The Pulse：In our studio: Joshua Wong on his detention in Thailand, Wang Chau controversy, interview

Hello and welcome to The Pulse. We’ve been away for two months, a period that turned out to be full of political and social activity – much of which has been ground breaking. Not least with the Legco elections bring in 26 new faces out of a total of 70 legislators - many are activists, and many are youthful enough to have caused a big drop in the average age of the whole council. We’ll be introducing some of those new faces in coming weeks. First though to Thailand, the so called ‘land of smiles”, although there wasn’t an awful lot of smiling going on when the Thai authorities detained student activist Joshua Wong on Wednesday night and locked him up for almost 12 hours before deporting him the next day. Mr Wong has come back to Hong Kong and is in our studio.
The government says Hong Kong doesn’t have enough land and that there is no choice other than to uproot villagers and eat into the country parks. However campaigners say there’s plenty of land available but it can only be used if the government is prepared to stop vested interests in the New Territories from occupying brownfield sites for profit. New legislator Eddie Chu Hoi-dick, has drawn attention to this awkward fact, and has – perhaps not so coincidentally – received death threats. He has highlighted evidence of an unholy alliance between the government, property developers, influential New Territories’ strongmen, and the underworld.
What on Earth is happening to Hong Kong’s governance? That’s a question that’s on an increasing number of lips in the wake of more and more controversies like those we examined in part one. There are concerns that such revelations are just the tip of the iceberg, and that – as with icebergs – even more problems lie beneath the surface. That’s why some campaigners have long been trying to convince an apparently reluctant government that, for the sake of history and the public record, we need an archive law. More on that coming up, after which I’ll be talking to Edward Yiu, the incoming representative of the architectural and planning sector in Legco about Hong Kong’s thorny land issues.