Who are the ‘ bad apples’?
The opposition camp is making a huge fool of itself by staging a lousy show of thieves crying “stop thief” and accusing Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying of dividing Hong Kong society. Everybody knows it is the radical opposition groups that have started all the political confrontations since the handover, including attempts to block the implementation of major policies concerning people’s well-being, character assassination against principal officials and those who don’t agree with them, interrupting meetings between government officials and local residents, denying other people’s right to speak in public, verbally abusing police officers on duty whenever they want and openly undermining social order and the rule of law by repeatedly violating the Public Security Ordinance.
The radical opposition groups are solely responsible for causing the degeneration of Hong Kong’s political culture. By accusing the SAR government and others of dividing Hong Kong society, they have confused right and wrong. It is yet more evidence that they are doing everything they can to split Hong Kong society further apart. The saddest truth about their insidious acts is that Hong Kong has been losing competitiveness and unable to advance economic development as much as it should as a result of the opposition camp’s political sabotage, and all 7 million-strong local residents have to bear the cost of their inexcusable deeds.
It was the British colonial government that sowed the seeds of political degeneration in Hong Kong by denying local residents practically all political rights for one and a half centuries until it was certain it wouldn’t be able to stay in Hong Kong beyond 1997. In order to maintain its imperialist influence and protect its interests in Hong Kong after the handover, the colonial rulers suddenly realized the city needed democracy and cultivated a crop of anti-Beijing organizations during the transitional period. The purpose of such manipulations was to create a “state within a state” that would serve Britain’s strategic interests after the handover.
There is no question at all who is to blame for the rotten state of Hong Kong’s political ecosystem today. The opposition parties nurtured and controlled by Western powers are the culprits no matter how hard they deny it. This is an excerpted translation of a Hong Kong Commercial Daily editorial published on Aug 15.