of a spokesman for the Association of Expatriate Civil Servants (AECS) on RTHK, selectively quoted by Mr Gittings ('the language of the Hong Kong Government is English'), of course do not fully reflect the Basic Law.
But that is no excuse for Mr Gittings to ignore the context of the other words used by the AECS spokesman to the effect that Chinese language proficiency was not objectively required for the performance of his job.
This has nothing to do with pretending, in Mr Gittings' words, 'that English still enjoys a superior status' or 'trying to pretend that the handover never happened'.
As Mr Gittings may know, Chinese and English were given equal status as official languages of Hong Kong under the Official Languages Ordinance well before the handover.
Since the handover, that equal status is enshrined in Article 9 of the Basic Law. Nor do Mr Gittings' words 'where necessary' (or anything like them), qualify Article 9's provision that 'English may also be used'.
