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One own goal, a bad year for Teresa Cheng, and misses all round: here’s how the Hong Kong government did in 2018
- Mike Rowse says the administration’s mishandling of the National Party affair, which led to the denial of a visa for a journalist, was notable among its misses
- Teresa Cheng, who began the year hit by a scandal over unauthorised building works, is now snagged in another over the CY Leung UGL investigation
Reading Time:3 minutes
Why you can trust SCMP
It is not an easy task to score a government’s overall performance over the course of an entire year. The range of activities is wide. Moreover, in addition to the targets an administration sets for itself, events often arise which are not within its control, so governments are prone to being blown off course. With that caveat, how should we rate the Hong Kong government’s 2018 performance?
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We can approach the exercise from three different perspectives – policy, personalities, and overall manner and bearing. Like the three blind men feeling different parts of an elephant, while none would give us a complete picture, taken together, we could still discern some valid truths about the total creature.
On the policy side, Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has been very clear throughout her term to date that priority is to be accorded to livelihood issues, in particular housing. To her credit, she has held to the course despite pressure from some pro-government voices to dip her toe in the treacherous waters of Article 23 security legislation.
Unfortunately, lack of new laws in this area, despite the obligation to take action specified in the Basic Law, left the administration defenceless when it came to handling the political pipsqueak Andy Chan Ho-tin and his hot button issue of “independence”.
That is the only explanation I can think of for the absurd overreaction in the way officials dealt with what is essentially a non-issue. Given the ongoing tussle on many fronts between China and the United States, and given the latter’s willingness to fan the independence flames in Taiwan and elsewhere to unsettle Beijing, the local administration probably felt it had no alternative but to strike a tough pose.
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