Taking a WikiLeak

Chip Tsao
Chip Tsao

September 8, 2011

While it is common knowledge that the SAR chief executive has long become a man of straw heading a Vichy-like puppet regime under the increasingly defunct “One Country, Two Systems” formula, it will come as a great relief for most Hongkongers to discover that our territory is actually being run de facto by the US government on Garden Road (the lesser of the two evils), according to the latest revelations from Julian Assange, the man in charge of the global political scare site known as WikiLeaks.

Beijing would certainly not be amused by the fact that not only has the Consul-General of the United States usurped the authority of the Hong Kong CPC Municipal Committee Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, but they would also be irritated by the fact that party leaders and legislators from across the political spectrum have been making pilgrimages to the top dining table, hosted by their alternative Uncle Sam master, to back-stab each other whilst enjoying their 12-ounce Colorado-raised angus beef steak.

Henry Tang was described as “impotent” by former legislator Albert Cheng, who divulged to his host on Garden Road that Tang was a Hobson’s choice preferred by his good friend Donald Tsang, so that government secretaries could report directly to him and let the former Shanghai textile sibling sip his red wine and have a good time—a case the Americans must have understood with a deja vu smile as they recalled when Nixon picked Spiro Agnew to be his vice president in 1968. James To Kun-sun, a leading democrat, asked how the White House could help to prevent Beijing’s infiltration into his party, a request that would have been granted instantly had John Hoover been alive and still in charge of the CIA. That made Tsang Yok-sing, chairman of the Legislative Council and a founder of the communist-sponsored DAB, look desperately vain as he complained to his underground American sovereigns that he and some of his colleagues had been misunderstood, because they belong to the “progressive” wing of their party and favor universal franchise. I wonder how his host reacted to such self-image laundering. Tsang must have forgotten the motto still widely believed in the White House and Congress: “There is no such thing as a good communist. The only good communist is a dead communist.”

A can of worms has been opened. Our “Centralists”—as those elites apparently in charge of Hong Kong and active in the region of the Legislative Council, the Hong Kong Club and Yung Kee’s VIP rooms proudly call themselves—must be sweating as they glance up embarrassingly at any subtle change of expression on the inscrutable face of Beijing. It’s like joining a Roman orgy in a dark room, and then the lights are suddenly switched on. While everyone is naked and getting very wet, what a surprise it is to discover who is there and who is not.