Whatever happened to former Security Secretary Regina Ip’s New People’s Party? One minute they were poised to become the silent-majority, sensible-centrist, ultra-moderate, middle-class answer to the trouble-making, unpatriotic radical chic of the Civic Party. The next minute they’ve faded into obscurity. But wait! Here they are, advertised on a minibus to remind us that they are still around, and that there is more to them than their dominatrix leader and her plutocrat-with-a-conscience sidekick Michael Tien. 
Out of curiosity, I have to investigate Legward Wong. (Mock not: it’s a real, if obscure, Anglo family line, not a clunky transliteration of his given name, which is Cheuk-kin.) The popular belief is that Regina acquired her young followers at Stanford University and through her Savantas ‘think-tank’ and thus, it loosely follows, they are probably a bunch of vaguely well-intentioned losers on the make. As opposed to the trendy, youthful idealists manning the pro-democracy barricades, and the trainee-despot patriot-thugs obediently tending the grassroots for the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment Etc of HK and similar true Leftist groups.
To get straight to the point, Legward is less uncool than you might expect, at least for a former ‘Hong Kong Spirit Ambassador’ and winner of an ATV ‘Loving Heart’ award. I mean: Bioengineering. And he was in Sweden, no less, practicing prosthetics and orthotics. (Whaddya mean, what is it? It’s the design, manufacture and application of orthoses – of course.) And he’s pretty serious about making life better for the elderly, which is one of those subjects that are desperately important but way too icky for most of us to want to even think about.
What’s this leading to? It’s to put things in context. Parts of the pro-Beijing camp are gearing up for the coming clash with the pro-democracy, Occupy Central, True Universal Suffrage movement. Former Secretary for Justice Elsie Leung offers a (surely superfluous) warning that the Chinese government would intervene if Hong Kong elected a counter-revolutionary splittist as Chief Executive. More entertainingly, Polytechnic U’s WK Chan accuses Occupy Central visionary Professor Benny Tai of trying to screen out people who don’t share his belief in the Anglo-American democracy that is collapsing in on itself in the Western World as we speak.
The charge that the people fighting a filtering mechanism for candidates in the 2017 CE election are filtering out opposing views sort of sticks, though both sides in 
this looming clash are equally guilty. The ‘Voice of Loving HK’ and ‘Protect Central’ folk who shouted (and ultimately shut) down yesterday’s Alliance for True Democracy meeting could truthfully complain that the ‘British dog’ organizers hadn’t invited them, even if the Alliance had grandly requested the presence of National People’s Congress sub-chairman Qiao Xiaoyang. Conversely, if the pro-Beijing groups were to hold a gathering, they wouldn’t ask the pro-dems to come along. (Compare the two sides. Each regards the other as puppets. Both can be embarrassing; the pro-Beijing rabble yesterday played into the pan-dems’ hands by silencing the event with their venom. The gap between them is cultural; Hong Kong is the city where East most definitely does not meet West, except to heckle.)
If Beijing is to implement political reform in Hong Kong for 2017, it will have to split the pro-dems. It would not hurt if at the same time it distanced itself from the more mouth-frothing, hate-spewing elements in its own camp and relied more upon the relatively cuddly moderates who give the United Front a human face. So we might be seeing a bit more of the Legwards, Clarices and Huberts. (Hubert – University of Woolongong and… fashion design. Obviously.)
You don’t have to divide the Wombles, sorry the Democrats.
They’re all knives and forks already. When they’re not knifing each other. they’re telling each other to fork off.
You were lucky to see pictures of Regina Ip’s brigade on a minibus. It quickly disappears. But they have a railing poster outside the Wellcome supermarket here. Every trip for a box of wine or a fresh wad of condoms, and there is Vagina, staring at you like an English Mastiff.
Not hard to see why ‘back end of a bus’ was chosen for the ad of these three.
Sorry typo … Interesting that the pro-democrats are having their own tactics used against them to good effect. Long Hair and his mates have been disrupting meetings and forums for years without a whisper from the moderate pro-democrats. It must hurt when the tables are turned.
Hubert’s company’s designs, and English grammar, are rather embarrassing, even by the standard of the usual fare of HK fashion.
http://www.glinteq.com/
His bio (linked from blog) sounds exceptionally pompous and elitist, though that’s probably his party’s main constituency, or at least those aspiring to that mindset.
Today’s SCMPropaganda sign that the end is nigh free-press and freedom-of-speech-wise wasn’t those Beijing-funded rent-a-thugs shouting down a democracy forum on a university campus, it was this:
http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/article/1209748/hong-kong-nets-only-small-fry-laundering-illegal-chinese-money
We all know that story, but what’s telling that the SCMP now chooses, very much after the fact, to run a generic Reuters story about HK events that leave more questions than answers, instead of doing real reporting that would have an SCMP reporter’s name on the byline. Gutless.
The NPP are an interesting bunch. I have to wonder about the ratio of clean cut young lads who seem to pop up as party candidates, purely circumstantial im sure. Also interesting is despite the middle class attraction that Hemmers mentions are their efforts in areas that may well be considered DAB patches. The NPP are certainly worth watching.
Breaking news, possibly vaguely related to Legover Wong’s bioengineering feats: just as Sars was obviously an American devil plot to divert attention from the war in Iraq, so the smog, sorry fog and H7N9 are manifestly evil American devil bioengineering plots to er er hurt the feelings of every Chinese.
They must resolutely face the consequences which er are something to do with devaluing the yuan and making it convertible with the Cypriot euro.
It is a sad day that I have to take BL to task for misrepresentation! According to Legover’s blurb, he was only nominated in ATV’s “Hong Kong Top Ten Loving Hearts”. I’m sure if he’d won, he’d be crowing about it and have the post-nominal letters after his name to prove it. As is stands, clearly he wasn’t even the 10th Loving Heart in Hong Kong, the callous bastard!
Polytechnic U’s WK Chan’s splenetic assault in “China Daily” on Professor Benny Tai is a curious piece of work. Chan is not so much from PolyU as from PolyU’s community college annex, so this is not exactly a clash of academic titans (any monkey can get a job at one of Hong Kong’s SPACE colleges; I should know, I was once one of them).
If Chan was one of my undergraduate students and had he bare-faced temerity to hand this article to me as an essay he would be on immediate plagiarism charges. Chan’s perfunctory remarks on Niall Ferguson’s “The Great Degeneration” are almost entirely a crib of Amazon’s Book Description:
“… representative government, the rule of law and civil society, the three essential pillars of Western societies …” — Chan Wai-keung
“Representative government, the free market, the rule of law and civil society: these were once the four pillars of West European and North American societies …” – Amazon Book Description (Chan has, for some reason, elided one of the pillars)
“Western democracies have broken the contract between the generations …” — Chan Wai-keung
“Our democracies have broken the contract between the generations …” — Amazon Book Description
“The Western rule of law has woefully metamorphosed into the autocratic rule of lawyers.” — Chan Wai-keung
“The rule of law has metamorphosed into the rule of lawyers.” — Amazon Book Description
PolyU, sack this egergious scoundrel!
Big Al, That IS Bela Lugosi you’re talking about?
Alllen Zemen was a TT Loving Hearter last time around, as I recall from the incessant plugs. There must be a real shortage of decent folk about for that to happen.
Scoff, mock and ridicule as much as you want, but you are here looking at the future Bunny Chans of Hong Kong. Only a matter of time before Legward becomes a JP. Hubert is already a ‘vice-convenor’, so the sky is the limit, I’d reckon.
An artificial limb designer named Legward: you can’t make this up !
Hubert’s company logo is, says his website, “combining from [sic] a Traditional Chinese Phoenix and a Traditional Western Dragon”. Just as he seems unsure whether he’s Chinese or Welsh, he also seems unsure how to spell his company name – the tab says “TENG Fashion”, but the page spells it “TANG”.
Broomhead & Legward aren’t the only ones – we’ve also got James Teen (we speak Cantonese if you hadn’t noticed by now, you Sheunghoi f*cker!) still plastered over minibuses plying the roads here north of Boundary Street.
We speak up! We deliver!
I sometimes just have to laugh all the way through the comments. Today is one of those days
I have absolutely no idea why the BL (that’s Big Lychee, not Bela Lugosi ) is blocked in China. Sometimes I cannot even understand what Hemmers is writing these days, not to mention the hilarious comments. So I’m sure the mainland censors cannot understand a word of it
BTW : don’t Legward and Hubert look so super-serious ?! Reminds me of my ( awful pretentious) self at that age . Are these the future CY’s of HK ?
As an aside, Wollongong is a shithole. Anyone choosing to educate themselves here is retarded or desperate or both.
The witch is dead!
Not doing a Nuri here but Legward, Hubert and Clarince, its so ridiculous it’s almost sad. Then add on the ATV director Rimsky, and you see how out of touch the parents are. Money clearly can’t buy brains. We have a global laughing stock in the making to add to the joke that HK has created.
Wish the evil fuckers in the north would die and join her.
Difference between Long Hair disrupting a meeting and Loving Bigotry For A Harmonious HK is that Long Hair gets arrested by the HK branch of the Public Security Bureau and the pro-govt meeting gets to continue with Long Hair and friends sentenced at a later date for breaking flower pots or something.
And I find it amusing that the CCP’s loons choose to quote a despot-loving apologist of colonialism like Niall Ferguson. Hong Kong, the mainland’s colony of choice for money laundering and deposit of corrupt cash in stable no risk HK property.
Well-said, Tom
Nice one Tom.