tim's experiment

There is an old rule in journalism that you should not start a piece with a quotation. But there are exceptions to all rules, including this one. A good example is a piece by Albert Cheng in Saturday’s SCMP. This starts with a long quote. The gist of it is that the writer had tea with Donald Tsang and suggested that the government’s problems stemmed from failure to genuinely consult the people, and this deficiency could be remedied by better use of the existing consultation machinery. The author adds that Mr Tsang did not seem to take the point.

Mr Cheng then teases his readers by saying that they may suppose this quote to be from a critic of the government. Not so. Apparently it is from Mr Lew Mon-hung, a CPPCC member and a former member of the government think tank. This is really not that surprising. How many of the government’s critics are entertained to a chat over tea with Mr Tsang?

Mr Cheng thinks this is surprising, and so do I. But we think so for different reasons. Mr Cheng thinks it is surprising because in his view Mr Lew is overlooking his “duty to help the Hong Kong government implement various policies”. Mr Cheng objects to the “incompetence of some CCPC members from Hong Kong”. Their criticisms “supply the media with endless fodder, and provided significant leverage for the opposition to further weaken the government’s authority.” The duty of the government’s allies is to support it in a “disciplined” way. Members of the CPPCC are entitled to express their opinions, but only in private. and “maybe it’s time to weed out unqualified CPPCC and NPC members and bogus supporters”.

This seems to me a very fine example of the sort of thinking which got the government into its present mess. There used to an advertisement for (I think) toothpaste based on the idea that only your best friends will tell you if you have bad breath.  Many years ago a mainland official asked me if it would be possible to recruit advisers for the government in Hong Kong and I told him that it would be easy to recruit advisers but difficult to recruit advisers who would be willing to offer advice which was not welcome. He agreed. I was surprised by the quote from Mr Lew, not because I expect CPPCC members to support the government in a robotic fashion but because generally that is all they do. Mr Lew took the opportunity to give Mr Tsang some valuable advice — all the more valuable because it could not be discredited at source by being put put down to political hostility or opposition.

No doubt it would be useful to the government to have a chorus of dependable cheerleaders and Mr Cheng is obviously well qualified to be cheerleader in chief. But it would be even more useful to have a few people who cannot be dismissed as malcontents or Martin Lee fans or closet demogogues or whatever, who are prepared to tell the government publicly and privately what they think it is doing wrong and how it is viewed by ordinary members of society who would like to see it prosperous and popular. The suggestion that all in-house critics should be expelled from the advisory mechanism is just prompting the government to go further down a blind alley in which it has already spent far too long.