Stuart Wolfendale

Every time I go to the polls in Hong Kong, I dutifully vote for a ‘pan democrat’ of some stripe or other and not long afterwards, they go and  act up like children in a schoolyard and make me want to spit. They did it again on Thursday, taunting Tsang over Tiananmen.

 

It was a set-up on time honoured lines. One of them asks the Chief Executive to vindicate the dead students of the massacre. As a rubber stamped viceroy of the Central government in a southerly protectorate, he has no business talking about  any such thing but the noisy ‘pans’ hold a rare moment of silence. They are waiting for Donald Tsang to oblige them, fatally, by navigating round the question like a man with arthritis at the helm of a racing yacht. This he does and is met by a gust of mountainous righteousness from Margaret Ng about burying conscience under economic benefit.

 

Instead of telling Ng that contemporary Chinese history and political morality were not what he was in Legco to talk about that day, he grasped a shiny shovel and dug a deep hole for himself at amazing speed which is what he is so good at on these occasions. Vindicated and with much expected spontaneity, the pans walked out of the chamber and had a gang meeting outside, with tears, for half an hour.

 

Well done boys and girls and exactly what did that achieve except to rot up an official we already know you don’t like and show up again your  tendency towards incontinent grandstanding? Donald Tsang may be a clutz with the off-the-cuff comments but an Ahmadinejad, he is not.  The pans need to be careful unless, as Tsang claimed, ‘the Hong Kong people make an objective assessment.”  but, in this case, of walk outs, banana throwing and varieties of rudeness.

 

This person may be taking a more than casual glance at the non -pan names in the polling booth next time. I’m running out of phlegm.

 

That still leaves us with Donald Tsang’s urge to explain himself to minefields. If the pans  gang up on the boy with the specs in the corner, he must find another way out than  walking  through the middle of them . His advisers really should have anticipated the aching predictability of a Tiananmen question being put into play around this time. There should have been a strategy for belting it into the bleachers. The CE needs practice in resisting the urge to give justification to all questions asked. On some issues, the message should be that, from him at least, there is no message at all.

 

 He needs to be put in a room away in far off Fanling Lodge on a Saturday morning with one or more persons who are not employed by him or scared for their pensions. They should throw at him everything he does not want to hear after the fashions of Emily Lau’s flash-flood anger, Margaret Ng’s donnish insistence and Raymond Wong’s hammy hysterics. Then they should throw it all at him all over again until he has on his tongue tip twenty two different ways of saying “I am not here to answer that. Next question, please.”

Posted in All, Hong Kong Politics