Lawmaker Duncan Chiu mocks John Tsang over Lan Kwai Fong crowd controls

2nd November 2026 – (Hong Kong) Technology and Innovation lawmaker Duncan Chiu has rounded on former financial secretary John Tsang after the La Salle senior mocked Central’s Halloween crowd controls, posting a sarcastic “tribute” that initially included an ableist slur he later deleted.

Mr Tsang, styling himself a “grandfather-grade” figure whose costume-party years are behind him, wrote on social media on 1st November that he had forgotten Halloween fell on 31st October. On the Friday evening beforehand, 30th October, Lan Kwai Fong already had crowd measures in place when he arranged drinks and a chat with friends on Wellington Street in Central.

Under what he called a “genius-level crowd-control design”, he said he followed the designated one-way walking route from Central, was carried almost as far as Wan Chai, then had to double back before reaching his destination — a detour that took more than half an hour. Once he finally returned to Central for the meal, he later joined the flow leaving Lan Kwai Fong toward the MTR, spotting a resident dressed as a Roman warrior and streets full of “monster” costumes, many of them, he judged, mainland visitors. He cast the scene as a rare “one-hour living-circle” night activity that could draw people into Hong Kong’s night market.

The remarks stung his La Salle College junior. Mr Chiu, who sits for the Technology and Innovation functional constituency, answered the same day with a post that opened by saluting his “genius-level” senior in language that originally contained a slur. He later removed those two characters. Framed as thanks for lessons his “senior brother” had taught him, the message quickly turned into a ledger of old grievances from Mr Tsang’s years as financial secretary.

He accused the former minister of routinely ignoring innovation and technology appeals while in office, citing talk that tech made up under one per cent of Hong Kong’s GDP and that the government offered no policy support — only for Mr Tsang, after leaving office, to cast himself as an innovation spokesman. Mr Chiu scoffed that snack-aisle branding was being passed off as entrepreneurship advocacy.

He also claimed his senior had taught him a “nine-point-nine-second face-change” and a collective “amnesia method”, saying Mr Tsang had cast aside the Lan Kwai Fong tragedy while caring chiefly that he could drink in the district at a festival peak and leave within half an hour. An “IQ 200” senior, he wrote, had further taught him that one could lecture on everything and treat empty talk as a manual — even guaranteeing that friends who somehow went for a beer amid tens of thousands of festival-goers could evacuate in ten minutes.

Why, he asked, had those problems not been fixed when Mr Tsang still held the purse strings? In office there had been inaction; out of office there was finger-wagging. His parting shot urged the senior simply to watch French films and drink coffee in his spare time.