My Take | The tragedy of Cheng Lai-king and the district councils
- The councils were the first local institution to become enfranchised for all eligible voters. Now, the electoral gains are being reversed, and worse
When you start in local reporting, your bosses often send you to cover boring district council meetings. In the early 1990s, when I was a cub reporter, they were still called district boards. A new constituency was then created for Castle Road in the Mid-Levels, which would subsequently merge into the Central and Western District Council.
Cheng Lai-king, back then a young local activist, had just won her Castle Road seat. She has, in an extraordinary record, held onto it ever since. You can’t do that without being truly committed to local or neighbourhood issues, unlike so many council members who won their first seats in 2019 just by shouting anti-government slogans.
I was impressed by Cheng in those first meetings. She was knowledgeable, courteous, almost kind, rather unlike the firebrand council chairwoman she has been projecting since the election landslide in November 2019 for the anti-government movement.
Many people know her for introducing Chris Tang Ping-keung, former police chief and current security secretary, at a post-election council meeting as “PK Tang”, a possible euphemistic reference to a very rude Cantonese slang.
Under her leadership, though her district council is by no means the only one, meetings often degenerate into rowdy protests and shouting matches against officials present.
