City BeatBeijing’s backing both a curse and a blessing in Hong Kong leadership race

Admit it or not, Hongkongers sometimes are self-conflicted when it comes to politics, especially when it involves the Beijing factor.

That’s exactly the case in the city’s current leadership race: on the one hand, many people, including the contenders, understand the importance of and are even impatient for Beijing to “bless” its preferred choice to remove the uncertainty; but any explicit endorsement at this stage can be criticised as qindian (欽點), or anointment, by Beijing. Qindian is a term used in history referring to an emperor’s personal preference in deciding a position.

There’s another intriguing phenomenon: although former chief secretary Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor is widely considered the front runner as Beijing’s pick, there are different interpretations as to whether the support she’s getting is a “genuine” qindian, because some insist that messages conveyed by Beijing’s liaison office, or even from someone higher up, can still be questionable as long as they are not coming directly from President Xi Jinping.

So, is a qindian a blessing or a curse – or both – to an aspirant?

It was reported that Zhang and Sun told invited Hong Kong business heavyweights that Lam “is the one trusted by Beijing”. One interesting detail revealed later was that Zhang stressed the decision to back Lam was made by the party’s powerful Politburo, not by himself or Zhang Xiaoming, Beijing’s top representative in the city.