With just over a week until she is due to take office, all eyes are on Carrie Lam, Hong Kong’s first female chief executive-to be. Unfortunately, what we’ve seen in recent interviews suggest that the city’s next leader is not willing to defend the rights of Hongkongers at the expense of offending Beijing.
Last night, CNN aired an interview with Lam, during which she was asked about the case of the Causeway Bay booksellers who were abducted in 2015 — specifically, Swedish national Gui Minhai, who remains in detention.
Despite assurances that she “shared the concern of some people” (which includes former Chief Secretary Anson Chan, by the way) that the autonomy and rule of law granted to Hong Kong by the Joint Declaration are “being eroded”, Lam said more evidence was required before “we could actually conclude what actually has happened.”
She added that she felt “obliged” to reiterate that law enforcement in Hong Kong is “something to be carried out by our own […] agencies”.
When asked by interviewer Kristie Lu Stout if she had “any words of comfort” for Gui Minhai’s daughter Angela, who has been campaigning for her father’s release, Lam said Hongkongers “should really be more sympathetic and perhaps more understanding as the thing evolves in the mainland of China”.
“We are duty-bound to safeguard the Hong Kong system, but it would not be appropriate for us to go into the mainland or challenge what happens in the mainland. That has to be dealt with in accordance with the mainland systems.”
Lam did not elaborate on why she believes safeguarding the Hong Kong system and challenging what happens in the mainland are mutually exclusive.
When pressed by Lu Stout again on “words of comfort” for Angela Gui, Lam responded, “Well of course I sympathize with the girl […] as a mother. And myself, if any of my close relatives were in that sort of situation, then even out of humanitarian and compassionate grounds, it is only right for me to say the words that I have said. But at the end of the day, we must respect the rule of law in respective jurisdictions.”
The disappearances of the five booksellers, known for publishing and distributing salacious tomes on China’s top brass, sparked fury amongst Hong Kong’s public in 2015, especially as bookseller Lee Bo was widely believed to have been abducted from Hong Kong soil by mainland agents.
Gui, who disappeared from his home in Thailand in October 2015, went on television months later to “confess” to causing a fatal hit-and-run in 2003, which he claimed was the reason for his continued detention. Gui is still in Chinese custody and has only been granted two meetings with Swedish authorities in the time since.
