Anyone but CY: it’s all BS whoever wins Hong Kong’s next chief executive election
It is March 26, 2017. Financial Secretary John Tsang Chun-wah has just defeated his boss Leung Chun-ying to become the next chief executive, getting 689 votes from the 1,200-member election committee. ABC – anyone but CY – has triumphed. There is a collective whoop of joy.
It is July 1, 2017. A feel-good factor sweeps the city as Tsang formally replaces the loathed Leung. The annual July 1 protest march – which made history in 2003 when a turnout of 500,000 eventually toppled Tung Chee-hwa – is called off. Organisers felt Leung’s ouster made the march redundant.
It is January 2018. Tsang’s prolonged political honeymoon persists. Even radicals such as “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-hung applaud the chief executive’s annual policy speech in the Legislative Council. No one hurls bananas or mocks Tsang as 689. Filibusters have faded from memory, as has the opposition camp. There’s just one big happy pro-Tsang/establishment camp.
It is today, October 12, 2016. Someone please snap a finger. It’s time to wake the dreamers from their flight of fancy. ABC is political BS. As a strategy it possesses neither depth nor an endgame. Even its most strident supporters struggle to explain what it can actually achieve other than that seeing the back of CY will take the angry edge out of our divided society. Sure, but make no mistake, the feel-good factor will be fleeting.
So it was when Beijing bowed to local sentiment by dumping Tung, our first post-handover leader. The feel-good factor that greeted successor Donald Tsang Yam-kuen quickly dissipated. Leung didn’t even have a political honeymoon even though Henry Tang Ying-yen’s illegal basement caused such fury that Beijing again heeded public opinion by switching its backing to Leung.
To survive, the opposition needs an enemy. It becomes irrelevant without one. To be relevant, our media needs the opposition to have an enemy. It makes no difference who becomes our next chief executive.
Tsang, Chief Secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor or retired Legco president Tsang Yok-sing will quickly become the enemy that Leung now is if they can’t deliver the opposition’s bottom line.
That bottom line is self-determination, so-called true democracy and the scrapping of Beijing’s political framework that screens chief executive candidates. This bottom line is belly-up because meeting it essentially makes Hong Kong a city-state. So, what comes after ABC? There is no endgame. That’s why it’s BS.
