For social and academic surveys, there’s no room for further emphasis that the polls involved must be designed and conducted objectively, and that the aims for the study should be spelled out in clear and unbiased terms. Of no less importance, the selection of the respondents and the working personnel for the survey ought to be accounted for in appreciable details that help readers of the findings to determine if the project is justified and done in a disinterested manner.
Unfortunately, opposition groups often cut in at the critical junctures of public undertakings or policy implementation, with surveys eliciting targeted answers apparently for lacing into public authorities for pre-identified “failures” in policies on various community fronts. With only publicity gains sought purportedly by the factions launching challenges against the image and credibility of the special administrative region government, there’s no avail whatsoever of such opinion polls to the administration and the general public!
The survey mounted by the Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute (HKPORI) on the SAR government’s anti-epidemic policy, for which the group has just released the outcome to the media, offers a case to illustrate the above situation. At this point in time, when the city is wholly concerted in determination and efforts to keep the COVID-19 virus transmission at bay, along with the heightened hard work from both local and mainland medics to treat patients struggling with the life-threatening omicron variant, a survey of such a kind does not serve any public good. Apart from distracting official attention to things they are already grappling with and trying to tackle, what benefit does the survey offer to the general public!
Some of the questions that are raised in the questionnaire make little sense, surprisingly. For instance, it starts by asking the respondents the chance of getting infected, which ends up with the majority coming down to “30 percent”. On what basis have the surveyed people decided on this quantitative option, among those given? The study has also obtained a 45 percent objection rate to the social distancing rule currently in force that caps social gatherings to two people each. While 80 percent of the replies gathered in the study were regarded by the HKPORI as dismissing the restrictions imposed under the COVID-19 surge, the overall consensus grabbed by the survey accepts only a ceiling of 10 people for each gathering. In addition to running counter to the primary objective of effecting a swift control of the viral transmission in the wider community, such a recommendation from a social survey lacks operational significance and rouses unnecessarily unhappy sentiments against the government.
As former Legislative Council President Rita Fan Hsu Lai-tai openly observed recently, the coronavirus epidemic being faced by Hong Kong is so gigantic in magnitude, complexity and medical dimensions that it surpasses all the city’s capabilities and material resources to cope with. Regardless of the previous arguments and political conflicts, all stakeholding parties in the territory must bury their hatchets and, with the vital support and care initiated by President Xi Jinping on the homeland, come to a united front to strike a phenomenal victory in attaining the “dynamic zero infection”, which is crucial for the reopening of the mainland’s border with the HKSAR for business and other interflows, as well as the revival of quarantine-free communications with major destinations abroad.
Mervyn Cheung Man-ping is a member of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies.