Category: Hong Kong As It Is

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive Donald Tsang attended a meeting with secondary students this past week. It was an informal occassion where students would have opportunity to interact with the head of their government. It was reported that the students were not happy with the meeting because they found Mr Tsang not a sincere speaker.

Why did the students have such an unfavorable impression? Let me show you the kind of answer Mr Tsang gave the students in the Q&A session.

Q (a student): What advice do you have for us?

A (Mr Tsang): You should make use of the “one country two systems” to wring from the Central Government (ie. Beijing Government) what is advantageous for Hong Kong.

Is this a “person” talking? It sounds more like an official giving lecturing to his/her subordinates, as in the mainland China. His answer is so boring and so impersonal. And I assure you this style is very typical of him. 

Whenever I hear Mr Tsang talk like a top official in the Mainland China, I conjure up a bleak picture for Hong Kong. He never succeeds, in his public speeches, in convincing me that he is a leader of imagination and humanity, not to mention the ability to inspire in people. 

Hong Kong is sadly a city without leadership. Will the city have one day? I doubt it, under the current “one country two systems”.

Hong Kong’s Chief Executive says, to be eligible for canditates for the territory’s top job, one must be patriotic and competent.

Please tell me any other place where to be elected for the head of the government, the candidates being patriotic is one of the must-have conditions. It has been 9 years since Hong Kong’s handover to China and I am increasingly uncomfortable with the way the top government officials talk. Their words sound so inhuman and artifical, like that made from a political container.

It cannot be more apparent to me that a leader, first and foremost, should serve the people, and to be able to accomplish this, he or she must be competent and have the leadership. What else should matter?

It is 32 Celsius degrees – sweltering hot. It is Saturday. It is first of July. I, with thousands of others, joined the democracy marching demanding universal suffrage, on the streets of Hong Kong. I don’t think many of my friends in Hong Kong will attend the march, so I just go there alone. I took the bus from kennedy town to Wanchai, and joined the crowd there, walking for about one and a half hours to the government heaquarters in central.

People from all walks of life join in the rally. I see a man with long dirty hair hanging at the back, carrying an umbrella, and wearing a pair of broken cotten shoes, mothers and daugthers, young lovers, a man in his forty walking by himself…people are not shouting slogans at their top of voices, but there is passion and unflinching will there. “we want universal suffrage”, some shouted. quiet tears well from my eyes, strangely. i am touched by the sense of solidarity and the will to overcome barriers just to fight for things valuable in life.

I am bebating in the morning: shall I go to the rally in this unbearable hot weather, and alone? I decide to go, at the end. Because I know I would hate myself if I didn’t go. I don’t want to be a person of words only, not actions. If I believe it is people’s right to choose someone to represent them; if I believe democracy is about people being able to participate in the process of governing and decision making process; if I belive Hong Kong has been a hugely capitalist place where only businessmen’s interests are taken care of, then I should go to this democracy rally to demand for universal suffrage.

I am glad that I am in the rally.