Carrie Lam: Beijing’s puppet who believes there is a place reserved for her in heaven

She rose from studious Catholic schoolgirl to the peak of the Hong Kong government, writes Ben Chu. But with the the territory’s liberties facing an existential threat from mainland China, Carrie Lam’s own future is now out of her hands too

‘Her behaviour and thinking have changed a lot,’ observes a fellow student radical (Reuters)

Carrie Lam, the most senior politician on the tormented archipelago of Hong Kong, is a woman of many nicknames. “Babysitter”, “tough fighter”, “777” are all sobriquets that have been attached to Lam in her long career in public life on the former British colony.

But the one that she really objects to is “puppet”. When Lam was elevated to the post of the territory’s “chief executive” in 2017 she was the candidate who enjoyed the backing of the Communist authorities in mainland China.

Since the 1997 handover to China the Beijing-favoured candidate has invariably won the suffocatingly restricted contests that Hong Kong calls elections. But while Lam was content to benefit from the support of Beijing she also wanted to be known as her own woman.

“To say that I am just a puppet, that I won this election because of pro-Beijing forces, is a failure to acknowledge what I have done in Hong Kong over the last 36 years,” she insisted to the BBC.

Three years on from that contest and the political landscape in Hong Kong has changed utterly.

Lam’s attempt last year to introduce a new law that would allow Hong Kongers to be extradited to mainland China ignited an inferno of protest on the streets of the territory.

Battles between Hong Kong police and demonstrators, who were demanding the Lam’s resignation and the implementation of full democracy, were like nothing the territory had witnessed before and plunged Hong Kong into a profound economic crisis.

As images of violent disorder – even medieval-style sieges – flashed around the globe, many wondered how long it would be before Beijing sent in mainland troops to restore order.

There were fears of a “new Tiananmen”, a reference to the brutal suppression of pro-reform student demonstrators by the People’s Liberation Army in the Chinese capital in 1989.

The troops never, in fact, arrived in Hong Kong, as the coronavirus pandemic helped to clear the streets.

But force arrived from Beijing last month in a different form. A new national security law for Hong Kong was passed by mainland China’s rubber-stamp parliament and imposed unilaterally on the territory.

Criminalising “subversion”, “succession” and “terrorism”, the law places the mainland’s Communist Party-subservient legal system firmly above Hong Kong’s own law-governed courts. Last year’s protesters, even the millions of peaceful ones, would likely fall foul of it. The law’s wording suggests that even those who make disobliging comments about the Chinese regime abroad could face arrest if they came to the territory.

Carrie Lam walks into the chamber to give her annual policy address last October (Getty)

Democracy campaigners are calling it the death of Hong Kong as we know it: a liberal, free-market, law-governed enclave in the South China Sea.

But did Lam help wield the executioner’s axe? Lam welcomed the new law as filling a “gaping hole” in the territory’s legal framework. And the chief executive’s office will gain some new authority, such as the ability to select judges to preside over national security cases.

Yet the fact is that most fresh power flows not to Government House, the neoclassical residence of the chief executive, but up to Beijing, specifically in the form a new mainland government security office in the territory with its own law enforcement personnel.

The clearest demonstration of who is calling the shots was that Lam herself was not shown the full text of the new legislation before it was enacted.

Some might argue that conformity has always been the distinguishing feature of Lam’s life.

Born Cheng Yuet Ngor in 1957 in modest circumstances in the Wan Chai district of Hong Kong island, she attended St Francis’ Canossian College, a Catholic girls’ school, where she become head prefect. Lam recalls that she wept when she did not finish top in a subject.

Her Catholic education seems to have instilled a conviction of her personal salvation. “There is a place reserved for me in heaven,” she once told a group of cardinals, something she’s been happy to declare to journalists.

Yet Lam’s life did not always suggest a reflexive obedience to higher powers. As a sociology student at the University of Hong Kong in 1978 she joined a club known for its social justice activism and took part in a demonstration outside the then governor’s residence to protest against the colonial authorities’ decision to shut a secondary school accused of housing “leftist” students and teachers.

She joined the Hong Kong civil service in 1980, in whose employ she would remain for the next three and a half decades.

There was, though, a year abroad, when she took a diploma in development studies in Cambridge. There she met another Hong Kong student studying mathematics called Lam Siu Por. They married in 1984, with Carrie taking his surname. Mr Lam is spending his retirement in the UK with their two sons, though the couple insist they are not estranged.

Carrie rose through the Hong Kong civil service ranks, earning a reputation as a “tough fighter” for her battles with the bureaucracy. Her “babysitter” nickname came from the fact that she often found herself cleaning up the administrative messes of the men above her in the hierarchy.

As recently as 2014 Lam seemed to have the air of a potential reformer about her. During the Umbrella protests of that year – when tens of thousands of students peacefully occupied districts of Hong Kong demanding universal suffrage – Lam sat down with movement’s leaders to try to broker a compromise.

Yet that had all gone by 2017 and her own campaign for the chief executive role. Sympathetic noises about the case for political reform had been replaced with praise for the increasingly authoritarian mainland Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

The nickname “777” refers to the total number of votes that elevated Lam to the top job, although some have noted that in Cantonese – the dialect of Chinese spoken in Hong Kong – “seven” also sounds like a vulgar insult directed at the impotent.

“Her behaviour and thinking have changed a lot,” observes Wai Chi Kin, a pro-democracy politician in Hong Kong who knew Lam when they were both social justice campaigners in the late 1970s.

Yet Lam’s political position is so weak and her authority so diminished that it’s difficult to see her pushing back against further abuses of Hong Kong’s civil liberties from Beijing even if she was minded to.

She was forced to drop her proposed extradition law last year in large part because powerful Hong Kong business elites feared they might end up being the ones being shipped to the mainland.

Protests against Hong Kong’s new security law (AP)

Lam gave an emotional apology behind closed doors to one group of oligarchs for her handling of the affair, even suggesting she wanted to resign.

Nor is she apparently held in high regard in Beijing. At the peak of last year’s street violence there were rumours she was going to be pressured by her mainland patrons to step aside.

She has shown signs of self-pity, complaining that the protests made it impossible for her to even visit the hairdresser. Hong Kong Facebook accounts are full of brutally mocking memes aimed at her (though many of them are now being hastily scrubbed from devices by people who fear arrest under the new security law).

A particular source of anger in this territory, where the gap between the wealthy and the poorest is one of the highest in the world, is Lam’s HK$5.21m (£531,000) annual salary, which makes her one of the planet’s highest paid politicians.

What next? Lam’s term as chief executive ends in 2022. She’s hinted in the past about moving to the UK when her career is over to be with her family, though she relinquished her British citizenship in order to run for chief executive.

Whether that is allowed to happen or not will probably depend on the decisions of a future UK home secretary. But there would certainly be an irony if the woman who presided over the death of Hong Kong ended up spending her retirement in the old colonial mother country. Many would describe it as an insult.

For now, Beijing puppet or not, Lam certainly resembles someone whose destiny will be determined by powers well beyond her own control.