Dear Mr Chief Executive, If you're reading, I would like to propose a New Year's resolution for you. History has taught us that there are two kinds of leaders. On the one hand, there are those who are pulled by the tide of events that surround them. Their actions are largely reactions, doing their best but hardly enough to control what goes on under their leadership.
They are the late Qing emperors, who fell prey to the opium trade, or the Leonid Brezhnevs who are forced into invading Czechoslovakia. They are the Jimmy Carters held hostage by a hostage situation in Iran, and they are the former governors of Hong Kong, powerless to initiate any change with 1997 forever looming on the horizon.
On the other hand, there are those leaders who push history forward. These are the men and sometimes women who make a stand, who dictate their own course of events and force society - and the world - to react to their ideas and initiatives. Their names and faces are, obviously, more memorable. They are the Mao Zedongs, the Franklin Delano Roosevelts, and even the Adolf Hitlers. History can be pushed both forwards and backwards, after all.
For now Mr Tung, the jury is out on which category of leaders you belong to. You are in the privileged position of being one of those rare individuals who could single-handedly push history in a decidedly forward and positive direction. There is no uber-nationalism here that wants to rule the world. Only a sense of growing identity, a kind of special administrative regionalism, if you will, that wants simply to rule itself. So here you are, at the crossroads of leadership and backed by the democratic forces of the Hong Kong people. What are you going to do?
As it may or may not have occurred to you already, Hong Kong's democratisation movement depends on you. No matter how many editorials are published in these pages, no matter how hard the people push, or how many bills the Legislative Council tries to pass, there is no way around the constitutional edict of the Basic Law. It states how, ultimately, everything in Hong Kong is subject to the consent of the chief executive.
You may argue, as the pundits do, that Beijing is where the buck really stops, not your desk. But history is not bound by authority. Quite the opposite, history is often made through the defiance of authority. The greatest leaders are the ones who dared to think - and act - outside the box. You are in Beijing's box, Mr Tung; imagine what you could do if you stepped out of it. Imagine how attentively the world would listen if the man to whom Beijing has entrusted Hong Kong stood up and said that the position of chief executive must be selected by means of universal suffrage and direct elections.
