My Take | It’s time to tear down the borders with mainland China
The way out of Hong Kong’s malaise does not lie in Western-style democracy or independence. Realistically, it’s to speed up the 50-year grace period of high autonomy to integrate fully with the rest of the country
Christine Loh Kung-wai is right. Two decades after the handover, some Hong Kong people and foreigners seem shocked that we didn’t become a Western-style liberal democracy.
Promoting a new book, No Third Person: Rewriting the Hong Kong Story, she said in a Post interview: “Hong Kong must release itself from the unspoken aspect of the old British Hong Kong story, tied to a sense that it should have become a liberal democracy along Western lines by now”.
Loh and co-author Richard Cullen pointed to a different source of legitimacy besides the ballot box: performance.
Oh dear! If our government had been delivering “prosperity and stability”, we could all tolerate a bit of corruption and incompetence. But that’s the problem, it hasn’t delivered. In many areas, it has either failed or at least failed to improve.
Take the slogan: “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong.” What we end up with is a cooperative and at times obsequious Hong Kong government that has done more to delegitimise Chinese rule.
A good deal of local antagonism towards the mainland and the central government has less to do with alleged Chinese interference than official incompetence in Hong Kong. They stem from misplaced anger and frustration.