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Alex Lo
SCMP Columnist
My Take
by Alex Lo
My Take
by Alex Lo

Advocating independence with a locked mindset

Hong Kong’s student leaders have not just become uncouth; they seem to have lost the ability for critical and intellectual thought

You give the lunatics and ignoramuses enough rope and they will hang themselves. That may be the best argument not to worry too much about the extreme localist fringe and those who advocate independence for Hong Kong.

The latest: those who commemorate the June 4 crackdown in 1989 have been denounced as brothel keepers by university student leaders.

“The Hong Kong Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China has become pimps and bawds in a brothel after they themselves were raped,” wrote Ng Kwai-lung, head of Shue Yan University’s student union editorial board. “Its task is to lure young girls to be tainted, before submitting them to the gangs and bandits.”

When asked to comment on his immoderate language, Ng hid behind Horace Chin Wan-kan, the father of the Hong Kong independence movement, saying Chin helped him write it.

It’s a bit sad that the head of a university’s student editorial board could not write a commentary by himself. But I believe Ng.

The violent sex language is characteristic of Chin, who will leave his job at Lingnan University after his contract expires in August. His supporters have hinted at political persecution but anyone who reads up on campus politics knows what his departure is really about. Last year, the university president reprimanded Ng for posting a “satirical” message in which he advised Hong Kong women to let mainland men fondle their breasts and wash their private parts to provide better service, and Hong Kong men to keep quiet when being shouted at by mainland women. In an earlier incident, Chin posted a message making fun of Chinese University student activist Shek Pui-yin’s breasts by referring to her “cup size”.

Independence-seeking youngsters like Ng don’t seem to be terribly independent in any critical or intellectual sense. His and other universities’ student unions and the Federation of Students are all boycotting the June 4 commemorations this year.

They say the quarter-of-a-century-old commemoration has achieved nothing, and that Hong Kong people need to think about their own city and not worry about the mainland and those nasty communists. Never mind that June 4 was the pivotal event that split local politics into the pan-democratic and pro-government camps. You know what they say about people who fail to learn from history.

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