An Attractive Proposition?

February 16th, 2007

A critical core percentage of this blog’s readership took me out to lunch yesterday. He wanted to know why I have not written anything about the CE election. I said everybody else was writing about it so what had I to add? He said he didn’t think I was really very interested in it, was I, and I said no, I wasn’t.

I told him that I didn’t feel the election was very attractive. He said he agreed the issues were uninspiring but I told him I meant that it didn’t look attractive. Alan Leong has all the warmth and spellbinding delivery of a customs inspector. Donald Tsang’s new sartorial see-saw between the late Sir Robin Day and Pandit Nehru still did not put watching his speeches on TV  much beyond staring at the test card. And if he really wanted to know what I meant, there was a picture in the paper of Rafael Hui talking to Li Gang from the central government liaison office and the Party’s locally grown hit man Tsang Hin-chi, who always appears as the very angriest of tortoises. It is not very seductive.

To his credit, Tsang Hin-chi has tried to make it more colourful by threatening to shoot himself if Leong wins which is of new interest and incentive to many across the political spectrum.

It has been said that it is a jolly good thing that Mr. Leong has contested this election because it gives the opposition the opportunity to flex its democratic principles and that’s probably right but when your man has as much chance of winning as I have of ovulating, the issues rather wither on the vine.

So does the language. The CE says he will ‘get the job done’. What precisely is the job and where is Mr. Tsang’s work docket? Exactly how and when will this job come to an end and what will we all do afterwards? Go on holiday? Mr. Leong said on Wednesday, in English, that Mr. Tsang had no right to have ‘action plans’. Only businesses should have action plans and governments should confine themselves to having ‘visions’ and keep away from plans. He went on in this way for what seemed like ten minutes until he had dug a hole for himself so deep that he disappeared from view.

What does interest me is what happens after Mr. Tsang has retained power with more certainty than even Kim Jong-il, when you come to think of it. Since the pan-democrats (fry for 2 minutes each side then serve) have got to lose, the real issue will be how well everybody else beat them up in the eyes of Beijing. When the time comes for sharing out the spoils of office and influence, there will be looming expectations from all the Beijing loyalists, big businessmen, gentry politicos, political fence sitters and special interest groups who all believe they made the CE look good.

I really don’t know how a man of purported principle like the CE manages this bit and keeps himself out of the lavatory. It is the point in the proceedings where the lack of democracy really does show. It is where the time servers, the incompetents and the greedy get their rewards. If you like kink, that’s attractive.

 

 

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