Plum Blossoms

« I Blog Because I Want To... ... | Main | Getting Shot Versus Being Targeted »

March 7, 2005

End of the Tung Dynasty

(Note: I'm too lazy to put in the links, but most of what's written here is pretty widely known or my own thoughts anyways. For details, see the China blogs on the blogroll.)

It's pretty much a done deal: Tung Chee Hwa will be quitting as Hong Kong's first post-1997 Chief Executive.

I've read a lot of commentary over the past week or so about this news. Some people think Tung is being pushed out; others think that it's Tung that wants out, not the central government. Personally, I'm inclined to believe that it's the latter: regardless of whether Tung was actually a good CE (more on that later), he certainly wasn't a popular CE. The job was thankless, and while there were many legitimate complaints against him, the banshee-like shrills of the most extreme detractors and their popular support makes me believe that Tung is happier without HK than HK is happy without Tung. I mean, a lot of the people who's been all “Down with Tung!” for the last seven years are too shocked to know if their dream realized is really a good thing: just look at how “happy” The Frontier is at the news of Tung's departure.

The text at the corner of the banner reads “The downfall of Tung Chee Hwa / [is] the demonstration of public opinion.”

Nonetheless, this entire fiasco proves one thing: the CE of the HKSAR serves at the pleasure of the central government, as opposed to the pleasure of the citizens of HK or the CE himself. The timing, halfway through the CE's second term, cannot be better at creating uncertainty (if not utter pandemonium), which the centre is quite intent on capitalizing upon. After all, we're the ones that came up with the whole “Crisis = Opportunity” thing. Will the new CE serve two years or five? And isn't it so convenient that the resignation triggers a new election just before the Election Commission (which chooses the CE) needed to be re-appointed and where the pro-government parties had hoped to make some inroads?

Speaking of the term length issue, this incident proves, once again, that the Basic Law is quite badly written, and that Chinese politicians have yet to emerge from millennia of arbitary rule to figure out exactly how to legislate. Nowhere in the document does it proscribe the procedure for how to deal with a resigning CE, hence the expected excuse of “health reasons” when Tung actually quits. And, of course, there's the ambiguity in the term length: does a replacement CE serve out the previous CE's term or start anew? Note that this ambiguity isn't exactly some ingenious plot by the central government to exert influence: the Right to Abode fiasco was built from exactly the same sort of unclear law, and the centre had never intended for that problem to come up in the first place. All these problems, of course, would've been moot if the Drafting Committee had added a few extra sentences.

But all these points don't answer one question: was Tung a good CE? It's fair to say that the answer is no. Of course, some things were out of his hand: SARS, first of all, and had the property bubble not burst so violently, the “85000” promise would be remembered as a godsend instead of demonized (it certainly seemed like a godsend back then). But development projects of dubious value (Cyberport, West Kowloon), comical attempts at revitalizing the local economy, a inflexible and excessively confrontational management style, and an inability to bridge the gap between HK pro-democrats and the central government suggest that Tung was certainly not the best material for high political office.

Alas, what's done is done, so be prepared for two years of Donald Tseng as CE (yah, that's what I'm predicting, and I'm not predicting anything past 2007).

Posted by Kelvin at March 7, 2005 6:02 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.kelvin-chan.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/61

Comments

Post a comment