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Hong Kong’s government is broken. The city needs its community leaders to step into the breach
- We’re on our own. It’s time for respected figures across the community, from faith groups, universities, business and legal professions and politics to provide a bridge between the government and protesters to rescue the city
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
When you live in Beijing, as I did, you realise that Hong Kong is tiny. At the Beidaihe Politburo meetings this week, we might merit five minutes in between the rice and noodles. The leadership has almost 1.4 billion people to deal with — we are merely 7 million.
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And those who peddle the ponderous line of “foreign agents” encouraging the radicals should remember that the United States has bigger ways to upset China (in trade and currency) and that Britain is consumed by Brexit. The former colonial power’s influence ended when James Bond became Johnny English. We are alone.
China wants nothing more than a calm, stable and prosperous Hong Kong. Indeed, our special role in the motherland is to make money on behalf of sovereign China, precisely because we are a different jurisdiction — and to do it quietly.
Hong Kong was fine until former chief executive Leung Chun-ying and his successor Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor poked the hornet’s nest by forcing Hong Kong to be more like China. The city was not broken, but they tried to fix it; and, in fixing it, they have broken it. Now, they have been stung.
They have single-handedly changed a naive community into a city of highly informed political activists; radicalising some. The results are diametrically opposed to Beijing’s wishes. That’s a rare (mis)accomplishment in the world of politics.
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We will never know what kind of misdirected ambition caused them to start the wind that has whipped into a whirlwind, but it has destroyed the government’s ability to govern, the police’s ability to police, split society asunder, and taunted China to the point of threatening army action.
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