Is Hong Kong's democracy torch still burning, or was it swept aside by the tidal wave of patriotism that hit us two weeks ago? How easy now is it to imagine the tens of thousands of patriotic people who lined the city's streets to cheer the Olympic torch turning out in similar strength to cheer democracy?
Patriotism and democracy are not, and should not, be mutually exclusive. But, in Hong Kong, we have the peculiar situation that if you support democracy you are somehow unpatriotic, and if you are patriotic, you have somehow spurned democracy. Why do we think we have coined terms like 'pro-Beijing' and 'pro-democracy' to show that the two are at odds with each other?
Hong Kong's democrats insist they, too, are patriots, and our patriots insist they have nothing against democracy. If all that were true, we would not have the situation we now have in which our fiercest defenders of democracy are banned from the mainland as traitors and our staunchest patriots do all they can to delay democracy.
Democrats think of Beijing loyalists as either shoeshiners or business fat cats who simply pretend to be patriots to win favours from mainland leaders. The Beijing loyalists stereotype the democrats as stooges of the west which wants to slow China's rise as a superpower. In many ways, this stereotyping has, over the years, seeped into the public mindset.
But are we now seeing a mindset change? Is the torch of Hong Kong democracy - which for so long has acted like a beacon for those who want to lock in our freedoms - being sidelined by the new torch of patriotism?
It is not a stretch to say that the democracy flame - well-fuelled in the past by the people's passion - has been reduced to a flicker at best in recent years, as Hongkongers slowly shed the deep mistrust they once had of Beijing. The democracy torch-bearers who fought so hard and sacrificed so much for the rights of the people are no longer regarded as the voice of the people. Their once powerful aura has eroded to the point that they are now just one of many competing voices.
The people still despise the self-serving shoeshiners and fat cats, and they have not abandoned democracy as an eventual goal, but the dynamics have changed - at first by the passage of time but recently hastened by the idiotic spectacle of the west overplaying its hand by using the Beijing Olympics to shame China's human rights behaviour.
