Opinion | After the extradition protests, it’s time to be pro-Hong Kong, to fix the leadership crisis and liberate the city’s potential
- The unprecedented protests have focused an avowedly apolitical and disparate city like never before. Hong Kong’s challenges run deep and can’t be addressed under the current system. Only a change that brings in critical voices can break the impasse
Unprecedented peaceful protests – student marchers joined by parents, young children, the elderly, those with disabilities, Christians, labour and business groups – have brought Hong Kong to a halt. Not physically – the city is hard-wired for work – but philosophically.
As prominent local barrister Margaret Ng Ngoi-yee put it, you may be safe now in Hong Kong but after the amendment to the Fugitive Offenders Ordinance is passed, you would no longer be safe. The sudden knowledge that the law would affect anyone visiting, in transit, or doing business in the city unleashed deep unease across broad swathes of society, including among foreign chambers of commerce, banks and multinationals with regional headquarters here.
Yet, at its heart, the issue is about vision – or the lack of it. Hong Kong faces a crisis of leadership in a system where the chief executive is selected rather than elected. In this top-down structure, there is no accountability to the people. Hong Kong's chief executives remain so divorced from realities on the ground that we have reached a debilitating impasse.
The city’s leaders have not gone through a gruelling democratic system. Candidates like Lam come from the civil service, where their work may have been exemplary but, as leaders, they have failed miserably. There is a yawning difference between a bureaucrat who takes orders and a leader with vision.
