The Hong Kong government's deficiencies laid bare by the fifth Covid wave (and its handing one more opportunity to China to tighten its grip on the city)

China bull in Hong Kong

 

We are by no means safely out of the woods yet but it's good to see continued drops in Hong Kong's coronavirus numbers: with today's reported daily new cases down to 7,685 from the 8,037 recorded yesterday and it being the third day in a row that the numbers are below the 10,000 mark.  Also, while the number of daily fatalities continues to be way higher than we want to see (with another 168 deaths reported today; 143 new, 25 backlogged as the system's still not running smoothly), it's heartening to see that the number of Covid patients judged to be in serious (32) and critical (19) condition as well as are in the Intensive Care Units (108) are also going down too.

Still, I don't think that Hong Kongers and people looking on outside of Hong Kong are going to forget, and forgive, how badly the Hong Kong government has dealt with this fifth Coronavirus wave -- along with so many other things -- though.  And chief among Carrie Lam's sins for many is her running to Beijing for help and thereby giving it another prime opportunity to tighten its grip on Hong Kong.   

 

In recent days, articles by Hillary Leung has appeared in both the Hong Kong Free Press and The Guardian (containing much the same information but edited differently) about precisely this.  And I can do much worse than to copiously quote from one of them.  So, here's doing precisely that and sharing the following excerpts from The Guardian's piece:   

“Beijing has been trying to mould Hong Kong into another [Chinese] city,” says Lynette Ong, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. “The Covid crisis gives them a legitimate reason to do so.”

 

...Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a history professor at the University of California, Irvine, says “there was once a chasm separating what takes place in Hong Kong from what takes place across the mainland border”. That chasm is getting smaller.

 

Under the national security law, spaces like independent newsrooms, universities and civil society groups have felt a chill as Beijing seeks to integrate Hong Kong further into its fold.

And as Hong Kong prepares to welcome a batch of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners to staff treatment facilities and open more isolation camps built by mainland workers, the assimilation is now playing out more publicly than ever.

“The way that Covid has been handled by the Hong Kong authorities has demonstrated that the ‘one country, two systems’ concept is a pale shadow of what it once was,” Wasserstrom says.

As for the other deficiencies that the fifth Covid wave has "exposed", you know things are bad when even the normally pro-government, pro-Beijing South China Morning Post is running pieces discussing Carrie Lam's administration's poor leadership and inability to deliver.  Some excerpts from today's article noting those deficiencies in its headline as well as within its body:

[C]riticism and condemnation [has] rained down from former officials, business moguls and senior counsel, with former government adviser Jack Wong Chack-kie urging [Carrie] Lam to “resign in shame”. Even former commerce minister Frederick Ma Si-hang and Ronnie Chan Chi-chung, chairman of Hang Lung Properties, both usually circumspect about government matters, weighed in.

 

Ma said the governing team’s handling of the fifth wave exposed “all kinds of administrative deficiencies” while Chan bemoaned a leadership that lacked humility and was full of unfounded self-confidence.

 

...Experts told the Post the raging fifth wave of infections exposed not only Lam’s poor leadership, but also the weaknesses of the government as a whole, from its inability to plan ahead, coordinate civil servants and departments and disseminate information, to its failure in offering solutions even with help from Beijing.

 

...[A specialist in public administration, Professor John] Burns, an emeritus professor at the University of Hong Kong, said: “Effective governance requires leadership. Unfortunately, our leaders lack the ability to mobilise their own colleagues and the people to win this war. Rather, they value hierarchy and bureaucratic process above all else.”

The quote of the day must go though to another expert though. Professor Steve Tsang is director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London.  Living and working outside of Hong Kong (and China) as he does, I think he is more able to not mince words.  And I think he got to the crux of the matter when he asked the following question: "How could the government of a very wealthy and developed city like Hong Kong be so unprepared, if it was even moderately competent?"!