No-one can accuse Carrie Lam of not taking her duties seriously. She shows an almost obsessive dedication to maintaining law and order and imposing a ruthless Chinese sovereignty over a recalcitrant Hong Kong. She is a notorious micro-manager, unwilling to allow even a modicum of autonomy to her subordinates. She boasts of having to sleep only three to five hours a night and has given up badminton, her sole recreation, as all that changing clothes and showering just takes up too much valuable time away from official duties.
The 1997 transfer of Hong Kong from a British colony to a special administrative region of China, based on ‘one country, two systems’, has played out as a fraught affair riddled with contradictions. As autocracy in the guise of Chinese capitalism shows no sign of relenting, the pressure to clamp down on public freedom in Hong Kong has gathered force. Lam, a career bureaucrat-turned-politician with roots in both Britain and Beijing, is at the helm of this repression as it reaches critical mass.
