Benny Tai’s incredible lightness of meaning
University of Hong Kong academic says one thing about independence, but really, he and his supporters assure us, he means something else
No one would deliberately keep saying something they didn’t believe in just for the sake of upholding free speech or testing its boundaries.
This is an astute observation, made by disqualified lawmaker “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung during a recent online podcast. He and his co-hosts were commenting on Benny Tai Yiu-ting’s controversial take at an anti-communist forum in Taipei on an end to one-party dictatorship and the conditions for Hong Kong to declare independence.
Leung is right. It’s just hypocritical and tiresome of Tai and his supporters subsequently to keep adding conditions and circumstances and hypotheticals to qualify what the University of Hong Kong law lecturer really meant. In fact, they have so watered down his original statements – available for viewing on YouTube – it would appear he is not saying much of anything at all.
An end to dictatorship in China? Well, he just meant all nations, civilisations and regimes collapse eventually. Hong Kong’s independence? You never know what the distant future holds, Tai seems to mean.
Perfectly innocuous statements, nothing to them!