Political mayhem has broken out in Hong Kong and it has caught the Chinese government, already in the midst of a delicate political transition of its own, completely unprepared.
The 1,200 privileged delegates carefully screened by China to “elect” Hong Kong’s next chief executive on Sunday would normally take their cues from China’s rulers. Indeed, the original electoral script was a one-act, one-star play.
Henry Tang (唐英年), unkindly nicknamed “Pig” by the Hong Kong press for his unimpressive intellect, and a heretofore supporting actor, C.Y. Leung (梁振英), nicknamed “Wolf” for his perceived chilly ruthlessness, were the entire cast.
Both men have impeccable pro-China credentials, a prerequisite to becoming chief executive. While there is a third, pro-democracy candidate standing somewhere in the wings, he does not stand a chance, because China would never allow him to get the 601 votes needed to win.
Tang, the preferred candidate of the local business elite and the civil service he once headed, promises to preserve the “status quo,” which is music to the ears of Hong Kong’s “haves.” However, a plot twist has complicated his shoo-in campaign, with both Tang and Leung now improvising their lines — peppered with frequent insults — and each consulting the director (China) at every turn.
At the same time, the audience, the people of Hong Kong, are howling, hissing and throwing bottles at everyone on stage — and sometimes at each other. So, what was supposed to be a boring bit of set-piece theater has become a sensational hit.
Tang, the mild-mannered scion of a textile magnate whose father is a confidant of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民), committed two elementary mistakes. The first was not confessing quickly enough to his having mistresses, one of whom has a college-age offspring whose father is probably Tang. Of course, Hong Kongers are far from being puritans and the sex lives of their leaders are not a primary concern. However, they also understand that anyone running for office should have been prepared for such a revelation.
Tang was not. Instead, it was left to the tabloids to reveal his mistresses, one by one, week after week, like peeling an onion in front of his wife, the public and the Chinese leadership.
The second error was even more inane. Local papers discovered that he had illegally built a large, deluxe wine cellar with a spa beneath one of his mansions. As a senior public servant, he knew that the construction was illegal and that he should have taken remedial steps to legalize his actions or to abandon it — a matter merely of money, of which he has plenty.
To everyone’s disbelief, Tang insisted that he did not have a wine cellar, just a storage room. Then he trotted out his already-humiliated wife, half in tears, to face the press, blaming her for building the cellar without his prior knowledge, while “gallantly” assuming responsibility.
Tang’s popularity sank and headed toward single digits. If China still insists on anointing him, more mayhem is likely.
However, Leung is also a deeply divisive figure — a man who comes across as someone waiting to settle scores, though no one really knows which ones. Hong Kong’s tycoons, press, intelligentsia and civil servants, who normally agree on little, find themselves in complete agreement where Leung is concerned: They do not want him as Hong Kong’s next leader, despite his favorable popularity ratings.
The tycoons fear that Leung’s deeply old-fashioned communist values would hurt their oligopolies. The press finds him evasive. The intelligentsia is wary of him as an underground Chinese Communist Party (CCP) member, something that he has denied. Civil servants believe that Leung harbors resentment of Hong Kong’s British colonial legacy, of which the civil service is the most visible.
Not even senior communist officials in charge of the Hong Kong portfolio wanted Leung, despite his being a suspected “sleeper” cadre in the territory. Locally recruited members do not enjoy seniority in the 70-million-strong CCP, so if Leung became chief executive, he would jump ahead of many of his seniors on the mainland.
To complicate China’s predicament further, the next leader will assume an office tainted by retiring Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang’s (曾蔭權) undignified and possibly corrupt links with the territory’s tycoons. The press calls him the “petty greedy CE.” Some legislators have called for his impeachment before he leaves office.
Tsang has been a beneficiary of favors by some of Hong Kong’s second-tier billionaires who run regulated businesses, such as radio stations and the cross-harbor tunnels. He enjoys flying in their private jets and sailing on their luxury yachts while on personal holidays abroad. Before he was shamed into giving it up, he rented a triplex penthouse for his retirement, leased to him at below-market rates by a wealthy businessman, who reportedly threw in a couple of million dollars of interior decoration.
Hong Kongers expect their leader to be a fair arbiter of conflicting public and private interests, not an obsequious toady to the rich. The most pathetic aspect of Tsang’s behavior is his failure to understand that Hong Kong’s rich, whose company he pathologically craved, respect only those who are richer, smarter and perhaps more ruthless than they are. They despise those who lack serious money and can be seduced by breadcrumbs.
Late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) promised “one country, two systems” when he negotiated Hong Kong’s return to China three decades ago. However, because China has never succeeded in overcoming its inner control freak, it has backed leaders who are incompetent, corruptible or universally feared and scorned. Hong Kong’s upcoming “election” will be no different.
Sin-ming Shaw, a former fellow at Oxford University, is an investor based in Asia and Argentina.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
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