Forty years ago, Carrie Lam was a student protester marching on Government House. Now she is the establishment favourite to be its next incumbent. Can the youthful idealism of her past help her inspire a new generation of Hongkongers?
T he young woman with neat, shoulder-length hair and bookish glasses stands quietly alongside her fellow demonstrators.
She is near the front of dozens of students who have gathered in the early summer heat to march on Hong Kong’s Government House amid a brewing political storm that has brought weeks of protests and will one day come to be seen as a key event in the city’s political awakening.
Many of those around her appear jovial, looking around and smiling for the cameras with their hand-painted banners. But the young woman looks more serious, her face hard to read as she peers over the shoulders of those in the front row. Is her expression determination, or shyness? Is she driving forward or holding back?
The date is May 11, 1978, and the woman in this photograph is a 20-year-old Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor. She and her fellow Hong Kong University students are marching to give a petition to the governor in the then-British colony in support of the teachers and pupils at the Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School. Those pupils themselves are staging a weeks-long sit-in to demand the reinstatement of four expelled “leftist” pupils and the dismissal of their headmistress, who is accused of financial mishandling.
Nearly four decades since that landmark protest, Lam once again has Government House in her sights, but this time with a very different proposition in hand. Barring any 11th-hour scandal – or a last-minute change of heart by Beijing – the once shy young woman who has long since shed her cocoon to become a confident and forceful contender for the post of Hong Kong’s Chief Executive – will be declared the city’s leader by Sunday afternoon.
Such an achievement is to be lauded in any city, but perhaps none more so than in Hong Kong, where the route to the top resembles a Byzantine maze in which entrants are required to juggle an uneasy mix of Western democratic ideals and deference to the mainland’s communist leaders.
Viewed from afar, the election can seem surprisingly democratic.
On Sunday, an Election Committee made up of 1,194 members, themselves elected by four subsectors broadly representative of society – industry and commerce; professionals; labour, social services and religion; politicians – will determine who becomes the city’s chief executive.
But, as detractors point out, the fine print seems to ensure Beijing’s preferred candidate always wins. Beijing-loyalists hold a tight grip on more than two-thirds of the 1,200 seats on the Election Committee. Beijing can count on this numerical advantage because these pro-establishment figures directly control some of the groups that make up the subsectors, while it also exerts indirect influence on others, such as the business sectors, which must largely toe the line given their vast interests on the mainland.
This time around, that candidate appears to be Lam. If – as is widely expected – she wins, it is likely to be purely from the backing of the pro-establishment camp; not a single one of the 326 pan-democrats on the committee have voiced an intention to vote for her.
Lam is expected to beat the former financial secretary John Tsang Chun-wah – who, polls repeatedly show, is far more popular with the public – and the retired judge Woo Kwok-hing to become the fourth chief executive since Hong Kong’s handover to Chinese sovereignty in 1997.
The winner will be formally sworn in on July 1, the 20th anniversary of the handover, in an inauguration likely to be witnessed by President Xi Jinping ( 習近平 ).
Lam would do well to savour the richness of the occasion, as her ensuing five-year term is unlikely to go as smoothly.
From the start, she will be unpopular with some Hongkongers purely because she is seen as Beijing’s preferred candidate. Mainland Chinese officials repeatedly showed a clear preference for Lam during her campaign, according to multiple pro-establishment politicians who said Beijing’s representatives in the Liaison Office in Hong Kong had been canvassing for her.
Her biggest challenge will lie in how she handles public demands for universal suffrage – an issue of particular pertinence to Lam for two reasons.
Firstly, there is disappointment surrounding this election. Ten years ago, then chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen persuaded Beijing to agree to allowing the city to elect its leader via universal suffrage in 2017.
Its failure to stick to that promise in its unadulterated form was the direct cause of the Occupy Central protests of 2014 in which student protesters brought the city to a standstill for weeks by blocking roads. (Indeed, in a delicious twist of irony some commentators have even suggested that it was the 1978 protests at the Precious Blood school that created the civic atmosphere in which the Umbrella Movement and Occupy Central could take hold).
Secondly, Lam’s five-year term will span the halfway mark in the “one country, two systems” agreement between Beijing and London that was supposed to guarantee Hong Kong’s political and economic systems for 50 years after the handover. There’s pressure on Lam to show critics that Beijing’s respect for this agreement goes beyond mere lip service.
Clearly, Lam can expect a baptism of fire.
“Lam is the product of an unfair and unjust election with heavy handed interference from the Liaison Office. This makes life difficult for her from day one,” said Anson Chan Fang On-sang, Hong Kong’s first post-handover chief secretary.
“She won’t have even a single day of honeymoon with the Hong Kong public. With little credibility to start off with, unless she moves quickly to mend her ways and earn the trust of the community, she will find it difficult to govern Hong Kong effectively.
“Beijing will have to recognise that by foisting upon us a highly unpopular chief executive, they have once again undermined confidence in ‘one country, two systems’, [Hong Kong’s] high degree of autonomy and [the notion of] Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong,” Chan said – referencing Beijing’s three promises to the city prior to the handover.
