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Opinion | If Carrie Lam is governing Hong Kong and Luo Huining is supervising, who’s really in charge?
- Beijing played a wild card when its agencies asserted that they were exempt from Article 22 of the Basic Law
- They have created so much ambiguity about their roles that it can’t possibly bode well for Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy
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Is it meddling, governing or supervising? Any dictionary will tell you the three words have hugely different meanings. But in the murky politics of present-day Hong Kong, the three seem to have become interchangeable.
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Meddling, in the Hong Kong context, is Beijing poking its nose into the city’s domestic affairs. Governing, in a political context, is running a city or country. But over the past two weeks, supervising has taken on a whole new dimension in our politics.
Were Beijing’s top representatives here meddling in local affairs when they slammed opposition legislator Dennis Kwok Wing-hang for filibustering to prevent a loyalist from chairing a key Legislative Council committee?
To me, it smacked of interference but Beijing has a way of pulling out limitless jokers from a deck of cards and playing them any way it wants. For 23 years since reunification, it was commonly understood that Article 22 of the Basic Law made domestic issues off-limits to Beijing’s liaison office and other entities here.
That understanding was suddenly shaken two weeks ago when the liaison office and the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office (HKMAO) asserted that they were exempt from Article 22. After three flip-flopping statements, the Hong Kong government agreed.
What made them exempt? Simple. They are not mere mainland government departments but an extension of the central government. In some card games, a joker can be anything you want it to be. Recasting what was commonly understood as something else in the blink of an eye was a well-played joker by Beijing.
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