IT IS AN OLD trick to use harsh rhetoric as a substitute for action - and that is what Tung Chee-hwa seems to have been doing with his attack on the Falun Gong last week.
His use of such Beijing propagandist phrases as 'evil cult' may have sounded totally out of place in free-wheeling Hong Kong, but then that is all too often the case when it comes to Mr Tung's utterances. And if spouting such nonsense is the price that needs to be paid in order to divert attention and defuse the pressure for any concrete steps to curtail the Falun Gong's freedom to practise and protest in Hong Kong, then it is one well worth paying.
Nor should it be forgotten that Mr Tung also has a constitutional role in China's hierarchy, by virtue of his position as SAR Chief Executive. Unlike Secretary for Security Regina Ip Lau Suk-yee, who had no business intensifying Beijing's suspicions with her ridiculously exaggerated account of the cult's activities in Hong Kong, Mr Tung has no choice but to pay at least lip service to the mainland leadership's biggest political campaign in many years.
What counts far more is action - and, on that score, Mr Tung's question-and-answer session with legislators last Thursday was refreshingly devoid of any substance. It was not just his refusal to speed up enactment of the Article 23 anti-subversion legislation, as Executive Councillor Nellie Fong Wong Kut-man and other troublemakers have been suggesting. Nor did he make any move to review - let alone revoke - the registration of the Hong Kong branch of the Falun Gong, despite intense pressure from local leftists for this.
Even some of the seemingly more worrying parts of his rhetoric, such as his warning that the cult's local followers will not be allowed to do anything that affects 'public peace and order on the mainland' is no more than Mr Tung has said many times before.
As far back as December 1999, he was already warning those attending a Falun Gong conference in Hong Kong that they 'must not act in any manner . . . against the interests of China'. But no attempt was ever made to enforce this earlier warning, with government lawyers admitting it was simply a policy statement with no legal effect.