The View | Hong Kong’s ‘committee trick’ is old hat and won’t placate frustrated youth
The bottom line here is that the Lam administration has resorted to a tactic much favoured by government bureaucracy since colonial times
What do big organisations do when faced with a massive problem that they have no idea how to resolve? Mostly they come up with the bright idea of forming a committee, or if the problem emanates from dissatisfied people in the ranks, they try and shut them up by offering jobs or membership of status-bearing committees.
This tells you all you need to know about the Hong Kong government’s current plans for getting “young people” to join its advisory committees, accompanied by suggestions that yet more committees might be cobbled together to accommodate the young.
Does the chief executive seriously think that plucking a number of young people out of the hat will satisfy the demands of countless others who are worried about more or less everything?
The bottom line here is that the Lam administration has no clue how to tackle the mounting frustration among Hong Kong’s younger generation and in the absence of a better plan has resorted to a tactic much favoured by the government bureaucracy since colonial times.
The old colonial bureaucrats were particularly good at this and had a knack for placating either the brightest and the best or those who simply made a lot of noise protesting against government policy. They were installed in a number of advisory bodies, and some were given fancy titles. And that, it was deemed, solved whatever problem came to hand.
This policy has the potential for limited success because among the discontented there are always some opportunists who are eager to be bought off and can be relied upon to shut up once this has been done.
Usually, however, the nominalism of plucking out a small number of people in the hope of placating a much larger number does not work. Listed companies, alarmed by the growing tide of opposition to high executive pay, have used this tactic by installing critics on their boards of directors, but have found that this does very little to dissipate the criticism.
Nevertheless the government thinks that it can somehow ignore the widespread evidence of the failings of the committee-membership trick by putting a small number of young people on official committees, including the reformed Central Policy Unit.