Beijing is mulling replacing embattled Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam well ahead of the end of her term following months of increasingly violent protests and political blunders, according to an anonymously sourced Financial Times report.
Citing people briefed on the Chinese government’s deliberations, the FT said Lam’s “interim” successor would be installed in March and serve out the rest of her five-year term, which ends in 2022, but would not necessarily go on serve a full term afterwards.
According to the report, former Monetary Authority head Norman Chan and former Chief Secretary and Financial Secretary Henry Tang are the front-runners to replace Lam.
The purported deliberations come amid Beijing’s most serious challenge in the territory since it was handed over by the British in 1997.
The city has been rocked by more than four months of protests, which were sparked by the Lam administration’s introduction of a bill that would have allowed extraditions to the mainland, but have since widened into a movement calling for police accountability and universal suffrage in selecting the city’s leaders. Currently, chief executives are selected from a pool of Beijing-approved candidates by a small group of electors.
Lam’s critics — even some within her own camp — have lambasted her approach to dealing with the protests. She has so far refused to make concessions (aside from belatedly withdrawing the controversial extradition bill months into the protest movement), while also remaining largely hands-off and allowing an emboldened police force to intensify its crackdown while bearing the brunt of widespread public outrage.
A policy address earlier this month, which Lam was forced to deliver via a prerecorded taping, was seen as an opportunity to offer a way out of the spiraling unrest, but the anodyne economic measures put forward by Lam did nothing to address protesters’ demands, and was widely viewed as a failure.
“We needed a big bang but this government doesn’t have any imagination,” one senior executive at a major company told the FT.
Calls for Lam’s resignation have been circulating for months, but a previous FT report from July — also anonymously sourced — said Beijing had rejected Lam’s resignation multiple times, while also restricting her latitude to negotiate with protesters.
According to the latest report, any moves to replace Lam before the end of her term are dependent on the situation in the city stabilizing to prevent giving the impression that Beijing is giving in to violence.
But even if the central government goes ahead with the purported plan, some analysts were skeptical it would make a difference.
“I don’t think a change in chief executive will have much impact on the profound political crisis that Hong Kong is facing,” said Ben Bland, director of the Southeast Asia Project at the Lowy Institute, a policy think tank.
“The problem is less who leads Hong Kong and more that its leaders have no popular legitimacy because they are effectively chosen by Beijing.”
Additional reporting by AFP.
