The Communist Party demanded dullards who can’t do much but will do it unquestioningly – and they got them. Even fervent pro-establishment figures struggle to sound enthusiastic about soon-to-be-Chief Executive Carrie Lam’s cabinet line-up. The lady’s own glowing descriptions of their newness and passion almost sound tongue-in-cheek.
The funny thing is that the Chinese government expects Carrie’s administration to take on some very big, difficult, hard-sell tasks in the coming years.
Take three. There’s the toxic Article 23 national security legislation, which today’s no-nonsense paranoid-psycho Beijing will probably insist criminalizes words and thoughts as well as actions. There’s ‘National Education’, through which the toddler-brainwashing Communist Party will take possession of your children (won’t apply to Carrie’s ministers and others who can send their kids to the safety of private schools). And in theory there should be a renewed emphasis on livelihood and welfare issues to sweeten the above medicine and keep the masses from revolting.
Such hazardous missions do not come naturally to the bunch of oh-so elite civil-service Administrative Officers approaching retirement known as Team Carrie. Their key skills are prevarication, risk-avoidance, focusing on process rather than output, and blathering helplessly about consensus and a way forward.
Beijing has progressively tightened its grip with each Hong Kong Chief Executive since Tung Chee-hwa. Following the counter-productive hyper-loyalty of super-zealot CY Leung, Team Carrie represents the next, more-subtle, stage of micro-management – a puppet government hand-picked to be bland, predictable and obedient.
The Hong Kong public knows better than to expect this lot to deliver results. Beijing will only become more frustrated as it finds tighter control means even more incompetent and ineffective administration.
I think we should start calling her C.Y. Lam.
Forget Article 23 and National Education, this lot can’t even pull off pedestrianisation.
Timeless prose yet again. There is so much purple in your passages that my fingertips are indelibly mauve after simply tapping the screen.
A supine spineless set of creatures, one blending into the other.
Surely you should be in Tahiti or more likely Bexhill by now. You never explained the attraction of Hong Kong for you. Tories can no longer lord it over the natives, so wherein lies the thrill? I don’t get it.
When do we find out about the under-secretary ‘talents’ ?
With the great Paul Chan as FS, what can go wrong?
Carrie Totter and the Chamber of Dimwits
by B.J. Cowering
“Their key skills are prevarication, risk-avoidance, focusing on process rather than output, and blathering helplessly about consensus and a way forward”. Fantastic! Perhaps also add “and checking on the value of their pensions every 5 minutes”?
Could they really not find another Senior Counsel to replace Rimsky Yuen that the Liaison Office would approve? They should stick Elsie Leung back in the job.
Impeccable survey of the shortsighted, stooped and washed-out men appointed to govern us.
I’m glad you’ve suspended the pious, but I believe hopelessly optimistic, view that all the Beijing nastiness we receive via the puppet government can only harden the resolve of right-minded people, that worse is better, that there must be light somewhere at the end of the tunnel. (Only poor George still believes in the inevitability of revolution.)
Can we have a look at the team from the liaison office who will actually be running Hong Kong for the next 5 years ?
I was sure I’d been told that Matthew Cheung had been told by Carrie that he wasn’t to be included in the new administration.
@Revolution
Lam has kept Paul Chan Mo’ Money in charge of Finance:
hehis wife owned illegal structures and developed a plot ofhishis wife’s own land whilsthehis wife was Secretary for Development, andhishis wife’s moral compass says libellinghishis wife’s kids’ classmates to helphishis wife’s kid usinghishis wife’s position as “representative” of a rotten borough as leverage OK. God only knows whathehis wife has been doing sincehehis wife started as Financial Secretary.Even given Rimjob’s feckless kowtowing to the CCP’s every illegal whim, Mo’ Money makes him look like a tower of moral rectitude and public service by comparison.
At the risk of seeming overly shallow…E V E R Y one of these faces are ones only a mother (or CCP Apparatchik) could love.
Talk about “fell off the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down”!
The people working at the ICAC must be thrilled that Simon Peh is re-appointed.
Look on the bright side. At least Greasy Greg So is going.
Her youngest cabinet member is 52. Way to tackle the younger generation’s discontent head on…
How convenient: the ICAC has decided not to continue the investigation into 777’s Museum project, where the architect was appointed internally (by 777) without following proper procedures. What are friends for ?
@Chinese netizen – The old one about politics being “show-business for ugly people” still holds true.
@FOARP: Hadn’t heard that one!! SO apropo!!
Why isn’t Ginger George in this line-up?
If Lam had appointed him to run something within his (admittedly narrow) range of talents (Drainage? Parks and Gardens? – I don’t know), she would, at a stroke, have absolved herself of criticism that her “new” cabinet fails to reflect ethnic diversity, and that it contains too few women.
As George is clearly both ugly enough and dim enough to grace this exciting cadre of thrusting administrators, Carrie can only have turned him down because she feared that with his well-turned ankles, exqisitely waxed legs, comely derriere, and generous bosom he would, when clad in his trademark cheongsam, have entirely upstaged her.
The quickest of glances at Sophia Chan will convince even the most sceptical that the threat posed to Carrie’s amour propre by George’s buxom beauty is a real one.
In the end, however, l believe that Carrie’s jealousy of George’s impressive physical and sartorial credentials (to say nothing of the way in which his thinning ginger bouffant outshines her drab senior AO’s bob) should not prove too damaging. After all, there are more than enough bozos amongst the people she has picked to royally screw Hong Kong without the need for any input from Gorgeous George.