A professed workaholic who seems to pride herself on being sleep-deprived , Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor is no doubt still working on her policy address . This will either be her swansong address, a piece of the legacy she is leaving for the city, or it will set the tone for her next term, should she seek and win it. As an overachiever who accepts being second to none, Lam has a lot riding on her speech on Wednesday, especially when the past two years have been so humiliating. In 2019, Lam delivered a pre-recorded policy address . And that was before Covid-19 so there was nothing normal about a speech that wasn’t delivered live. It was the ultimate display of her loss of control of the city she should have been leading. Last year, she postponed her policy address just two days before she was due to deliver it. She said it was moved for her to attend meetings on the mainland to garner support and secure opportunities for Hong Kong. The abrupt rescheduling was unsettling and raised expectations for her policy plan. That address turned out to be so underwhelming that many wondered why she didn’t just deliver it at the originally scheduled time. Lam failed then to secure what she had said was her top priority ahead of meetings with mainland officials: re-establishing quarantine-free cross-border travel between Hong Kong and the mainland. And the border remains closed today. She must recognise the need for frank talk, and use this week’s address to talk to Hongkongers about how the Beijing-Hong Kong relationship has changed, beginning with how her job as chief executive has. Just give it to us straight because we can see that the red carpet is no longer rolled out for her. And that, too, is reflected in the working relationship between the central government and that of the office of the chief executive. Just last month, Lam was reduced to paper-pushing – only being able to put in a request to get medical experts on the mainland to meet their Hong Kong counterparts to start talks on opening borders. They eventually met , and it was because Vice-Premier Han Zheng had, as Lam put it , “attached his personal attention to the matter”. It would seem that, had it not been for Han’s intervention, the SAR government would not even have been asked to submit more information to prepare for talks on reopening. And, in the run-up to the policy address, there have been suggestions that we should expect drastic measures on housing . You and I know that’s because mainland officials have put their foot down. As early as March last year, Han made it clear that Hong Kong is expected to start working on a solution to its housing problems. Mainland property developers have been feeling the heat for some time. Now, it seems, local property developers are also under pressure, despite their denials . Lam recently said that local developers have in recent years been more cooperative in trying to boost the housing supply. Few believe their cooperation is the fruit of Lam’s hard work. So this is what life is like in a communist country Maybe there is no prestige or political clout in the chief executive office now. But there is one thing Lam can do, but has failed to: explain to the people of Hong Kong what mainland policies mean and how we should interpret them. Take the mainland crackdown on after-school tutoring , online influencers and online games , for example. Hongkongers are genuinely befuddled. And if the chief executive cannot shed light on what these measures mean and how they fit into “one country, two systems”, and whether Hongkongers should be concerned with the same regulations being applied here and to what extent, then all that talk about integration, opportunities in the Greater Bay Area and shared prosperity is just gaslighting. Alice Wu is a political consultant and a former associate director of the Asia Pacific Media Network at UCLA