HK’s next administration grimly forms

While the Palace Museum 20th Anniversary Gift Vision degenerates into a classic Hong Kong government PR-disaster, preparations for the investiture of Chief Secretary Carrie Lam as the city’s next Chief Executive continue. As they must – assuming that the geniuses of the Chinese leadership, still wiping the blood of incumbent CY Leung off their hands, have no better plan.

The lady has dinner at a property developer’s mansion with a bunch of real-estate cartel scions. This is an old and predictable ceremony – a lot of sniffing and licking more nauseating to watch than the grossest mating ritual on a TV nature documentary. One or two more daring tycoons start to endorse her publicly, having deduced that wannabe Financial Secretary John Tsang is not to be Beijing’s choice.

Behind the scenes, a ‘campaign’ team is taking shape. The idea is to lobby stroppy interest groups represented on the Election Committee. Beijing wants to avoid another ‘689’ situation, where even a rigged ‘election’ fails to display enthusiasm for the winner. On the other hand, a one-horse quasi-race could look even less credible. To complicate matters, hostile pan-democrats now hold over 300 seats on the Committee – enough to theoretically make ballot-box mischief. (As an additional complication, Beijing’s local Liaison Office might be undergoing purge-rectification, sapping its voter-herding and micro-management ability.)

Carrie’s ‘campaign’ team is being hastily cobbled-together from the more nice-and-presentable circles of Hong Kong’s establishment, as typified by its chairman Ronald Arculli. The wretches will be expected to muster support from entitled vested interests, grasping parasites and other self-serving detritus of the Communist Party’s co-opted support base. CY Leung as candidate at least had some psychos and weirdos he could send off to talk to the Heung Yee Kuk as equals; the New Territories mafia will eat Carrie’s helpers for breakfast.

If China’s leadership wanted a dependable and solid local support base, it could start by asking why practically all 300 of the 1,200 Election Committee seats filled by something like a popular vote in December went to the pan-dems. Just joking. As it is, the zaniest Beijing could do in terms of last-minute panic-induced lateral-thinking is to pull John Tsang out of the hat.

Now poor Carrie prepares to declare herself a ‘candidate’ by pleading (in her oh-so-endearing ‘defiant tone’) with the opposition and broader public not to politicize her Palace Museum dream. The government has no legitimacy, so anything it does is going to be politicized. And dutifully scrabbling around for backers among property tycoons and rural gangsters isn’t exactly going to change that.

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14 Responses to HK’s next administration grimly forms

  1. Enid Hui says:

    Oh well. The queue to prosecute our grandees is a bit full at the moment. No doubt Carrie will figure there one day. The good life, the limousines, the yachts, the furniture and fittings of Hong Kong blingsters are all clearly addictive and irresistible. You can never have enough bow ties, shoes, handbags, racehorses, calligraphy rooms…

  2. Gooddog says:

    My God – if you were Carrie, why would you ever run for this job?

    I understand Regina running (she is a power crazed, rubber wearing, boot stomping psychopath), but I thought Carrie was more sensible.

    Just take your pension and flee. The next four years are going to be a complete and utter shit show.

  3. Chinese Netizen says:

    “…other self-serving detritus of the Communist Party’s co-opted support base.”

    Can descriptions get any better than this? I think not.

  4. WTF says:

    Lands Department Lads (and Lasses) in Taipo out and about today looking rather embarrassed as Lufsig apparently has ordered them to slap around some of the Crooks Hung Yee Kuk developers for not being more vociferous in support of him with Beijing. This is causing much embarrassment as many in the local lands office have taken bribes from the Kuk, hence the shuffling of feet and embarrassed looks, the hand clutching and whispers of just wait till Hari-Carrie get in office, and it will all be made okay.

  5. WTF says:

    Dang that KMB driver, I didn’t want to press [post].

    I wonder if this is all a set up, Porn-stache, Hari-Carrie, etc are all being purged in a very CCP backhanded way, and they will pull an Jimmy Carter/Obama. ie: pick a unknown (to the public) who looks clean, and throw him up with so little time that his/her story can’t be picked over. Someone particularly like Obama, who is completely sold out to the vested interest clove most close to Beijing, but knows how to sell his lies to the public.

  6. Chinese Netizen says:

    “Someone particularly like Obama, who is completely sold out to the vested interest clove most close to Beijing, but knows how to sell his lies to the public.” ~WTF

    Is there anyone THAT sophisticated in HK???

  7. Stephen says:

    Was it really 5 years ago that “Real Tax Payer” was ejaculating all over the comments section in praise of Lufsig ? There is no such excitement this time as The Head Prefect, in her perfect little bubble, is being thrust forward because the CCP won’t allow a unifying Hong Konger that the city can get behind. Mrs. Lam (where’s Mr. Lam been these last 5 years?) seems to have forgotten the highlights – having to meet the children during Occupy Central, the abandoned open topped bus tour because your safety couldn’t be guaranteed and the Pro-Dems telling her they were not going to pocket her magnificently crafted Constitutional Reform guff. It’s going to get worse.

    Meanwhile more and more businesses relocate their Asia Pacific HQ’s to Singapore …

  8. Knownot says:

    Why would anyone want to be Chief Executive of Hong Kong? I have tried to make a serious list of reasons, and wonder what can be added.

    1. Flattery
    It is flatttering to be told by the Government of China that you are considered capable of doing the job. Similarly, they will persuade you that you really will have ‘a high degree of autonomy’.

    2. A sense of duty
    An old-fashioned virtue, but still a virtue. As they say, a wish to ‘serve China’.

    3. Ambition
    In itself, not a bad thing. Essentially, the desire to do one’s best.

    4. Genuine self-belief
    Rightly or wrongly, you believe that you can help to make HK a better place.

    5. Excitement and privilege
    People will defer to you. Your home, your car, many other things, will remind you that you are special. If you fall ill, you will be treated by the best doctors in the best hospitals. During your five-year term, you will meet monarchs, presidents, and prime ministers, some of whom will be figures of true historic importance.

    6. The desire to make a mark in the world, and to be remembered after you die
    The names of the least important Governors are recorded, so in a sense they are remembered, and some Governors, for example Maclehose and Patten, really did make a mark. CY Leung has made a mark. One day in the future, your grandchild’s child will point to a photograph and say, with perhaps ironic pride, “That’s my dad’s grandma. She was president of Hong Kong, or something.”

  9. WTF says:

    Chinese Netizen: Obie-the-Wan is no sophisticate, as his 8 years in office has shown. He’s just an attractive object that even his classmates at Harvard Law School snicker ingly called “Obameter” because he did nothing without first taking the temperature of the room, and still goofed with alarming frequency. I suspect there are better animals in Hong Kong, but will they hunt for the CCP is another question. Maybe Jasper will be hauled out.

    Stephen: your comment on RTP sent me to google up his comments, and I stumbled over this post by Hemlock: http://biglychee.com/?p=10886&cpage=1

    Which bring us to this little bonus: I have received word that Chief Secretary Carrie Lam’s son Jeremy (mentioned yesterday) was a lucky recipient of a non-means-tested GBP4,500 scholarship award doled out by the local ‘Friends of Cambridge’, a group founded by David Li, boss of the Bank of East Asia.** No need to root around for grubby conflicts of interest – yet. Just cut out and keep in case Carrie becomes Chief Executive sometime.

    Is it too early to start re-hashing that Carrie must be covered in filth if the CCP let her become CS? To someone elses comment yesterday about why would she do it, for the filthy lucre, silly. She’ll be a double dipper on retirement funds, will get a faux seat in China’s faux parliament she can use to market her herself to British firms back in the UK. Think of her as a less intelligent, if just as nasty and amoral, Baroness Lydia Dunn for a new era in olde corruption. Beijing was counting on her grasping nature, and in a week or a month we’ll see what they really intend to use her for.

    ** Yes, the same David Lee who’ gave Donald the Duck’s wife a fat gift.

  10. Joe Blow says:

    Al Semen is endorsing Lamb Currie. Talking about the kiss of death.

  11. Red Dragon says:

    Oh God! What a bloody shower!

    Carrie on up the Khyber, and her grinning organ grinder’s monkey, Ron Arculli.

    Vadge the Impaler, and her senile turncoat sugardaddy, Akers-Jones.

    Baldilocks Woo, and his in-bred mafiosi in the benighted Heung Yee Krook.

    And waiting in the wings (maybe), the louche, indolent, porntachioed stumblebum, “Long Dong” Tsang.

    If ever there were a shining exemplar of the benefits to be derived from the enlightened rule of the Grecian 2000 brigade in Zhongnanhai, this surely is it.

  12. LRE says:

    @Knownot
    For the list (and to my mind the one that makes most sense)

    7. Blackmail
    The Government of China rings up you up and says: “Be the Communist Exonerative or it’s no pension and serious jail time for you. There’s no escape — trust us — we know where all the bodies are buried.” In the unlikely event that you’re actually clean, they’ll set you up first.

  13. Cassowary says:

    Knownot: You forgot, “They told you to, and they know where your family lives”.

    I do know that in environmentalist circles, Carrie Lam has a better reputation than most other government officials. That isn’t hard, considering that she’s being compared to Paul “Pave the Country Parks” Chan and formerly, Donald “Air Pollution’s Not a Problem if People Aren’t Dropping Dead in the Streets” Tsang. John Tsang is said to be fairly useless on environmental issues, and Regina Ip might as well be a Captain Planet villain. Not that Regina will ever be CE, but don’t be surprised if she claws her way into a ministerial position. If she becomes Secretary of Development, we’re all screwed.

    So there’s that, I suppose. Carrie probably would’ve been a decent CE (again not hard considering the competition) had Beijing put her instead of CY in charge five years ago.

  14. Hermes says:

    @ WFT. Interesting what you said about the grant doled out to Carrie’s son. My own daughter applied for the same grant a few years ago, but her headmistress at a certain elite HK refused to back her (applications must be made by the school, not the pupil) since she had already picked her desired winner (the head girl), who then went on to become the awardee. Since there is no stipulation that there can only be one nominee per school, I always thought something dodgy was going on between her and David Li…

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