HONG KONG - It's no coincidence that the opening days of 1997 here overlap the waning days of 4694, the Chinese Year of the Rat. Because while Hong Kong leaders past, present, and future may be mouthing public pieties about Hong Kong's date with destiny later this solar year, their actions this week have displayed the baser qualities of the lunar calendar's rodent.
It's been an increasingly absurd political silly season before the 30 June handover of the British colony to China. Which is why it was so refreshing to hear today from the one woman who seems to be able to piss them all off - and who's using the Web as one platform for doing so.
How's this for starters? "He is crazy," Emily Lau says about Tung Chee-hwa, the man hand-picked by the Communist Chinese to run Hong Kong's government after China takes over.
Lau is a democratically elected member of Hong Kong's lame duck, mostly powerless legislative council - the Legco. Tung, a Hong Kong resident, will carry the title "chief executive" when Hong Kong becomes a special administrative region (SAR) of China. But he doesn't yet - which is why, in an interview Thursday, Lau was ridiculing Tung's comments to reporters the night before that he should no longer be referred to as chief executive-designate, but simply chief executive.
"If there's no SAR yet, how can he be chief executive of anything?" Lau says.
Lau, who earlier this year was named one of the 100 most powerful women in the world by the Times Magazine of London ("Do I look very powerful to you?" she said while waving her hands at her small, undecorated office in the Legislative Council chambers) has recently taken her message to the Web, where she's posting a continuously updated series of essays and announcements about events related to the handover and the Hong Kong democracy movement.
"I think the Internet is wonderful because you can build a record of what someone has said, what positions they have taken. There are those things which the people will understand ... " Lau says. " ... the trouble with media is that they're too forgetful. That's why the Internet will be so useful. If he [a politician] has really changed his mind, that's fine, but let the people see."
There's clearly some calculation behind Lau's love of the good sound bite. Before becoming a politician, she spent nearly 15 years working as a journalist for the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong Television, BBC-TV, and the Far Eastern Economic Review. But her chutzpah has paid off: In 1995, she won overwhelming reelection to her legislative seat, and she's repeatedly been voted the most admired local person in Hong Kong opinion polls.
Lau may be as popular for venting at the current British government as she is for her attacks on the Chinese. "The British are still pursuing the line laid down by Geoffrey Howe," she says about John Major's rule. "Sure, they appointed this mad dog Patten. Meanwhile, Michael Heseltine is leading trade delegations to Peking. You think the Chinese government doesn't understand what's important to them?"
She also has no illusions about her own party's goals. "The main purpose of a political party is to seize power," says Lau, who won election as an independent and is perhaps best known for her work with Frontier, a nonpartisan Hong Kong human-rights group. "We're not interested in that," she says about Frontier. "But we are interested in a good system. Human rights and the rule of law should be independent of parties."
Asked whether she or her Frontier colleagues expect to be jailed for expressing their opinions after 30 June, Lau says quietly and firmly, "Not on July 1, or anything like that. And that's precisely why we're speaking out now, to prevent that very thing from happening."
"But one fine day, when Emily Lau is no longer saying it, you will know what has happened to her."
