Shoe-shiners beg CCP for slight appearance of fairness

Today’s burning question: How much should the Chinese Communist Party rig a rigged election?

Hong Kong lawmaker Regina Ip warns against an overly obvious CCP bias towards Carrie Lam in the fake poll for the city’s Chief Executive. It would, Regina fears, harm Carrie’s credibility.

This is of course true – but (believe it or not) Regina is not being purely altruistic here.

While she probably realizes that Beijing will not appoint her Chief Executive, she has by all accounts set her heart on being on the ballot for the pseudo-election this March. Yet if the Communist regime wants the charade to be a 100% rather than just a 95% stitch-up, they can always keep her name off the list. Her whining that this is unfair would be almost touching if the Leninist system were conspiring against her alone. But it is designed to exclude all 7 million Hongkongers from having a say in their own governance, and she has had years to speak out about it, had she wished.

In her frustration, she stoops to an ancient gesture of aggressive defiance and exposes herself to bystanders – albeit on the radio.

Almost as soon as Carrie announced her ‘decision’ to ‘run’, the pro-Beijing press published fawning items about her. An op-ed piece in today’s South China Morning Post lists some of them, but omits an obvious one.

The article essentially repeats the general complaint made by Regina Ip – that Beijing is more than ever abandoning any pretense that Hong Kong’s Chief Executive appointment-ritual is an election with some shred of competition, fairness or uncertainty about it…

Which brings us back to the question of how much election-rigging is too much?

The answer would appear to be: when the shoe-shiners obediently acting out their parts in the sham find it embarrassing. The 2017 exercise is looking so heavy-handed, even the media that spout propaganda are complaining that it’s looking too heavy-handed.

For Regina, this frankness is a particularly painful betrayal. She has kowtowed to the Communist god in every hideously obsequious way imaginable, dreaming of her ultimate reward, but is apparently of no further use. (Unless the script-writers decide to put her on the ballot as designated loser, to keep the relatively popular John Tsang out of the picture. Beijing’s idea of a pat on the head.)

Another way of asking the question is: At what point is the election-rigging enough? For Xi Jinping’s Communist regime, petrified by CIA-backed pan-dems launching pro-independence colour revolutions from Tsuen Wan to Tibet, the answer is, of course, never. This is no time for chabuduo.