The formation of the new pro-China Bauhinia Party has given rise to a frenzy of speculation over not only the fate of Hong Kong’s Deputy Mayor Carrie Lam but also the future of the entire loyalist political camp.

Behind speculation of this kind there is often the assumption that the Chinese Communist Party has some masterly plan to boost the effectiveness of its cyphers in Hong Kong. Less however is said about the possibility that the Party is simply floundering and exasperated by the low calibre of the people who are supposed to be looking after its interests.

Sometimes the cunning and capacity of the seemingly all powerful Party is exaggerated – not least by its opponents. They seem to overlook a long history of staggering incompetence and failure.

Moreover, in Hong Kong it is often hard to tell whether many of things that are attributed to the Party do in fact come from Beijing or are the result of over-anxious Quislings second guessing what they think is expected of them.

The problem the Party has in Hong Kong is the markedly poor quality of the people it relies upon to do its bidding. The HKSAR has only had four Chief Executives and without exception each one has proved to be a miserable failure, two even had to be forced to step down, which may well explain why the Party is undecided over whether it’s a good idea to bring that number up to three by getting rid of Mrs Lam and in so doing tacitly admitting its abject failure in selecting people for the top job.

The serried ranks of the numerous United Front and underground Communist Party organizations in Hong Kong are largely populated by opportunists (including a heavy layer of colonial re-treads) and time servers with a light smattering of outright crazies who have found a home in the embrace of the five-star flag because there is no other place for them.

Adding to this mix is a smattering of true believers who have actually read the sacred texts of Marxism Leninism but, as is the case on the Mainland, true believers are treated with caution because they tend to have principles.

Some of the saddest members of this United Front nexus are ‘reformed’ democrats who are forced to confess the error of their former beliefs and need to try that bit harder to win advancement in the new order. They are sad because they will never really be trusted by the hard men who run the Party, they are despised by their old colleagues and are marginalized by everyone else.

The upshot has been that the human resources available to the Party are hardly fit for purpose. The people they rely on jockey mercilessly for position, want jobs but have little idea how to handle them and, perhaps worst of all, they are a terrible source of information about what’s going on in Hong Kong, maybe because they are afraid to tell the truth to their bosses or equally it may be that they are simply ignorant.

Time after time they have furnished the Central authorities with faulty information, not least in the past 18 turbulent months. When the protests emerged in June last year, they confidently told the bosses that it was nothing to worry about because the defeat of the Umbrella Movement four years previously had knocked the stuffing out of the democrats.

When it became obvious that the protests were growing rather than receding, they assured the bosses that they had a cunning plan to divide the opposition by offering some carefully crafted concessions and some giveaways that would isolate the radicals from the vast bulk of the population.

And when it became crystal clear that this was not going to work, the Deputy Mayor and her team of zombies simply retreated from public sight and handed over the entire management of the protests to the police who were given free reign to crack down on and scare the living daylights out of the people.

By the end of last year, the pro-China camp talked itself into the illusion that the democracy movement was well into retreat and that although it had not been absolutely crushed, it would be safe to go ahead with the November District Council elections at which the so-called silent majority would demonstrate their rejection of pro-democracy candidates. They could not have been more wrong.

It was at this point that Beijing decided to simply push the Hong Kong government to one side and to install a regime of direct rule, albeit while maintaining the façade of a local administration.

However, they still could not work out what to do with the support chorus who were self-evidently not up to the job.

It is therefore entirely possible that this new Bauhinia Party represents a substantial attempt to revamp the ranks of the pro-China camp. Equally it could be an opportunist move by ambitious individuals seeking to elevate themselves at a time when other Quislings are so clearly failing.

It may take a while to sort out the truth of the matter, but the bottom line is that bringing in a new bunch of Quislings to replace the old ones is highly unlikely to work and, most importantly, although it has proved possible to clear the streets of protests, the Hong Kong people’s commitment to liberty has not been extinguished, even if the most sycophantic of sycophants have been busy telling their Beijing bosses another story.

(Stephen Vines is a Hong Kong-based journalist, writer and broadcaster and runs companies in the food sector. He was the founding editor of ‘Eastern Express’ and founding publisher of ‘Spike’. In London he was an editor at The Observer and in Asia has worked for international publications including, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, BBC, Asia Times and The Independent and, during Hong Kong’s 2019/20 protests, for the Sunday Times. He hosts a weekly television current affairs programme: The Pulse”

Vines’ latest book Defying the Dragon – Hong Kong and the world’s largest dictatorship, will be published early next year by Hurst Publishing. He is the author of several books, including: Hong Kong: China’s New Colony, The Years of Living Dangerously - Asia from Crisis to the New Millennium, Market Panic and Food Gurus.)

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