Now that July has arrived in Hong Kong, CE-elect Leung has been upgraded to CE. Is everyone happy about it? Not from what I saw during the annual protest on Handover Day. Embraced by a whirlpool of allegations, scandals, integrity issues, and low popularity amongst the Hong Kong public (surprisingly enough, wikipedia has pretty detailed information on the events that went down throughout the entire 2012 CE election debacle. Though I must make an addition; whilst Tang had an illegal structure in his house, it turns out that Leung has six.) One must wonder why we even voted for him to take the post at all.
Oh wait. We didn't vote, because we couldn't. The CE is chosen by a small, select group of individuals (most of whom are alleged to be pro-Beijing due to their business ventures), much to the ire of the population. The motivations behind this practice is unclear (for the public, anyways), though definitely not because Hong Kong people do not want to vote. PopVote is a great example of this will to choose our own 'leader'. It was an informal voting session arranged by HKU that took place in March, which allowed the public to choose who they wanted for CE. It might not be recognized by the HKSAR government, but was treated by the organizers like it was the real thing, with proper ID checks. Despite the initial setbacks (the PopVote website getting hacked and the confusion of converting to paper ballots), and the long waiting time endured at the polling stations, PopVote received a turnout of over 200,000 ballots.
The results from PopVote showed that over half of the ballots were cast as blank. And yet with these results showing such low public popularity for all of the candidates, inclusive of Leung, he was still voted in office by some faceless batch of people. And already his behaviour has not been promising; low points include his unwillingness to comment about the circumstances of mainland activist Li Wangyang's death, his 'shock' at realizing his own abode has illegal structures (Hello Kitty does not approve! You'll need to check facebook and old news clips to et the reference), or unwillingness to answer a reporter's question about the 2012 Handover demonstration yesterday evening. Are we going to have a CE who deliberately disconnects himself from the questions that Hong Kong people want to ask, and in general, who doesn't answer questions at all?
(And before any of us forget; now that Leung is in office, he better uphold his promise from the CE elections to release the minutes of what transpired during the confidential Executive Council meetings about how to handle protesters in 2003.)
On another note: why are all of our CEs so messed up? Can the higher-powers of Beijing honestly not find a single decent individual in Hong Kong to take the position?
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(The extended version of the logo, with a police baton in one hand, and pepper-spray in the other. In recent times, the Hong Kong police has been incredibly heavy-handed when approaching protesters. They haven't used batons (yet), but they have pepper-sprayed protesters as though they did a bulk-buy of the stuff at a special sale. Always strange to see tax dollars being used against tax payers. The police's rationale for using this sort of force was that protesters enacted violence upon them; but what, and where, is this violence? Shaking a few police barriers? Refusing to move away from an area? And is pepper-spraying not a form of violence towards protesters; in which case, will the police be held accountable for that? And honestly, it is quite irritating that some members of the observing public would blame the protesters for getting pepper-sprayed. I reckon that is a rather unhealthy mentality to adopt. First off, the police aren't exactly an innocent party and has been shown in some instances to instigate conflict; secondly, the key is to look at why the protesters acted in the way they did to result with such police action. Oftentimes scuffles arise from poor police planning, especially with crowd control or reducing the width of the protest routes... It appears depressingly probable that this sort of police behaviour will continue in the near/far future.) |
