My Take | Yellow ribbon torn as infighting erupts
With Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and former lawmaker Wong Yuk-man embroiled in a public war of words, who needs mainland communists as enemies?
The summer heat must be getting into people’s heads. How else can you explain why some of the city’s most prominent public figures are going at each other’s throats?
No, I wasn’t thinking about the tongue-lashing former chief executive Leung Chun-ying gave to veteran journalist Francis Moriarty over an invitation by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club to Hong Kong National Party boss Andy Chan Ho-tin to talk about independence for the city.
Rather, I was thinking about a new row between two of Hong Kong’s fiercest anti-communists, media boss Jimmy Lai Chee-ying and former legislator Wong Yuk-man.
Commenting in his own newspaper, Apple Daily, Lai wrote that unless “the dynasty of Xi Jinping” collapses, Hong Kong is finished. “The politics of strongman and emperor Xi is slowly eroding the city’s core values of justice, culture and education,” Lai wrote.
But while the focus of his article was on Xi, he couldn’t help taking a swing at Wong and several others usually associated with the radical localist movement, including Horace Chin Wan-kan, often called the father of localism, and Wong Yeung-tat, founder of the radical localist group Civic Passion.
