If Cheung Mo (aka Long Hair) and his gang are labeled as Hong Kong’s political “radicals,” then Chief Executive Sir Donald Tsang must be China’s Margaret Thatcher. Let’s look at our “radical” acts: A few mild abusive words yelled at government officials, limited scuffles with police on the street, throwing a few toy bananas at the Chief Executive in Legco and deliberately missing the target… In the eyes of South Korean peasants, or university student anarchists in protest of the Toronto G20 conference, or animal-liberators storming a Stanford medical school laboratory—Long Hair’s “radical” actions are nothing more than kindergarten playground antics.

We’re doing everything we can to make Hong Kong look proudly like San Francisco—for starters, there’s a smoking ban in restaurants and parking spaces for the disabled, but we also have a committee ruling on equal opportunities, a sex workers union, and active gay organizations. But our local knowledge of the word “radical” urgently needs to be updated. We have a local Leon Lai fan club, but in order to make Hong Kong competitive with London and New York, we need a few study groups on the thoughts of Leon Trostsky holding regular seminars attended by hundreds of post-90s youths.

We have teenage pseudo-models (also known as “Leng Mo” in Cantonese, although the word “Mo” here is a phonetic coincidence which has nothing to do with hair) clamoring to sell their practically nude photography collections at the so-called book fair, but we don’t have crop-haired tomboys branding themselves a gender military here to tear the books to pieces. With common people and petty entrepreneurs suffering from the plight of high rental and property prices, I’ve long awaited the occupation of the IFC by student unions from the University of Hong Kong.

These would be the most elementary steps for Hong Kong to develop a true radical wing that would befit a genuine international city. With the portrait of the Great Chairman hung at Tiananmen Square and the “One Country, Two Systems” we enjoy, here, where else but Hong Kong is more convenient and legitimate to announce the founding of a Maoist Shining Path of the South China branch, complete with anti-property-hegemony guerillas ready to kidnap a few siblings of billionaires with the aim of liberating millions of Hongkongers from property price bullying? That would humbly bring us a step closer to Tokyo’s Red Army of the 1970s.

All this is not to mention how any truly historic radical would want to touch base with Al-Qaeda about what ought to be done with the hundreds of Starbucks and McDonalds in the city—symbols of US cultural and economic invasion.

No, all we’ve been seeing here these years is the empty totem of Che Guevara on a T-shirt. To make Hong Kong a genuine metropolitan center on the world stage, act now.