Tung Chee Hwa and Post-Handover Hong Kong

In a 1998 article by Willy Wo-lap Lam (林合立), some hawks within the Hong Kong branch of China's Xinhua News Agency were said to be attempting to "claw back territory" by telling the Central Government that Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa (董建华) was not up to his job - and that he needed to be "supervised" by mainland cadres.

"After all, bad blood between Xinhua and Tung goes back to pre-handover times, when the former backed the candidacy of top judge Yang Ti-liang (杨铁梁) for Chief Executive," Lam wrote in Beijing's Hong Kong Policy in the First Year of Transition (in Chris Yeung, ed, Hong Kong China The Red Dawn, Prentice Hall, 1998).

If only the said supervision had gone ahead as planned and with intensity!

The article also noted that when Tung assumed the position of Chief Executive, he aspired to achieve the stature of "an East Asiatic strongman in the mode of Deng Xiaoping (邓小平) and Lee Kuan Yew (李光耀)", the two politicians he reportedly admired most.

Lam also had this cautionary tale to add: "When asked about the secret to maintaining Hong Kong's viability, Politburo member Li Ruihuan (李瑞环) cited in 1993 the fable of the Yixing (宜兴) teapot. The value of the priceless teapot from Yixing, Zhejiang province, lay in the layer upon layer of residue accumulated through decades of constant use. Some time in the Qing dynasty, such a vessel fell into the hands of a foolish woman who offered it for sale in the market. A connoisseur was willing to pay a lot of money for it. While waiting for the man to return with the money, the woman scrubbed the teapot clean, rendering it worthless. Unfortunately, in the nine months since the handover, Hong Kong has experienced the same kind of cultural and political cleansing in the name of promoting patriotism and "Chinese values". The fate of One Country Two Systems, one of the unique enterprises of humankind, hangs in the balance."