Opinion | Carrie Lam is trying to shift the blame for the unrest to protesters. Don’t let her get away with it

The Hong Kong economy is suffering, perhaps as part of the government’s plan. When people are tallying losses and blaming protesters, and when protesters are antagonising Beijing, everyone forgets it was Lam who got us here

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Chief Executive Carrie Lam speaks at a press conference in Hong Kong on August 20. Photo: AFP

Published: 9:15am, 26 Aug 2019Updated: 9:44am, 26 Aug 2019

Hong Kong is paying the price for 12 consecutive weeks of anti-government protests. Economists – and not just those from the government – have sounded the alarm. Our core industries have been affected and knock-on effects have been felt in the tourism and retail sectors. Hotel workers have been forced to go on annual or unpaid leave because occupancy rates have slumped during what would usually be the peak season.

Hongkongers have recorded huge losses on stock market investments, and the most vulnerable residents – low-skilled workers and working poor – are going to suffer the most when shops and restaurants close and lay off people. Hong Kong’s politically explosive summer is already causing massive collateral damage to the economy.

We saw this coming, and yet Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and her administration hid and sat on their hands for weeks. And perhaps Lam and her administration were waiting for exactly this: they were buying time not to figure things out but to let Hong Kong take a hit. The power vacuum was a tactic intended to penalise people for acting up.

We can now take Lam’s bait and blame the protesters, especially the students who are planning class boycotts, or we can mull over retired judge Henry Litton’s observation, in an interview with the Post, that the Lam administration has simply not been doing its job: governing.

Lam refused to respond to protesters’ demands from the start, and she has since perfected the art of disappearing and shirking responsibility. She hid and made the police force pay for the political disaster of her making. When that didn’t work, she hid behind the Independent Police Complaints Council.

Most ludicrously, the government’s public relations chief was made the scapegoat for the worst political crisis since the handover. It’s simply beyond the pale: the blame has been pinned on Cathy Chu Man-ling of the Information Services Department, while Lam continues gaslighting the public and the central government.