Todd Crowell comments in Asia Times, “Let us now praise Tung Chee-hwa”:
Hong Kong does not elect its chief executive, so Tung hung on. But ever the Confucian gentleman, Tung knew that the Mandate of Heaven had been withdrawn after he was publicly berated last December in Macau by Chinese President Hu Jintao. The only thing left was a face-saving way to ease him out of office and make way for somebody more attuned to Hong Kong’s current realities, someone with perhaps a few more political skills if not charisma.
And Bruce Gilley writes about Tung as a “Victim of a Failed System in the Wall Street Journal (subscription only):
Outgoing Hong Kong Chief Executive Tung Chee Hwa is not the victim of factional infighting in Beijing. Nor is he the victim of massive unpopularity in Hong Kong. Both those explanations are far too complex, far too logical when applied to a political system that works on a very different logic. Rather, Mr. Tung is the victim of nothing more than being part of a system that mercurially uses and disposes of cadres everyday, because it sees this as the only way to justify its existence.
That’s not how Mr. Tung’s departure, which he finally confirmed yesterday, is being seen in Hong Kong. As a modern city that likes to think of its leaders as modern leaders, the territory views recent events in more conventional terms. Those who seek an easy explanation point to popular unrest, scandals, incompetence and all the rest. No elected leader would have lasted the nearly eight years that Tung did. Those who are bemused at his ousting point to the fact that a man who was thrust into the impossible job of simultaneously pleasing Leninist rulers in Beijing and cosmopolitan citizens in Hong Kong actually managed to retain some minimal degree of trust from both sides. In that sense, Mr. Tung hasn’t performed too badly in what was an impossible task.
