Is this the price we pay for loving Hong Kong too much?
- Yonden Lhatoo offers a loving little reality check, amid all the political grandstanding and paranoia over the city’s national security law, to remind us how and why we got here
While some of his peers who were disqualified along with him had openly derided their sovereign government and contemptuously mangled their oath-taking, Law’s only crime to be kicked out of the legislature was to insert an upward inflection while reading out the words, “I swear allegiance to … the People’s Republic of China”, making it sound like he was asking a sarcastic question.
Oh, and he also quoted Indian independence hero Mahatma Gandhi in saying, “You can chain me, you can torture me, you can even destroy this body, but you will never imprison my mind.”
Anyway, that’s history, but he is now professing complete cluelessness as to why he is a target under the new law. “At the end of the day, maybe the answer is, I love Hong Kong too much,” he said.
Well then, this must be no ordinary love that has brought Hong Kong to such a sorry state of affairs.
It must have been love, deep and resolute, that drove our opposition politicians to reject Beijing’s electoral reform package back in 2015. If they had accepted it, Hong Kong would already be electing, by universal suffrage, its chief executive – from a pool of candidates pre-screened by Beijing, sure, but still far better than nothing, which is what we have now. And we would be directly electing the entire legislature instead of still having to put up with half its seats being decided by special-interest groups.
It must have been love, love, love alone that tolerated, glossed over and encouraged the violence and vandalism that subverted what could have been a well-justified, popular mass movement for greater democracy last year but mutated into a campaign of hate and anti-national anarchy.
Don’t forget that it also laid the groundwork for Beijing to impose the sweeping national security law that is now causing so much angst and uncertainty.
Had it not been for the external elements in last year’s social unrest, the involvement of some loving foreign governments in encouraging and enabling the people unleashing chaos, the romantic waving of British and US flags on the streets, the passionate invitations for Western powers to “punish” Beijing at the cost of destroying Hong Kong because “if we burn, you burn with us”, China’s leaders would not have found an excuse to bulldoze through with such a draconian new legal regime.
Poor, love-struck Law. While the rest of us are here to face the music that he and his revolutionary comrades have orchestrated, maybe he should listen, tucked away somewhere in his safe space, to this old duet by Patty Smyth and Don Henley: “But there’s a danger in loving somebody too much/And it’s bad when you know it’s your heart you can’t trust/There’s a reason why people don’t stay where they are/Baby, sometimes love just ain’t enough.”
Yonden Lhatoo is the chief news editor at the Post
