Carrie Lam – CY Leung without the laughs

UK NGO Hong Kong Watch releases a damning report on Beijing’s increasing control over Hong Kong. (US NGO Freedom House also downgrades the city in its human and civil rights rankings.) Chief Executive Carrie Lam takes a break from playing lovey-dovey with the Liaison Office’s boss to blast this ‘interference’ in domestic affairs (see video).

What’s creepy about Carrie’s performance here is that she is playing the Communist Party apologist role so convincingly. As a career Hong Kong bureaucrat, she is accustomed to blandly and mechanically denying that her pants are on fire while flames and smoke swirl around her. But since taking office she has acquired a greater air of conviction – and about (what must be to her) alien, Leninist ideology rather than plain old governance screw-ups.

We can rule out the possibility that – like the pipe-smoking Anglophile civil servant in Timothy Mo’s Monkey King – she was always a closet Red. She exhibits none of the passion for the Communist cause that we saw in her predecessor, CY Leung. She recites the party line (‘China is not meddling but helping Hong Kong’s development’) as someone who has mastered her briefing papers to perfection, but doesn’t actually understand the material.

So far as we can tell (say from her Gay Games awkwardness), she is similarly unquestioning about her Catholicism. (Indeed – could it be that the local Catholic hierarchy have guided and counselled her to render unto the Beijing Caesar in the hope of furthering Vatican diplomatic goals?)

In short: she’s an administrator. (And disproof of at least one part of Catholic dogma.) The Communist Party frets that the British (somehow) left them with a city full of de-Sinicized Western-brainwashed counter-revolutionary terrorist teenagers. But they must be delighted to find that they also inherited civil servants who will obediently implement – and robotically defend – whatever policies the Liaison Office puts in front of them.

This entry was posted in Blog. Bookmark the permalink.

5 Responses to Carrie Lam – CY Leung without the laughs

  1. Well why shouldn’t Peking control Chinese territory?

    It’s the capital city after all.

    Presumably you are in facour of Free Cornwall, independent Isle of Man and the kingdom of Wight.

    Get off it buster. Carrie is exactly what you and the other mid-Levels small property owners deserve.

    And thanks for helping me to write my new book, one of them anyway.

    Every day in every way THE QUIET ENGLISHMAN takes shape.

    Good on yer!

    Time for a foreign body count…ughh…so many of them…

    Pip, pip!

  2. Stanley Lieber says:

    Nice touch on the Catholic dogma link.

    There are no atheists in foxholes.

    Because death concentrates a man’s mind wonderfully?

    Plenty of atheists in comfy armchairs, I suppose.

    Chief Sitting Bull knew his onions and he died a Catholic.

  3. HillnotPeak says:

    Where will she retire, the grand penthouse in Shenzhen so nicely decorated by Donald or maybe Otto+neighbour’s basement? I guess rural England is out of the question now.

  4. LRE says:

    I enjoyed the way she took a big old swig of water at the end, there: to wash away the salty taste of Beijing’s Wang (Zhimin).

  5. Red Dragon says:

    I very much hope that our Carrie’s plan to bugger off to Esher with her monstrous pile of ill-gotten fivers will be stymied.

    If, her exquisitely tailored cheongsam covered by a chutney encrusted pinny, she ever dares to pop up, grinning self-righteously, at my local fête, I’ll be having a few choice words with the WI, not to mention the Home Office.

    I mean to say! What self-respecting member of the Home Counties bourgeoisie would want their sun-dappled evening on the lawn ruined by the stench of incense and hypocrisy emanating from the “Stockbroker Tudor” pile next door?

Comments are closed.