The new Legislative Council was sworn in last Wednesday and the first act of the 60 lawmakers was to elect their president. To no one's surprise, Tsang Yok-sing, former chairman of the Democratic Alliance for Betterment of Hong Kong, triumphed over Fred Li Wah-ming, of the Democratic Party.
Lawmakers Albert Chan Wai-yip and Leung Kwok-hung, both of the League of Social Democrats, again pressed Mr Tsang to disclose whether he was a member of the Communist Party, but they were ruled out of order and, of course, Mr Tsang again refused to answer.
But he has made it clear that party membership will be irrelevant to his new duties. 'The Communist Party's platform and the duties of Legco president are two separate and unrelated issues,' he said.
The Communist Party, of course, has been operating covertly in Hong Kong since before the proclamation of the People's Republic of China in 1949. A good case can be made that, with the establishment of a special administrative region in 1997, the party should have packed up and left, to be consistent with the principle of 'one country, two systems'.
Evidently, it decided to remain in Hong Kong and continue operating underground.
Actually, the question of whether Mr Tsang is a party member surfaced in 1992, when he founded the old DAB and, later, when he ran in the Legco elections.