Silenced by a shoe and he still doesn't know why

Stephen Vines
Second Opinion
Next Magazine 2010-03-25

Mr. Henry Tang's peculiar fixed grin indicates the terrible level of communication between Hong Kong's rulers and the ruled.

Almost a month has passed since the shoe throwing incident when the Chief Secretary Henry Tang demonstrated that he does a passable imitation of a lamp post but a poor imitation of a political leader.

When the unemployed Mr Man flung his shoe at Mr Tang during a youth summit the Chief Secretary looked startled, stopped reading the speech, which was anyway threatening to put people to sleep, and donned that peculiar fixed grin he favors when something is going on that he doesn't understand.

Mr Tang is far from being Hong Kong's brightest person and rarely ventures out alone without a script prepared by one of his officials so he is spared having to utter words that come out of his own head. Former US President George W. Bush had a similar problem when speaking in public and even had trouble reading out the scripts prepared for him but when, in 2008, a Iraqi protester gave him the flying shoe treatment he both managed to duck, unlike Mr Tang, and then managed to make a decent joke about the incident. Later, when back in the hands of his minders, he even managed to use the incident to make a telling point about America's aims in Iraq.

The best example of turning heckling to advantage was supplied by the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev who was on a tour of the nation explaining why the Communist Party had decided the time had come to denounce the crimes of Josef Stalin.'We all knew what was going on back then but could not do anything', he told his audience.'Why not', shouted a man at one of these meetings. Khrushchev looked up from his speech and asked,'who said that?' Total silence followed.'Now you know', he triumphantly continued.

What is staggering about the Tang incident is not just that he was completely unable to respond in any way but that his handlers did not even bother to subsequently supply him with some words that would have made it possible to turn this insult into an advantage.

It seems to be official government policy to never let officials depart from their scripts and always to miss an opportunity to use an opportunity. Thus it is that despite repeatedly being subject to colorful disruptions of his rare addresses to Legco the Chief Executive Donald Tsang can do little more than grimace or share his Chief Secretary's habit of assuming a strange looking grin.

The not very lamented first Chief Executive of the SAR, Tung Chee-hwa decided that the best way to communicate with the people of Hong Kong was to copy the habits of the leadership on the Mainland and make toneless speeches punctuated by pauses at which point the handpicked audience were expected to break into polite applause. If anyone can remember a single word of any of these speeches please do not contact me, it only shows you have an appetite for the very dull.

This tells us a great deal about the state of political leadership in Hong Kong where charisma has been surgically removed from the picture and communication is largely carried out in ways that show an alarming disregard for the people who are supposed to be the recipients of this communication.

Lively rhetoric is almost absent from Hong Kong's political scene, indeed it is a struggle to think of any political leaders who can actually manage to inspire an audience. The ailing democrat Szeto-wah is an exception; he makes very moving speeches which are greeted with rapt attention. Lamentably the democrat camp has few other people who can perform in this way and the pro-government camp largely does not even bother to try.

This is not just a matter of performance but an indication of the terrible level of communication between Hong Kong's rulers and the ruled; as this is not acknowledged things can only get worse.