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The View | Forget the mask ban. Beijing can solve Hong Kong’s protests by letting a governor run the city
- Taking a hard line won’t work, yet doing nothing is not an option. Why not amend the Basic Law, perhaps jointly with the UK, to bring in a tried-and-tested fix? A governor can rebalance the local vested interests and focus on improving people’s welfare
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Why you can trust SCMP
I think I may have committed a crime at the weekend. I found myself a willing participant at an illegal gathering, with the prospect of arrest. It is no excuse that the crowd were in fancy dress and the masks were pink and sparkly – the law is the law, and it is blind.
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In August in these columns, I wrote a short speech for the chief executive that many kind readers suggested that she should have given – perhaps avoiding the current crisis point. Instead, the government has enacted policies that merely plaster over minor symptoms, which treat the patient as helpfully as a swarm of leeches.
The fatuous anti-mask law is as useful as a cat photo. It makes it illegal to perform The Phantom of the Opera. Otherwise it has, as forecast, been an abject failure. The police have got their arrest numbers up but (what a surprise) it transpires that journalists, paramedics and medical cases are hard to distinguish from rioters.
The Education Bureau looks cheap in asking schools to report on mask-wearing students – and, duh, we know what kids do if they are told to not do something. Barristers will have a field day pointing out that the government’s environmental policies have failed to clean the air to global standards, so masks are necessary. Surely, if you are an administration lacking in credibility, the last thing you need is to announce a policy that is largely unenforceable.
The people of Hong Kong believe that Beijing wants Hong Kong to be like the mainland. My conversations indicate that this is not correct. China wants and needs a calm, prosperous Hong Kong – or the army would already be running the city. It’s not a good look for Britain to build the special administrative region for 155 years, only for China to fail in 22.
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