Opinion
Replacing Carrie Lam with another puppet would be pointless. Instead, Beijing needs to loosen the strings
- The Hong Kong crisis is likely to end in tragedy unless Carrie Lam can muster the courage to tell her bosses in Beijing to stop eroding the city’s autonomy, allow genuine democratic elections, and end the insidious mainlandisation
When a puppet show loses appeal, the smart thing is to reinvent the storyline. The dumbest thing is to keep the old plot with a few character changes. Audiences will not be duped.
Hong Kong is like a puppet show morphing into a Greek tragedy. The puppet strings stretch all the way to Beijing where furious puppet masters insist only a small minority of people brainwashed by the West are booing what is otherwise an excellent show.
How can violence end when, instead of providing a political path to end it, Lam and her bosses prove through the banning of Wong from elections that the fear of lost freedoms that feed the violence is very real?
I do not know if Lam, who is a Catholic, still goes to church, and if she does, what she prays for. I hope she prays for the many hundreds of arrested young protesters. And I hope she prays for the strength to tell her bosses that, unless they stop eroding Hong Kong's autonomy, the puppet show will definitely end in a Greek tragedy.
Michael Chugani is a Hong Kong journalist and TV show host
Opinion
Carrie Lam could have addressed the five demands in a speech for the ages. Instead, she gave us a damp squib
- No one needs to hear Carrie Lam boast of her successes when the violence on the streets shows her agenda hasn’t worked
- That violence finally pushed her to tackle livelihood issues, but silence on the five demands won’t calm Hong Kong
I am unfamiliar with much of her initiatives but if her perfect record had improved lives, Hong Kong should be the world’s most contented city. Maybe Lam should rename Hong Kong “Shangri-La” as her next initiative.
No policy speech in recent memory had such potential to shape history, coinciding with Hong Kong’s gravest political crisis ever. Lam could have recast herself by promising to try to make Beijing understand the deepest of Hong Kong’s many deep-rooted problems is not housing but a fear of eroding autonomy.
Lam could have used her speech to reach out by telling Hongkongers she understands their concerns and will relay them to her bosses. Instead, she squandered a speech that could have reshaped events.
This does not mean her speech was entirely out of focus. People do care about livelihood issues such as finding land for the city’s housing crisis and extra funding for health care, education, the elderly and the needy. Hong Kong’s unfair society where a handful of tycoons dominate our lives has long been a major grievance.
But even though she prioritised housing, her overall speech was a damp squib. Not a single word about the five demands or meaningful policies to make our society fairer. Will it quell some of the violence? I don’t know.
But the five demands, particularly an independent inquiry and political reforms, are the priority now, not livelihood issues. Being forced to deliver her speech by video, the first time ever for a leader, is a shape of things to come.
Lam chose blue for the cover of her speech, hoping its contents will bring back blue skies. She ended by predicting a rainbow will replace the political storm. Talk about wishful thinking.
Michael Chugani is a Hong Kong journalist and TV show host