Protests and pandemic will be Carrie Lam’s legacy, but she deserves to be remembered for much more

While the focus as Lam concludes her term will no doubt be on her toughest moments, they shouldn’t define her leadership
Lam has been a champion of art, innovation and heritage conservation, and has taken on seemingly intractable issues like housing and waste management

Bernard Chan

Published: 6:45am, 17 Jun 2022

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It’s a curious thing about memory that we tend to remember and dwell on negative events much more readily than on positive ones. Negativity bias is a proven psychological phenomenon. That’s why we recall insults better than praise. Or pay more attention to negative events than positive ones.

It’s no wonder then that Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s soon-to-be-concluded term may be remembered more for the 2019 protests and the once-in-a-lifetime Covid-19 pandemic than anything else she has accomplished. Most people would agree that her five-year term was the most challenging of any chief executive’s since the handover.

Critics have faulted Lam for not acting quickly enough or not being “decisive” enough in the handling of these unprecedented events. But, faced with something that’s never been encountered before and the responsibility for millions of lives, who among us can quickly formulate and decide on a cogent plan of action? It’s easy to be an armchair critic, but much more difficult to be in the hot seat.

Perhaps we can remember instead Lam’s willingness to tackle long-standing and seemingly intractable problems, sometimes with controversial decisions, such as banning e-cigarettes, municipal waste charging and increased welfare spending.

Carrie Lam (centre) visits the Kwai Chung Estate as residents undergo a five-day lockdown during the fifth wave of the pandemic on January 23. Photo: Felix Wong

A recent success is the elimination of the MPF offsetting mechanism, ending a decade-long argument between employers and employees. This long-awaited landmark bill protects employee pensions from being raided by employers to cover severance and long-service payments.

She has also managed to extend maternity leave from 10 to 14 weeks, drawing Hong Kong level with the International Labour Organization’s recommendation.

With blue-sky thinking, Lam’s administration has spearheaded an ambitious Northern Metropolis Development Strategy to transform the northern part of Hong Kong into about 926,000 residential units accommodating 2.5 million people. She has also implemented tenancy control for subdivided units, and provided 20,000 transitional housing units.

She was a driving force behind the InnoHK initiative to develop Hong Kong into a hub for innovation and technology, and global research. Twenty-eight world-class research clusters, such as the Hong Kong Center for Neurodegenerative Diseases, have established a presence at Hong Kong Science Park, in collaboration with renowned universities such as Stanford, MIT and the University of Oxford.

The chief executive attends a ceremony for a project to build a youth hostel – Po Leung Kuk Lee Shau Kee Youth Oasis – in Yuen Long on March 12, 2019. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

An additional HK$10 billion “InnoLife Healthtech Hub” in the Hong Kong-Shenzhen Innovation and Technology Park has been proposed to augment technology innovation in life and health sciences.

From her time as secretary for development, Lam has been known for her passion for conserving Hong Kong heritage and revitalising historic buildings such as Central’s “heritage triangle” of Tai Kwun, PMQ and the freshly restored Central Market. A centre for heritage and arts, Tai Kwun won the Unesco Asia-Pacific Award of Excellence for Cultural Heritage Conservation.

A hallmark of Lam’s term is the development of Hong Kong into Asia’s cultural and commercial art hub. In 2020, Hong Kong’s global art market share rose to 23.2 per cent, overtaking London as the second-largest contemporary art auction market in the world.

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Hong Kong’s world-class visual culture museum M+ to open in November

The award-winning Xiqu Centre for Chinese Opera and M+ museum of contemporary visual culture have been inaugurated at the West Kowloon Cultural District, and Hong Kong’s Palace Museum will open soon.

Lam has done much to improve the liveability of Hong Kong. Victoria Harbour, one of the world’s most extraordinary urban landscapes, has had a makeover. Residents can now walk along a connected 7.4km harbourfront promenade on the island side, enjoying enhanced public spaces such as a fence-free breakwater with 360-degree harbour views.

The vice-chairman of the Society for Protection of the Harbour said we should be “eternally grateful to Mrs Lam for all she has done to help protect and preserve the harbour for the enjoyment of present and future generations of Hongkongers”.

Lam has achieved much that she should be remembered for. It may interest the unbiased observer to know that 96 per cent of over 900 new initiatives pledged by Lam in her first four policy addresses have been completed or are progressing on schedule.

However, we may not be able to appreciate the tough decisions she made for Hong Kong until long into the future, as they were made not for short-term acclaim but for the sake of future generations. As she retires from public service, let’s take a moment to recognise her contributions to improving this city’s liveability, prosperity and well-being.

Bernard Chan is convenor of Hong Kong’s Executive Council