What does the public make of the new administration under chief executive-elect Leung Chun-ying? There are those who continue to harp on his pro-Beijing background, reducing everything into the same old pro-democracy versus pro-Beijing struggle which has haunted Hong Kong politics since the pre-1997 transition.
But things do not need to play to a doomsday script. Leung is certainly someone from within the establishment whom Beijing trusts. However, he did not emerge from the establishment inner-circle that has dominated Hong Kong governance. Throughout his campaign and after his election, Leung has positioned himself as a challenger promising change and new thinking on social and economic issues, such as housing and the environment.
Hong Kong has to get out of the political quagmire in which it has been trapped for years. The city's politics is a no-win game.
Mainland officials often wonder why the government has not been able to implement an 'executive-led' system, as the former British administration claimed to have successfully done. The reason is not just that we have a vocal opposition that favours confrontational politics. Our system is defective; this is the result of attempts during the Sino-British negotiations in the 1980s to preserve an outdated modus operandi that has proved to be incompatible with political and social realities after 1997.
The present system fails to confer a bottom-up political mandate to the chief executive, and executive-legislative relations are disconnected and unstable, to say the least. Three decades of district and legislative elections have bred the rise of political parties that nevertheless have no hope of being 'in government'. Thus, most have opted to play the opposition in different degrees - curbing government power and questioning its actions.
If Leung is keen on a more proactive government, he has not only to forge a social consensus on such a paradigm shift by reaching out to various sectors in the community, but also to win over the legislature in supporting an expansion of the government's role. This entails politics. With the pro-democracy versus pro-Beijing dichotomy dominating political debate, it is easy to point fingers at government officials and to sow the seeds of distrust in any authority, except possibly the judiciary.
Hong Kong is not alone in such difficulty; in other developed societies, citizens are also becoming increasingly sceptical and distrusting of their governments and politicians, so that efforts are often ignored and issues amplified.
