City Beat | Torn between Hong Kong and Beijing, Carrie Lam’s delicate task is to satisfy both

She flew out on Sunday and will get her appointment letter from Premier Li Keqiang first, followed by a meeting with President Xi Jinping – formal protocol without which her confirmation as Hong Kong’s leader would not be finalised.

The running joke in town is that whoever wants the city’s top job must be out of their mind, but there is logic behind it. The fact is, whoever sits in the hot seat is torn between two sides because the chief executive must be accountable to both Beijing and Hong Kong.

This is therefore the reality, convenient or inconvenient. Many, including Lam herself, may feel that she, to a certain extent, has distanced herself from the liaison office by getting assurances from Beijing’s representatives that she and her governing team on their own should in future handle the lobbying for Legislative Council support instead of seeking help from the office.

But the formal arrangement for her to visit all the three agencies representing Beijing here – the liaison office, the People’s Liberation Army garrison, and the Commissioner’s Office of the Foreign Ministry – on the same day has added an element of symbolic protocol to these “courtesy visits”.

For now and the future, it signals a working relationship between the chief executive and Beijing and its representatives under the “one country, two systems” policy.