If Carrie Lam is governing Hong Kong and Luo Huining is supervising, who’s really in charge?

Is it meddling, governing or supervising? Any dictionary will tell you the three words have hugely different meanings. But in the murky politics of present-day Hong Kong, the three seem to have become interchangeable.

Meddling, in the Hong Kong context, is Beijing poking its nose into the city’s domestic affairs. Governing, in a political context, is running a city or country. But over the past two weeks, supervising has taken on a whole new dimension in our politics.

Were Beijing’s top representatives here meddling in local affairs when they slammed opposition legislator Dennis Kwok Wing-hang for filibustering to prevent a loyalist from chairing a key Legislative Council committee?

To me, it smacked of interference but Beijing has a way of pulling out limitless jokers from a deck of cards and playing them any way it wants. For 23 years since reunification, it was commonly understood that Article 22 of the Basic Law made domestic issues off-limits to Beijing’s liaison office and other entities here.

That understanding was suddenly shaken two weeks ago when the liaison office and the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office (HKMAO) asserted that they were exempt from Article 22. After three flip-flopping statements, the Hong Kong government agreed.

What made them exempt? Simple. They are not mere mainland government departments but an extension of the central government. In some card games, a joker can be anything you want it to be. Recasting what was commonly understood as something else in the blink of an eye was a well-played joker by Beijing.

But how’s the game of thrones to be played with Beijing’s new assertion that the liaison office and the HKMAO have the right and responsibility to supervise Hong Kong? Who is on the throne in Hong Kong, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor or liaison office boss Luo Huining?

That’s where the murky part of governing and supervising comes in. Does governing transcend supervising or is it the other way round? The three flip-flopping government statements may provide a pointer.

Three hard truths for Beijing to accept about ‘one country, two systems’

The first said the liaison office and HKMAO fell within the scope of Article 22, the second omitted mention of Article 22, and the third said both entities were exempt from Article 22 – the exact position of the liaison office.

It doesn’t take a genius to know the final statement – a virtual statement of surrender – was thrust on the government by the liaison office. When Luo, a hardliner trusted by President Xi Jinping, took over the liaison office in January at short notice, I wrote in the Post that he would be the real boss, not Lam. That now seems to have come to pass.

Loyalists will argue that Lam is still in charge of governing and that Luo’s job is to take a wider supervisory role on behalf of Beijing to ensure “one country, two systems” doesn’t go awry. But is Lam really governing or just doing the nitty-gritty work? And what does a wider supervisory role for Luo entail?

To many, the attacks on Kwok by the liaison office and the HKMAO – the accusations of misconduct and that he is breaching his oath of office by filibustering – would fall into the category of micromanaging a domestic issue rather than playing a wider supervisory role.

Events of the past two weeks have created so much ambiguity about the roles of the two Beijing entities that it cannot possibly bode well for Hong Kong’s high degree of autonomy.

To supervise is to keep watch over someone, to make sure everything is done correctly. Is Luo keeping watch over Lam? Since reunification, and even before, people had feared that the real power centre was in Western, the location of the liaison office, rather than in Central, the seat of the government.

Does anyone remember September 2015? That was when Zhang Xiaoming, boss of the liaison office at the time, said the chief executive’s power transcends all three branches of government. Chief Justice Geoffrey Ma Tao-li quickly countered that the judiciary was independent.

If Zhang’s assertion still holds true, Lam’s power transcends Legco, the judiciary and the executive but Luo has a supervisory leash on her, which technically means Luo’s power transcends everything. Way too complicated. I give up.

Michael Chugani is a Hong Kong journalist and TV show host