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. And the same is surely true of Mr Tung's rhetoric last Thursday. After all, 'one country, two systems' would be dead if the Hong Kong Police really started arresting people for disrupting peace and order on the mainland. The reality is his administration long ago realised that, much as it might wish otherwise, there is virtually no way to ban the Falun Gong in a city still governed by the rule of law. Government sources have admitted for more than a year that even the future Article 23 legislation would not outlaw the sect, since the constitution of its local offshoot does not contain any political goals. The only other legal avenue would be to try to revoke its registration under the Societies Ordinance, a possibility which has been much discussed in recent weeks. But any such step would risk being challenged in the courts as arbitrary, especially since no attempt has been made to enforce this law against any other body since the handover. So that may well explain why Mr Tung resorted to rhetoric rather than action last week in his effort to appease Beijing's concerns over the Falun Gong in Hong Kong. For the truth is that there is nothing much he can do in any case. Danny Gittings is the Post's Editorial Pages Editor ( gittings@scmp.com )
