Stuart Wolfendale

It is not easy to understand the Anson Chan peculiarity. It is not a phenomenon because scientifically it’s not big enough but it is as persistent and sometimes as annoying as Pudong Airport flight announcements.

There have been two occurrences of it in recent weeks. The content was identical in each case but the delivery vehicle was different. Chan was telling the Chief Executive that he had broken his election promises and that the green paper on universal suffrage was a sorry mess. On one occasion, she chose to do this through an open letter in the South China Morning Post. On another she used her attendance at an Asian Youth Orchestra rehearsal camp to criticize Tsang. She was pictured in the newspaper, her chief nursing officer smile in place, sat amongst a group of teenage fiddle players.The words underneath talked about her unspecified “core group of advisers” and, for a moment, you could have thought she was among them.

The curious thing about Anson is that though she is well known to many, most think that it’s somebody else who is supporting her. In fact she doesn’t really have a base. She comes from a stock. Her fame rests on her breeding not on numbers.

Dame Anson Chan GCMG CBE is from an upper middle class family that fled the Communist victory over the Nationalists. Her grandfather was a Koumintang general, her father a Shanghai textile manufacturer, her mother an intellectual and her uncle a doctor who also became a British knight. She represents the most Anglophile strain of the civil service elite who, along with some of the longer established Chinese gentry families who have unshakeable British sentiments, seem to find the Communist Central Government philosophically and emotionally difficult to stomach.

The problem is understandable. The Central Government understands it and knows exactly who they are.

Because Chan was both the first woman and the first Chinese to head the Civil Service under a British governor , because she displayed grit, cool determination and near perfect English vowels and because she ostentatiously quit Tung Chee hwa’s woefully unpopular government,  she has found that she has quite a few miles to run as a solo political peculiarity. This run has been reinforced by a residual deference amongst some Hong Kong people to senior colonial mandarins and the dim shortage of colourful characters among party politicians.

But, it is a run that is slowing. She has no party. She has nothing very original to say and when she says it, it is in faintly off-centre settings, foreigners’ gatherings, minority newspapers and often in English. She is a woman with a past, but her dislike of the present means that it cannot repeat itself.

I suspect that the Dame Lydia Dunn solution may well occur to Anson eventually; a comfortable life in London and the British countryside, meeting up with the self exiled Hong Kong anglophiles and snug visits back from time to time in CX business class. She’d be making a far better use of England than I ever will.

Posted in All, Hong Kong Politics