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【網上論壇】Saying “Sorry” Isn’t Good Enough: Put Political Reform Back on the Table(Mark Clifford, Former editor-in-chief of the SCMP)

蘋果日報 2019/06/24 12:09

蘋果論壇Mark L. Clifford南華早報前主編Political Reform

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” This old saying is worth thinking about as Hong Kong’s political crisis rumbles on.
After weeks of insisting that the government had nothing to apologize for, ministers now are outdoing themselves to say how sorry they are.
Do officials hope that the public will quickly forget and they can go back to business as usual? Or do these apologies signal a real change.
There’s reason to be skeptical. Whenever the government doesn’t easily get what it wants, officials insist they will do a better job of listening to people in the future. Carrie Lam is practiced at this. Think of the protests over the demolition of Queen’s Pier and the Star Ferry Terminal. Or the demonstrations against the construction of the high-speed train, the co-location arrangements in the Kowloon station, or the failed attempt to introduce pro-mainland school textbooks.
Even if Hong Kong officials wanted to pay less heed to a few dozen people in Beijing and listen more to the 7.5 million people of Hong Kong, it’s not clear that they would know how. Older Hong Kong officials were trained by British colonialists how to administer, not how to represent. Younger ones are trained in a system where power comes from Beijing. The give-and-take of retail politics isn’t part of the Hong Kong administrative DNA.
Lam and her team started June with rigid defiance and heavy-handed police tactics. Now they have moved to retreat, disorder, humiliation, and apology. This is not governing. This is reacting.
At least back in 2007 when Queen’s Pier and the Star Ferry pier were being demolished, Lam had the courage to meet opponents. Now it appears that she has lost even that confidence. For good reason. She is famously out of touch with life in Hong Kong – not knowing where to buy toilet paper or how to use the MTR are symptomatic. But you don’t have to be a woman of the people to know that most people in Hong Kong support a representative democracy. And they have for decades.
As the pro-Beijing camp split, Federation of Trades Union lawmaker Alice Mak reportedly rounded on Lam: “What’s the use of crying now? You know how to cry, I also know how to cry.” The government should stop crying - and stop apologizing – and come up with some innovative ideas to move forward.
What would progress look like?
Lam needs to be bold if she wants to, at best, limp through the next three years of her term. The idea of a truly independent commission to investigate what happened on June 12 is a good place to start. Lam also should put political reform back on the table. Lam’s idea to depoliticize society, by concentrating on livelihood issues, has flopped. Having tried everything else, perhaps Hong Kong’s leader might truly listen to what the overwhelming majority of the city’s people want -- democracy.
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