Carrie Lam’s shameful legacy in Hong Kong
Hong Kong’s leader Carrie Lam has announced she will not seek a second term in office, says the BBC. Lam was at the helm during a time of mass unrest and helped usher in new laws that eroded the territory’s civil freedoms. Massive prodemocracy demonstrations, of the kind that had prompted Lam’s predecessors to resign, led under Lam to greater Chinese control in Hong Kong. Lam refused to answer questions about her decisions or the role she played in events.
She did, though, “pay tribute to her backers in Beijing”, says Matthew Brooker on Bloomberg. Her governance style came to epitomise how the administration of Hong Kong – which was promised a high degree of autonomy after the 1997 handover from Britain – had become “more overtly wedded to Beijing and less responsive to local sentiment”. That is now unlikely to change, whatever the cost to Hong Kong’s standing as an international financial hub. Hong Kong has, for example, isolated itself internationally, “contrary to its economic interests and professed ambitions as a global financial centre”, in conformity with Beijing’s zero-Covid policy.
As for who will succeed her, the signs are “hardly encouraging”, says Johnny Patterson in The Spectator. John Lee is the lead candidate – a former policeman, he would probably be “a willing enforcer of Hong Kong’s new totalitarian regime”. Another candidate is the former leader CY Leung. It was under his leadership that major protests first broke out in 2012 and 2014. He is “nearly as unpopular as Lam among the Hong Kong people” and is more ardently pro-Communist. Lam paved the way for a Hong Kong that has “changed fundamentally for the worse”.
Lam will go down in history as Hong Kong’s “chief executioner”, says The Wall Street Journal. “Perhaps some day she’ll say, when it’s safe to do so in exile, that she had little choice given Beijing’s orders.” But she could have resigned rather than follow those orders, which “would have been a significant symbolic statement”. Her biggest offence, though, may be that she and other Hong Kong officials “continue to pretend that Hong Kong retains its autonomy and independent rule of law. Beijing will appoint her successor, and repression is now part of the job description.”