Bauhinia Party a Plan B|Andy Ho
The new Bauhinia Party has pledged to recruit 250,000 members. It is a tall order to fill. So far, there has been no sign of its founders taking the target seriously.
The party was registered as a limited company in Hong Kong on May 14. Seven months later, it has enlisted only about 20 members. It has yet to set up a proper secretariat, let alone district branches for recruitment and nursing the constituencies. Reportedly, it is still using a corporate service company at Times Square, Causeway Bay for correspondence.
There is no news of the party looking for experienced aides. The date for its debut has remained elusive. It looks unlikely that it could get its acts together to tackle the upcoming elections.
Enticing public participation in party politics has never been easy. Despite their popularity in opinion polls, the Democratic Party and the Civic Party have a combined membership of barely over 1,000.
On the other end of the spectrum, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong(DAB) has invested 28 years to claim the title as the biggest party in town. It had 45,214 members as of last month. Among them are only eight legislators and five District Councillors. The Bauhinia Party will have to be five times more effective than the DAB to achieve its proclaimed membership goal by the year 2047.
Meanwhile, founded in 1948, the Federation of Trade Union(FTU) has matured into an umbrella for 253 unions from different trades including the government sector. It boasts 436,657 members at the last count. However, most of them have signed up for practical rather than political reasons. The FTU offers shopping discounts, medical and dental services, and a wide range of training courses and much more.
The federation stays hard at work to sign up members. Those registered between last December 1, 2020, and January 3, 2021, will be entitled to a luck draw. Among the 500 prices on offer are $10,000 worth of a supermarket coupon, Huawei and Samsung smart phones, Lenovo laptops and Nintendo switches.
It is easier said than done to convince four percent of the local population to join a political party whose leaders are hardly household names with no proven track record. A convenient way out is perhaps for the Bauhinia Party to siphon support from the established pro-Beijing camps. Yet, there is no evidence that it enjoys the necessary political clout, in the form of overt blessings from Zhongnanhai, to do so.
When the party was in its conception, national leaders Tung Chee-hwa and Leung Chung-ying joined forces with National People’s Congress Standing Committee member Tam Yiu-chung to launch the Hong Kong Coalition on May 5, when the anti-government protests had yet to abate. The organization was meant to be an overwhelming show of force of the pro-Beijing civil forces in the territory about a month ahead of the proclamation of the national security law for the Special Administrative Region.
Of the Bauhinia Party’s three initial board members, only Chen Jianwen, chairman of local cosmetics chain Bonjour, was included in the coalition’s 1,545 founding members. The other two Bauhinia organizers are Li Shan, a Credit Suisse board member, and banking veteran Wong Chau-chi, chairman of multimedia firm CMMB Vision and director of private equity fund Chi Capital.
In a speech at a Tsinghua University event in Beijing last month, Li outlined the key policy proposals for his party. He wanted a political consultative conference to be installed to function as an Upper House on top of the Legislative Council. Its members are supposed to be hand-picked by the Chief Executive.
Li did not specify how big this super-structure should be, nor explain how it would be conducive to a better law-making process. More importantly, how it could tally with Article 68 of the Basic Law, which reads: “The ultimate aim is the election of all the members of the Legislative Council by universal suffrage.”
An appointee to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, Li seems eager to replicate the shortcut to power on the mainland in Hong Kong.
Although it has yet to produce a manifesto, the party has already gained substantial free publicity. It has even been hailed as part of China’s strategy to reshuffle the traditional pro-establishment leaders in the SAR with Beijing-related elites in the long run. Beijing would probably not mind having a Plan B in place to drive the entrenched local forces to work much harder. Whether the Bauhinia Party is its preferred alternative is another matter.
In any case, the Bauhinia founders have managed to apply their business leveraging skills for maximum political advantage to themselves in the absence of any solid efforts.
(Andy Ho is a public affairs consultant. A former political editor of the South China Morning Post, he served as Information Coordinator at the Chief Executive’s Office of the HKSAR Government from 2006 to 2012.)
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