點新聞
Through dots, we connect.
讓世界看到彩色的香港 讓香港看到彩色的世界
標籤

Opinion | Hong Kong needs a heart transplant, not a facelift

The Chinese national flags and flags of the Hong Kong SAR flutter in Hong Kong. (Xinhua)

By Philip Yeung, A university teacher

PKY480@gmail.com

I have come to blame Hong Kong officials, not to praise them. 

America and its allies have been barking up the wrong tree. They berate Beijing for trampling Hong Kong's rights and freedoms. But it was the abuse of freedom and an excess of negative politics that have made things ugly.

Don't blame Beijing. The root of this unholy mess is that it is run by charlatans who pass themselves off as elites. To govern well, you need a team of talented problem-solvers. When local officials see a problem coming, they run for the exit or dance around it. 

Worse, they display a "let-them-eat-cake" attitude. Only here can a political assistant take home the pay of a US Vice President.  

All the principal officials, regardless of rank, are detested by the people, to a varying degree, with their popularity ratings permanently underwater. When the pent-up fury erupted, politics hijacked it, with a transfer of hostility from the local to the central government—a fact cleverly exploited by America to turn the city into a pawn in its chess game with China. 

Look at the litany of woes: from a city of unlimited opportunities to a hotbed of stupid politics. A level playing field is now a playground for property tycoons who have sucked the energy out of the city. Free elite public schools now charge fees to keep poor students out. 

Hong Kong is a purgatory for the poor. The comedians have all quit because people are too sad to laugh at jokes. 

Once upon a time, if you were born poor, you had two escape routes from poverty—education or self-employment, however humble. Both channels are now closed. 

The poor are in an Indian-like caste system--trapped in poverty for life, with no glimmer of hope, not even a glimpse of the blue sky from their windowless coffin units. 

The tell-tale signs of official failure are everywhere--in the colorful names for subhuman dwellings: nano-flats, coffin homes, cage beds, rooftop huts, and subdivided units. These names will shame any government but not ours. It has no sense of shame.

Hong Kong is a first-world city run by third-world bumbling idiots, with high pay but a low ability worthy of a banana republic. Under them, "One Country, Two Systems" has become a laughingstock. Our housing unaffordability is through the roof, and so is our misery index. Tiny Macau looks down on us. Singapore points to us as an object lesson in how not to govern.

For many, life is a curse. For their children, schooling is no better than warehousing. In Band-3 schools, two or three students out of a hundred make it each year into college. The rest are bridesmaids, bored to the core, with no employable skills. Their boredom is laced with anger and despair. These forgotten children of the poor are ripe for manipulation by political opportunists. 

Officials are given an iron rice bowl with no requirement to serve and no punishment for inaction. 

You only need lips for this job, this being "a government by platitude." Periodically, they mouth the right buzz words. Their brains are in deep freeze, defrosted only when they leave public service. 

Their heart is in hibernation. It beats only when they buy or sell real estate for profit. 

They wriggle out of every problem and lie cunningly with statistics--under-reporting rising jobless or suicide rates. Without an unemployment insurance program that tracks joblessness, they are free to play the numbers, keeping the jobless rate hovering around 6% even at the height of the pandemic, inching up by decimal points.

They are clever at finding reasons not to do anything. Law Chi Kwong, Secretary for Labour and Welfare, dismisses the need for jobless benefits because they make people lazy! The unemployed are shoved onto welfare rolls, but the handout won't even rent half of a subdivided flat. Yet, income tax is dutifully deducted from every paycheck. 

Workers sink or swim by themselves. Suicide pacts or family homicides are reported matter-of-factly almost on a daily basis. 

Officials have long floated the idea of a universal pension plan. They will talk till the kingdom come. In the meantime, they have given themselves the world's most generous pensions, with multi-million payouts upon retirement and superannuation payments deposited monthly into their bank accounts. Pensions are your headaches, not theirs. 

This rotten system must go. Amend the Basic Law and revoke their colonial-era perks designed for British expatriates, including sending their children to Britain for education at public expense. 

These perks are colonial hangovers that belong in the dustbin of history. Meanwhile, officials' children have deserted the public school system en masse. In Singapore, this is a crime.

The city needs a heart transplant, not a facelift. 

Once famous for its efficiency, Hong Kong is now synonymous with incompetence: long delays, cost over-runs, and criminally shoddy work in infrastructure projects. And yet, no heads have rolled.

So much for our Accountability System. 

The civil service is awash with secret British subjects. Their eyes are on their bank accounts, but their hearts are in Britain, where their kids attend school. The emotional allegiance among the self-important Administrative Officers 

(the so-called AO clique) is to their former colonial masters, not to their people and their sovereign. 

The public servants I admire are police officers. Respected for their restraint, they bear the brunt of public discontent and are singled out for abuse as scapegoats for doing their duty. 

America and its allies have offered asylum to Hong Kong activists. It should cover another category: our senior officials. After all, they have long been refugees from responsibility and are deep-dyed yellow sympathizers in the "Color Revolution." Their departure would instantly improve governance.

Our patience has run out. Without competent and caring leaders, we can only pray for 2047 to come early, before Hong Kong is declared a failed city.

 

The views do not necessarily reflect those of DotDotNews.

Comment

Related Topics

New to old 
New to old
Old to new
relativity
Search Content 
Content
Title
Keyword