« The Many Meanings of “Ho” | Main | Full Disclosure »
February 3, 2005
Grassroots Revolt
This story about the organizers of the HK anti-Albert Cheng rally on 1 January 2005 is a curious example that grassroots organizing is not necessarily the monopoly of the so-called “democratic” camp:
As the discussions proceeded and they were condemning Albert Cheng, in came the supporters of Albert Cheng who began to repeat their own posts continuously to interrupt the discussion. Technically, this is known as "cleansing the board." This dirty trick ignited outrage and everybody kept posting and posting. This battle went on for more than half a day, and then suddenly one frustrated netizen suggested that they ought to organize a spontaneous demonstration to protest against the evil politicians. Once they are out on the street in numbers, what would the politicans do then? They could not be doing bulletin board cleansing anymore. This suggestion soon drew several thousand affirmative responses. At this point, the human resources recruiter proposed that people show up at the police station on December 18th to file an application for a January 1st march.
While the source, Bauhinia magazine, may seem a little too close to the mainland for reliability, I find this particular story to be believable. The truth is that characters like Albert Cheng and “Long Hair” Leung Kwok-Hung are by no means “democrats”: the classification merely comes from their constant attacks on the SAR government, in Cheng's case tracing back to his talk radio days.
In fact, Cheng and Leung are populists, merely people who simultaneously fire up popular opinion for themselves while following the opinions of the mob like dogs follow their masters. Cheng's radio show technique, after all, mostly consists of interrupting dissenting opinions. So when Cheng overplayed his cards by putting himself into the Link REIT privatization case, it's no surprise that the unprincipled Cheng would find himself staring into such immense opposition.
The real democratic camp, therefore, would have much to gain by distancing itself from these fruitcakes and working realistically with the SAR and central governments, while maintaining their principled positions.
Posted by Kelvin at February 3, 2005 10:28 PM
Trackback Pings
TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.kelvin-chan.net/mt/mt-tb.cgi/44
Comments
Post a comment
Thanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out)
(If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.)