Time for Superman
July 8th, 2007Late last week, it looked as though it was time for Superman. The caped crusader might have zoomed into Hong Kong, put the dome back on the Legco building, steadied the flagstaff at Government House and told the Commissioner of Police waving to him from his office window that he need have no fear.
Ambrose Lee, Secretary for Security had told the media that the people who had splashed paint on New World’s phone shops and driven a car into its front doors were a challenge to the whole community, to the government and the police force too. James To of the Legco security panel, feeling peckish for a sound bite, called the splashing and glass cracking the Chief Executive’s ‘first challenge’ then a ‘direct challenge’ and then, warming to his theme, To warned Donald that these forces of darkness were not afraid of him. Cue Superman.
I do wish Mr. Lee would not rush to microphones like that and declare the imminent end of civilization as we know it just because a bunch of gangsters have turned perky. If indeed what was done to Mr. Chen Yu-tung’s business is a challenge to the community, then it is one that has been going on in Hong Kong for ages.
Ordinary men and women who borrowed unwisely or desperately or gambled compulsively or simply went broke are having their doors drenched in red paint and their windows stoved in and rather worse than that by the scores every day. When that has happened to a family in a housing estate in an unfashionable part of East Kowloon, for example, I cannot recall one occasion on which the Secretary for Security has faced the cameras or the deputy director of the Central Government Liaison Office has uttered words of reassurance or the police have put a twenty four hour guard around the flat.
That was done for Mr. Chen because he is one of the magnate elite, a not precisely defined group but easily recognizable and immediately wrapped in cotton wool when wounded. This group is notoriously nervous of organized gangsters. There is no moral buffer between the two, simply capricious fortune and paths differently taken.
Mr. Chen is a man who believes well of his fellows. He had no idea what could have led to the attacks. ‘I have no enemies’ he has said. He seems to be a bit out in that estimate. The police arrested nine forty eight hours after the attacks. How could that come about?
I know. Commissioner Tang king –shing keeps a French police tepee in his office. He donned it and, in his remarkable impersonation of Claude Rains, declared , “Arrest the usual suspects!â€
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