Given a system rigged to ensure that pro-government members are always in the majority, it is perhaps no surprise that political parties in Hong Kong have become as much an expression of individual egos as of policies or ideologies. Splits and new creations are leaving the field even wider open to the one party with Communist-level discipline, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment of Hong Kong (DAB) which is in all but name the local substitute for the Communist Party of China whose membership in the territory remains a secret.