Can somebody with more profound knowledge please tell me what Anson Chan Fang On-sang is up to? So, she never dreamed of running for the chief executive post, and everybody misunderstood her. So, she would like to visit Beijing if invited - although in June she denounced top officials for impeding Hong Kong's move to universal suffrage. All of a sudden, on September 26, she began pinching the chief executive's political slogan of 'strong governance' - although she called it 'good governance' instead. She criticised his plan to appoint more accountable officials as hurting civil servants. Then, last Saturday, she made another U-turn. She admitted that she had indeed considered running in the election, but decided against it when she realised she couldn't influence the result. She continued to criticise the political appointment system, but conceded that 'strong governance' and 'good governance' were basically the same. Politics is perhaps the cruellest and most competitive game in the world. Not long ago, Mrs Chan was hailed by the dissidents of the democratic camp as the goddess of democracy. But when it came to supporting her candidacy for chief executive, few expressed any enthusiasm. She then spent almost all of August in London, where officials refused to see her. As the former chief secretary, Mrs Chan's time has long passed, and she seems to be the last one to realise it. Her core group on Hong Kong political reform was universally regarded as an anticlimax. Many flatly rejected her invitation to participate, and after several months' effort, she managed to assemble only a group of four has-beens like herself, and a young man nobody has heard of. She may still be loved by reporters clamouring for the most trivial of happenings, but she will never gain any importance in the political arena. Her utterances will never be respected. She would be much better off going back to her retirement and to her grandchildren. She left it late to announce that she wouldn't contest the election, and now the dissidents are in a shambles. The Democratic Party is too busy putting its own house in order to put forward any candidate. Finally, the Civic Party put forward the lacklustre Alan Leong Kah-kit, its youngest barrister, as its candidate this week. Meanwhile, the campaign to win seats in the Election Committee will soon draw to a close. The committee will be formed on December 10, and the chief executive election will take place on March 25. Without a credible candidate, the chance of the dissidents getting the required 100 nominations to field a candidate is becoming slim. Some radical factions of the dissident camp, notably The Frontier, quickly made the face-saving move of declaring they would boycott this 'small-circle', undemocratic election. While that damage-control exercise is understandable, it will further weaken the solidarity of the dissidents on the issue, and further reduce the probability of their getting the 100 nominations. If they fail to do so, the dissidents will be limited to making feeble noises from the margins of the election. In that case, they will have only themselves and Mrs Chan to blame. It is only logical that somebody should run against Donald Tsang Yam-kuen, so that our chief executive is not elected uncontested three times in a row. Nobody, not even Mr Tsang himself, wants a one-horse race. In the past two elections, the sole candidate produced no platform, there was no debate and members of the Election Committee had nothing to do. This time, if there are no competitors, the committee members will be asked to do nothing more than cast a vote of confidence in the only candidate - most likely Mr Tsang. That will be boring, to say the least, for them and the rest of us. So we all want the dissidents to shape up and give this a really good try. I would be happy to see Mr Tsang win, after a contest. I guess he would like that too, as it would be more conducive to strong governance - and to keeping up appearances. Lau Nai-keung is a Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference delegate
