How much damage has Carrie Lam done to Hong Kong politics since 2016? Beijing must keep count

By now, nothing should faze us when it comes to Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor. She herself remains unfazed by how much of a political deadweight she is. In fact, she’s political poison – just look at how the pro-establishment camp was pretty much obliterated in the district council elections, losing control of 17 out of 18 district councils.

So she has finally admitted that “dissatisfaction with the government” was the reason for the devastating defeat. Last week, she even met those who had been dragged down by her incompetence and apologised.

But we know what they say about apologies: they don’t mean anything if you’re going to keep doing what you’re sorry for. Every minute she stays put, someone else pays. Not only is she sinking decades-long political careers, she is so poisonous that the pro-establishment parties might not recover from the electoral haemorrhage.

Perhaps she knew saying sorry wasn’t going to cut it, and so it was reported that she plans to offer those who lost their district council seats public service appointments. But if she was to follow through with that, Lam would cause even greater damage, corrupting public service. Public service appointments are not consolation prizes, and they are certainly not political assets to be frittered away.

Nixie Lam of the Democratic Alliance of the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, who lost her district council seat last month, said the consolation prizes were an insult. And she is absolutely right. It is an insult not just to those who have committed themselves to public service as members of statutory and government bodies, but also to those who have served districts as councillors.

By treating public service appointments as table scraps, and political casualties of her government’s ineptness as dogs, Lam has revealed the ugliness of her politics, and her jaw-dropping inability to see how misguided and unfit she is both as a public servant and a leader.

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It also shows how much her arrogance has crippled her. Although she has vowed to “humbly listen” to the people, she has clearly not learned how to listen. Some have speculated that during Lam’s latest duty visit to Beijing, the question of how to rebuild ties with the pro-establishment parties will be high on the agenda.

That’s all well and good, but surely Beijing should realise it is unreasonable and impractical to expect someone like Lam to clean up the mess she made with her extradition bill.

Most in Hong Kong thought the chaos and violence would end, after the beating the pro-establishment took at the polls. It didn’t. Lam has offloaded her work onto the police. She has done nothing to curb the violence. The government has only issued statement after statement after statement condemning violence and placed public service advertisements. Surely, the months of mayhem require a stronger solution than what Lam and her team have been willing to give.

One must wonder what kind of report Lam prepared for submission during the duty visit, and how Beijing leaders were going to evaluate her work. Given that not much work had actually been done, what is there to evaluate? Instead, they should probably spend some time tallying the irreparable damage Lam has done to Hong Kong politics – since way before the extradition bill.

After all, the bill was pushed by the very same Lam who rammed the Hong Kong Palace Museum plan down our throats, just weeks before she announced her run for chief executive. In 2016, Lam negotiated with the Beijing Palace Museum for the transfer of treasures from the Forbidden City, got HK$3.5 billion (US$448 million) in funding from the Jockey Club and appointed an architect – without any consultation or public tender.

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Most outrageous, of course, was how Lam even kept the consultation panel of the West Kowloon Cultural District Authority in the dark. She was notorious for her arrogance – her utter lack of respect for procedures or people – even before she took up the city’s top job.

Back then, Lam said the secrecy was necessary because she wanted to avoid an “embarrassing” situation where the Hong Kong public would have a chance to oppose the museum project. As chief executive, she has now put Beijing in an even more embarrassing situation.

This is how things are done the Carrie Lam way: amid fire and fury, she has wrecked the future of “one country, two systems” and of Hong Kong.

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