Yauh Chau, Yauh Yit
Saturday morning, Long Hair calls. "I'll be protesting on Paterson Street this afternoon, why don't you meet me there?" He doesn't say who or what he'll be protesting, but when I get to Causeway Bay around 3pm, I'm not surprised to find a Regina Ip rally in full swing. She's sitting on a chair in the middle of the pedestrian street in front of a banner that says "Show the power of Facebook! Show your support for Regina!" Apparently, Ip is using Facebook as a campaign tool which strikes me as a terrific tactic--if you are running for freshman class president. (Catfight alert! Anson Chan has joined the Facebook campaign, too--and she has four times as many "friends" as Regina...)
I glance around, and sure enough, to Ip's right, there's a long bamboo pole swaying to and fro above the former Security Secretary's head. At the top end of the pole is a bright red banner with lots of hand-lettered Chinese characters I can't read. At the bottom end of the pole is Long Hair.
"What does this say?," I ask him, and he smiles. "Hard to explain. It's like a Chinese poem. I say that Regina Ip is like a toilet stone." As I stand there, looking totally bewildered, Long Hair's assistant, Peter, trying to be helpful, chimes in: "Chinese toilet stones."
"Never mind," says Long Hair. "I'll explain it to you later. Too bad you are late. You didn't see me hand my petition to Regina. She said I was a nice person, a gentleman. That's because I opened a door for her once at Legco. She was very surprised and didn't expect it, so she hesitated. And then the door slammed in her face. Accidentally of course. "
He is playful, gleeful, grinning and dancing restlessly from one foot to another. Long Hair lives for these street confrontations. "Look at her--see how nervous I make her? She cannot relax because she knows I am right here. So I will follow Regina around for the next two weeks. This is a war!"
Ip is wrapping up. She finishes her speech and heads to a waiting car, surrounded by her security guys.
"Hey, we're going to go out now to support some of our district council candidates. Want to come?"
Of course I can't refuse Long Hair's invitation to get an inside look at Hong Kong's district council elections. So I wait while his supporters roll up the "toilet stone" banner, and we head for the Cheung Mo-mobile, a white panel truck completely painted over with Long Hair's caricature, his name, and various political slogans. The van is the nerve center of Long Hair's mobile protest operation--in the back there's a huge stack of black speakers, a couple of loudhailers, cartons overflowing with leaflets, folding tables, a couple of bamboo poles for banners. When we get stuck in traffic at the approach for the Eastern Tunnel, passing truckdrivers wave, and taxis beep their horns or roll down the window to yell, "Waaay! Cheung Mo!.
We're headed for Kwun Tong, where one of Long Hair's long-time colleagues, Chan Po Ying, is running for district council in a three-way race. The district, which has 14,422 voters, consists of seven buildings in a public housing estate, Tsui Ping South. Chan, a single mother of 51 who has a masters degree in social work, is a community activist. For seven years she ran an NGO for women workers that's headquarted in Tsui Ping South estate. Now she is running for the council seat here under the banner of the League of Social Democrats.
The common wisdom about Hong Kong's district council elections is that the voters aren't concerned with big issues like universal suffrage, but with the everyday problems in their communities--sidewalk cracks, dangerous intersections, smelly garbage. That's why the pro-Beijing DAB is supposedly so sucessful getting their candidates elected at this level--because they concentrate on the little problems, the local stuff. (And because they, notoriously, have an endless Yangtze River flow of mysterious funds--enought to take busloads of elderly people out for outings and lunches on election day).
The LSD doesn't have lunch money, but Po-Ying's background in community work, and her track record as a social worker in this housing estate would seem to make her a very attractive candidate.
We pull into the estate, a grey institutional block of deteriorating high-rise buildings (the estate dates from 1989, which in Hong Kong terms means it's ancient). This is the other side of "boom boom Hong Kong". Sad laundry sags from racks sticking out of most of the windows.
The estates around here were built to house the workers in the nearby factories--Kwun Tong was once one of Hong Kong's major manufacturing centers. Now most of the factories have moved across the border. The people who live here work as low wage cleaners and store clerks. If they work at all. Since the current economic bubble has lifted property values in all Hong Kong's neighborhoods, not just the rich ones, rents are soaring, and nobody who lives here now can afford to move out of their dingy, but subsidized, government housing.
In the distance, I see a band of about 20 young women and children wearing yellow vests. They are holding bright yellow banners on poles and chanting, "Chan Po-Ying! Tauh sam hou!" Vote Number 3! Chan Po Ying.
Po Ying--whom I've known casually for about three years--spots me and waves excitedly. A campaign supporter runs over and grabs my hand, "Gan ngodeih la!" Follow us! At this point, Long Hair decides to bail. "I better go to Shatin now...I'm late to help my buddy running for DC up there. Stay here with Po Ying, you will find it interesting." He jumps in the Cheung-Mo-mobile, and speeds off.
I fall in with the little yellow parade. We weave through the concrete platforms between the buildings. Then, suddenly, we stop in front of a high rise, and assemble in formation. Chan Po Ying steps out in front, takes a mike that is connected to a loudhailer, faces the wall of windows and hanging laundry, and begins to speak about minimum wage, the hard times faced by working people, the problems of the estate.
At first it seems very strange--there are only a few elderly people around listening. It seems like Chan is literally talking to walls, delivering speeches to the sides of buildings. But the logic of this form of campaigning quickly becomes apparent. Since you can't drive around in the estate (there are only footpaths and large concrete plinths, typical of Hong Kong's dreary institutional public housing architecture), you can't use a truck with a loudspeaker here. And since there's no MTR exit to stand by, nor any high-trafficked path, shouting at hanging laundry seems like the best way to make contact with voters in this estate.
Still, it seems like a lot of effort for very little result. As I troop with the troops, I fall into conversation with one of Chan's supporters, a bright young woman just out of college who worked as an intern in Chan's NGO office here. "I hope that Chan will win, but it will be hard. Because there is another guy running from the Civic Party in this district."
I'm shocked to hear this. The Civic Party, the Democratic Party and the LSD were supposed to be cooperating in the district council races, to make sure they formed a united front against the DAB. In other words, there aren't supposed to be two pan-Democratic candidates running in the same district. What happened?
"I don't know," says the supporter. "They are badly organized." The Civic Party sent a "parachute" candidate into Tsui Ping, 26 year old Kwan Chi-kin. He doesn't live in the district, and has not been a community organizer here--he's an unknown. He will split the pro-democracy vote, for sure. Incumbent Fung Mei-wan, the DAB sympathizer, will certainly win. (And the following day, Fung handily wins re-election, with 2,838 votes to Chan's 359 and Kwan's 887).
"The Civic Party has only one tactic--to get as much media attention as they can. But that doesn't work in a district council election," sighs the young supporter. "You need to understand the needs of the grassroots." She is too polite to put it more directly: the comfortable lawyers and professionals in the Civic Party haven't a clue about how to speak to the heart of a Hong Kong worker struggling to rise from a shabby housing estate. Sure, universal suffrage is hugely important, ultimately, to the future of this worker. But you have to offer something more tangible and compelling than intellectual and moral arguments to win the votes and support of people on the other side of Hong Kong's widening economic divide.
And even then, politics is politics is politics, whether you are in Hong Kong or New York or London. "It's a big advantage being an incumbent," observes my buddy Andrew To (who successfully defended his district council seat against the DAB's shrill challenger, talk radio host and "legal executive" "Angel" Leung, by a vote of 2,825 to 1,851.)
Andrew and Angel met last month in a raucous RTHK TV debate that has become a YouTube classic. But Andrew doesn't think the debate made any difference in the outcome. "Not that many voters saw it, although we did distribute a CD. But I don't think the results at this level have to do with the media but with voter mobilization. I got almost the same number of votes in this election as I did last time. People already know who they want to vote for and I made sure I got all my supporters out. Also, if you are currently in office, as long as you don't have a scandal, people would be likely to vote for you. It is human nature to not want change." Andrew's right: incumbency is like inherited wealth. Americans usually re-elect their congressmen, and Hong Kongers are no different. Virtually all the sitting district council candidates who ran yesterday won.
It is also human nature to follow the leader. And that is what the DAB is all about. They're taking orders from the Big Party over the border, demonstrating a lockstep discipline that Republican Chairman Karl Rove can only dream of. Meanwhile the pan-Democrats are trying to forge a winning team from a loud, messy family that includes wealthy barristers, feisty unionists, grassroots activists and civil servants with expensive hairdos.
The papers today are spinning the results as the "triumph" of the DAB. I wouldn't exactly call it that. Out of 405 seats, they won 115, and 94% were re-elected incumbents. Respectable, but hardly a rout. If you count up all the pan-Democratic parties--and there are two new ones formed since the last election in 2003--the total number of pro-dem seats is 93. Since the DAB had the lion's share of the campaign money, and the majority of incumbents, I don't see much evidence of their political genius, or their surging public support. Truth be told, the DAB aren't really great campaigners. Their "platform" consists of repeating the correct party line, and their repertoire of tactics is straight out of the old school political playbook: smears, threats and a chicken and rice box for every voter. It is only compared to the pan-Dems that they look like pros.
I was in the middle of chewing this over with Hemlock over breakfast yesterday morning, when I was interrupted by an unexpected phone call: Long Hair. "Hey, I just finished protesting Donald Tsang at the polls. I'm on Robinson Road, where are you?" Two minutes later, he had joined us for coffee, all charged up by his close encounter with his favorite adversary. But Long Hair, what about the district council elections? "We messed up," he shrugs. We should have been more organized."
The voting has just started, but the election is already yesterday's news to him, Long Hair's gathering his stones for the next battle. Oh yes, about those stones: "The poem on my banner was from a Chinese proverb. In the old days, you know we used to go to the toilet on stones. The urine would run off, but the shit would stick and then you could collect it to use as fertilizer in the fields. So the toilet stones would always be stinky and hot. Just like Regina Ip. Yauh chau yauh yit."
Thanks for another insightful piece from the inside.
P.S. My Chinese poetry is no good thus I have no clue what "toilet stones" imply until I read Long Hair explanation. (smile)
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Hey Daisann. I agree with Kempton, another fascinating view backstage.
Wondering what your views are on the overall results for the DC elections. Going to write a whole article, or would you care to share in the comments?
Sounds like the turnout-poor pan democrats could use some Aussie-style compulsory voting!
However, in our case I actually think that compulsory voting has led to a greater advantage to incumbents. This form of franchise
tends to tip the balance towards what we call 'swinging voters' (a slightly unsavoury label, if you have a dirty mind), who tend not to be so politically engaged but vote on so-called 'hip pocket' issues.
Our federal election is this Saturday. Whilst Australians also traditionally favour incumbency (we have had a 'change of government' only four times in the last 50 years), it appears as if this one might be one of those exceptional instances where the incumbent gets turfed (in this case, our conservative Prime Minister John Howard, the master of consciously using incumbency in and of itself as a selling point).
So hope for the pandems yet in 2008!
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Hi Vincent-
I've probably spilled enough words on the DC race, but in answer to your question, I really don't think this is the disaster that the media is pumping it up to be. The pan-dems, with their usual media bumblingness, are playing into the spin, what with Albert Ho (democratic party chairman) and Frederick Fung (chairman of another pan-dem party, the "Party for Democracy and People's Livelihood") very publicly falling on their swords.
For goodness sakes, this is a District Council election. On the scale of political power, this is somewhere between dogcatcher and state assemblyperson. Some of these vote margins were in the dozens; the average "winning" vote was around 2,000.
With all the money, manpower and discipline at their disposal, the DAB came away with about 28% of the total number of seats. The poorly funded, disorganized pan-Democrats have 93 seats, or about 23%. That's a five percent spread, which is not "rout" territory to me. There were more than a few close races, and if a few hundred votes had tipped the other way, would we be talking about a pan-Democratic "triumph?"
Given that the DAB had most of the campaign money, plus the covert/overt support of the HKSAR government, the fact that the Dems held them below 35% is a solid achievement, I'd say.
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Hi Daisann, thanks for an informative and insightful piece. I've never had any interest in politics anywhere but your writing makes it really interesting.
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You know first it was very difficult to understand what it means "toilet stones". Now I see it is a very nice allegory, thanks to Long Hair for the explication. And I must add that your manner of political presentation is very interesting.
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