It’s unthinkable. Just over four decades ago, Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, Hong Kong’s current chief executive,
stood up calling for a responsive government. She was then a student at Hong Kong University, and she marched with fellow HKU students to Government House to present a petition pleading with then-governor Murray MacLehose to consider the concerns of students and teachers at the Precious Blood Golden Jubilee Secondary School, who were protesting against a cover-up of their headmistress, a nun, siphoning school funds into her Catholic mission.
MacLehose, like Lam today, stood unyielding even after the Central Court magistrate, Paul Corfe, found the headmistress guilty of “a gross betrayal of trust”. That was the colonial way of governing. The administration was answerable only to the Crown, not to the taxpayers and other residents of Hong Kong.
But the Precious Blood students, a new Hong Kong generation that gave birth to the mother of all student protests in our society, were equally adamant. They didn’t yield until they brought MacLehose to heel and he ordered an
independent inquiry by then-HKU vice chancellor Rayson Huang. The findings of that inquiry brought shame to the government and MacLehose.
What a comparison it now makes. There is no need to remind Lam that what makes a good leader is not iron will, but the ability to recognise what is reasonable in the demands of the common people – even the critics – and the humility to make the necessary amends. She knows it. She has seen that it was the lack of such ability in her predecessor, Leung Chun-ying, that made him an unpopular leader. And she has proven that she is not of the same ilk.
When Lam said, more than once as chief executive, that there’s
no need to rush to enact regulations under Article 23 of the Basic Law – which Leung and others like him have been pushing for – she made us feel that she possessed not only the wisdom to recognise Hong Kong realities but also the courage to put those realities clearly before the leaders in Beijing and make them agree to go slow in their dealings with society on that matter.
Where has that quality gone, now that
businesspeople, leaders of the
legal profession and others have teamed up with
pro-democracy campaigners against a new piece of extradition legislation the government is trying to rush through? Has she lost it all in her second year in office, or is she under pressure from the hard-core faction in China’s Communist Party?
