tim's experiment

It is difficult to sustain one’s usual optimism about the future of Hong Kong as you watch our leaders clinging stubbornly to their delusions. It is now a well-established conviction among establishment types that the Occupy wave is receding, that the population has returned to its accustomed loyalties, and that in a few weeks when the last tents have been removed from the last highway, everything will be as it was before. This has reached a telling point where the Chief Secretary offered further talks on the government’s preferred basis – that all significant points have been conceded in its favour in advance. This is now regarded as magnanimous.

This is a dangerous error. So it is perhaps worth making a few points:

The fact that 80 per cent of the population now thinks the occupations should end does not mean that having weighed up all the circumstances they think the occupations should never have started, still less that they support the government’s stand on the usual issues. Most of them, in fact, are broadly sympathetic souls who wish the protestors well and think this particular tactic has run its course. They understand and share the underlying feeling of the whole movement that a government answerable only to local millionaires and a distant despot cannot meet the needs of a sophisticated modern city.

It is a commonplace of social movements that in the first instance they are led by someone or some people who urge the superior effectiveness of asking nicely for what you want. If this does not work, then such leaders are likely to be elbowed aside by people who wish to ask less nicely. There are signs of this happening already.

The rule of law and a minibus company are an incongruous combination. Another quote from the much-quoted Lord Bingham: “litigation does not, on the whole, lead to happiness.”

Large numbers of young people are now perhaps too frustrated and exhausted to go on sleeping in the streets. After a few days or weeks back home they will be less exhausted, but more frustrated. Young minds will then turn to other ways of making their point by disturbing the peace. It is not for me to put ideas into people’s heads, but 10,000 determined and disciplined activists could certainly do things which would make our leaders wish they had encouraged the street sleepers to stay put.

The government’s Legco puppets went to a lot of trouble to discourage any possible repetition of the “by-election as referendum” tactic. This now looks a mistake. Legislators of a democratic disposition will of course wish to be seen as dedicated to the cause for which the on-street amateurs have given so much. If this wish is deprived of one obvious means of expression it will resort to others which may be less welcome.

This generation of students, like every other one, has in its turn to make the disillusioning discovery that some honorable members are not honorable, that some Justices are not just, and that many senior civil servants are happy Quislings who would with equal willingness have served Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin or Mao Zedong.  But the generation which has grown up since the handover has had to get its head round the fact that they were surrounded by lies: that the handover had ushered in a new era of happiness and prosperity, that our motherland loved us, that Hong Kong was governed by its people, that its leaders were popular, that its elections were fair, that the law was no respecter of persons, that diligence and intelligence would be rewarded and that there was some hope of you buying a flat to live in before your girlfriend was too old to have babies. They have discovered their dissatisfaction and they have discovered their power, to embarrass if not to force changes. These discoveries cannot be undone. As the great military theorist Clausewitz put it in a rather different context, it is difficult to restore limits which consisted mainly of ignorance of what was possible.

In short, re-opening the streets is a tactic. Strategy requires reform and the redress of grievances. Instead we have a government two senior members of which — the Chief Secretary and Chief Policeman — are now considered too provocative to be displayed in public. O tempora o mores.