Carrie Lam is a godsend to the opposition – she’s the one thing they can agree on

Just last year, the pan-democrats suffered a big setback in legislative by-elections because they couldn’t work together with the localists. Thanks to the chief executive, the factions are now more united than ever

Alice Wu

Published: 9:30am, 19 Aug 2019

Why you can trust SCMP

No one seems to know how Hong Kong is going to get through the present crisis and, instead, a lot of us have been looking ahead to the future. And it’s not just observers like me.

Members of the pro-establishment camp are bracing themselves for huge losses in the upcoming district council elections. Post columnist Alex Lo has gone further, to predict a big win for the pan-democrats in next year’s Legislative Council election: well, at least a win big enough for them to take a historic role in shaping and fighting for political reform (instead of against it, as they have done before).

Nothing should be ruled out, of course. Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and her government have been a godsend to the pan-democrats. It’s hard to believe that it was only last year that the pan-democrats suffered a big setback, with two consecutive losses in the Kowloon West by-elections due to disunity and their failure to win the hearts and minds of the localists.

The localist problem had been the pan-democrats’ biggest headache ever since Edward Leung Tin-kei took 15 per cent of the vote in the 2016 New Territories East by-election. After Leung made his political mark, the pan-democrats were torn: to align themselves with radical and violent groups would be to risk losing their base, but rejecting the localists meant losing their influence.

The truth is that the pan-democrats’ uneasy relationship with the localists endangered their own political future. They had been in a “damned if they do and damned if they don’t” situation for years. The consensus, at the end of 2018, was that the pan-democrats could only have a future if they cut all links with the pro-independence and self-determination forces.

Who would have guessed Lam, of all people, could single-handedly solve the pan-democrats’ localist problems? With her deeply unpopular extradition bill, she has inadvertently brought together traditional pan-democrats and radical localists.

Blindsided: why does Beijing keep getting Hong Kong wrong?

This is why we have been seeing largely peaceful protests turn violent. The “peaceful, rational and non-violent” majority of protesters stand side by side with the violent radicals. Lam has been the tie that binds; her gift to the pan-democrats.

The past two months have revealed a lot of uncomfortable truths. Many are still grappling with how quickly we were consumed by anger and hate, how easily we shed our moral inhibitions and how we ruined the Lion Rock Spirit.

More disturbingly, we have witnessed how arrogant incompetence has become, by far, the biggest threat to Beijing’s principles of “one country, two systems”, “Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong” and a “high degree of autonomy”.

We have also been shocked by the utter uselessness and helplessness of the pro-establishment camp.

When Lam and her administration went into hiding, the pro-establishment camp took a hiatus, too, proving incapable of taking the lead or doing anything meaningful in place of the embattled government.

A Tiananmen-style crackdown would be catastrophic for China

They were invigorated briefly after being called to attend a seminar hosted by the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office in Shenzhen, but it was clear, right from the off, that they were out of their depth and out of ideas. The time and effort put in by 500 politicians and business executives have yielded few results. Their paucity of ideas for what can be done is evident in the pro-police advertisements placed in newspapers.

The largest political party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, has to take the biscuit, though. Executive Council and DAB member Ip Kwok-him seems to believe that dispatching volunteer crews to clean up after protesters when it is “absolutely safe” to do so will somehow pave the way out of our hell.

Perhaps what this political crisis has exposed is the irrelevance of political parties in Hong Kong.

Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA

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