The issue that won't go away
The absence of such issues as Article 23 legislation, Sars, negative equity and rising unemployment evidently contributed to a sharp decline in the turnout for the July 1 protest demonstration. But the fact that 21,000 people did take part in the march shows that universal suffrage is an issue that is not going to go away.
The July 1 protest march is turning into an annual event. And, quite likely, the celebratory parade, too, will be held every year on July 1. The attendance at these two events will be one good barometer of public sentiments.
It is good that the government did not simply cite the diminished size of the protest but, instead, said that the calls of the protesters would be treated in a pragmatic, sincere and objective manner. Chief Executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen's emphasis on listening to the people is also to be welcomed.
Mr Tsang is putting considerable emphasis on opinion surveys. He has repeatedly cited a poll commissioned by the Central Policy Unit (CPU) in April to justify his administration's assigning a low priority to democratisation. Opinion surveys are useful indicators but, in Hong Kong, history shows that government-commissioned surveys cannot always be trusted. The most infamous case was in 1987, when the administration of then-governor Sir David Wilson went to great lengths to try to show that the public was no longer interested in holding direct elections to Legco in 1988.
There was no CPU at the time. Instead, the government created the Survey Office, headed by senior official Adolf Hsu Hsung. That office commissioned an opinion survey whose results were used by the government to show that the public - despite having clearly indicated in 1984 that it wanted direct elections to begin in 1988 - had changed its mind.
Similarly, the Tsang administration is suggesting that the public, despite overwhelming support for universal suffrage in 2003 and last year, no longer has much interest in seeing this come about any time soon.
Mr Tsang says the results of April's opinion survey will guide the policies and actions of the administration. If that was the intention, then surely Mr Tsang, who was acting chief executive when the survey was commissioned, should have made a public announcement at the time. Instead, he chose to keep quiet until the survey results proved favourable to his particular cause - non-democratisation.
Now that he is making such a big thing of this survey, it is incumbent on him to make everything about the survey as open and transparent as possible. It is not good enough just to say that universal suffrage is less important to people than the setting up of a central slaughterhouse for chickens. Mr Tsang must come clean and disclose who conducted the survey, what the terms of reference were, the exact wording of the questions and the methodology.
Without disclosing this information, Mr Tsang is asking everyone simply to trust him. He may, indeed, be a trustworthy fellow. But as chief executive he cannot ask the public to take him on faith - he must show the public how the government ascertained public opinion and how policy is being formulated. Otherwise, one may well conclude that there is little to differentiate the government's April survey from that of October 1987.
Former governor Chris Patten described that earlier poll as a 'pretty peculiar business', which involved such 'spectacularly imaginative ways' of seeking and interpreting opinion that a detached observer might well judge the exercise to have been bogus.
Frank Ching is a Hong Kong-based writer and commentator
