tim's experiment

Readers may have been wondering, as I have, for many months how the election by universal suffrage of the next Chief Executive was going to be fixed. That it was going to be fixed was never in doubt. We are dealing with democracy with Chinese characteristics here. Elections are only allowed if they can be fixed.

The broad outlines of how this will be done are now clear. The Nomination Committee will be pretty much the same shower who were the electors last time round. Any candidate who wishes to run will need more than half of the votes of the committee. Of course this would leave us with a maximum of one candidate, and we can’t have that. So each committee member will be given three votes, thereby ensuring that there will be three candidates. This will produce three trusted candidates, every one of whom will no doubt be a notorious creep owning at least two illegally-adornment-infested houses in the best parts of town. And we will be graciously allowed to choose between any of them who survives the election period without coming up with some no-no like a noisy mistress or an illegal basement.

This is a preposterous arrangement. Even if the nominating committee were genuine  it would be a recipe for three identical candidates offering a minimum of genuine choice. The nominating committee is in effect a vetting committee. And we can all guess what sorts of candidates will be vetted out. No doubt we will be told that candidates who wear the label of a major political party or have massive visible public support can still be nominated. But they can also still be not nominated, and that is what will happen to any of them who threatens to divert the election from its intended course, which will probably be the re-election of C.Y. Leung.

Any derogation or dilution of this catastrophic arrangement will be presented as a major concession by the comrades to the people of Hong Kong, the implication of this being that we should gratefully shut up and accept the result as a legitimate representative of us all, even if the winner turns out to be Lufsig again.

Next year: how to fiddle Legco.