Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) has acted as a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) pawn, promoting an extradition treaty with mainland China and enthusiastically supporting Beijing’s imposition of Hong Kong’s National Security Law.
Earlier this week, Lam announced that she would not seek re-election and would step down in June. Her decision to fall on her sword should serve as a lesson to Taiwan’s pro-unification, pro-China camp.
An experienced administrator with a doctorate from the University of Cambridge, Lam was in 2017 selected to be the territory’s fourth chief executive and the first woman to hold the office.
Many people initially held high expectations for her and hoped she would lead Hong Kong through a political transformation.
Unfortunately, Lam turned out to be no different from her predecessors. She toadied to Beijing’s every whim and fancy like an obedient lap dog, and abandoned her fellow Hong Kongers.
Consequently, as Lam in 2019 sought to push through an amendment to Hong Kong’s extradition laws, and then later went further by conniving with Beijing to introduce its national security legislation, she was deaf to the effects on local financial markets and academic freedoms, and to calls for democracy.
Lam endorsed the use of force to suppress the legitimate appeals of Hong Kongers, and sacrificed the territory’s freedoms and democracy in exchange for personal power.
In forfeiting her intellectual credentials to become Beijing’s loyal political servant, Lam inadvertently turned herself into a lightning rod for those seeking to punish the CCP.
First, she was forced to give up her honorary fellowship at her alma mater, Cambridge’s Wolfson College, and then she was hit with financial sanctions by the UK and the US. Now, even the CCP has dumped Lam by declining to support her bid for re-election.
Lam’s political machinations have come to naught and her pretensions to power have been revealed to be the chimera they always were. Her political defenestration should be a wake-up call to people in Taiwan’s pro-unification camp.
As a free and open democracy, Taiwanese are of course welcome to hold different political opinions, such as supporting Taiwanese independence, unification with China or maintaining the “status quo” — and they can run for office on their chosen platform.
However, some pro-unification Taiwanese and media organizations have, like Lam, forfeited their political autonomy and simply parrot whatever propaganda line is being pushed by Beijing.
They questioned Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement, and more recently have been promoting a pro-Russia, anti-Ukraine line, mirroring the language coming out of Beijing.
Their slavish fawning at the feet of the CCP, their inability to distinguish friend from foe and their mechanical regurgitation of Chinese propaganda is identical to Lam’s behavior in every respect.
Lam has been unceremoniously tossed aside by her handlers in Beijing. Taiwanese who aspire to unite Taiwan with the “motherland” in the belief that this would bring them power and material gain should not be indifferent to her fate.
Paul Lei is a media industry veteran.
Translated by Edward Jones
Taiwan should reject two flawed answers to the Eswatini controversy: that diplomatic allies no longer matter, or that they must be preserved at any cost. The sustainable answer is to maintain formal diplomatic relations while redesigning development relationships around transparency, local ownership and democratic accountability. President William Lai’s (賴清德) canceled trip to Eswatini has elicited two predictable reactions in Taiwan. One camp has argued that the episode proves Taiwan must double down on support for every remaining diplomatic ally, because Beijing is tightening the screws, and formal recognition is too scarce to risk. The other says the opposite: If maintaining
India’s semiconductor strategy is undergoing a quiet, but significant, recalibration. With the rollout of India Semiconductor Mission (ISM) 2.0, New Delhi is signaling a shift away from ambition-driven leaps toward a more grounded, capability-led approach rooted in industrial realities and institutional learning. Rather than attempting to enter the most advanced nodes immediately, India has chosen to prioritize mature technologies in the 28-nanometer to 65-nanometer range. That would not be a retreat, but a strategic alignment with domestic capabilities, market demand and global supply chain gaps. The shift carries the imprimatur of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, indicating that the recalibration is
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), during an interview for the podcast Lanshuan Time (蘭萱時間) released on Monday, said that a US professor had said that she deserved to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize following her meeting earlier this month with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). Cheng’s “journey of peace” has garnered attention from overseas and from within Taiwan. The latest My Formosa poll, conducted last week after the Cheng-Xi meeting, shows that Cheng’s approval rating is 31.5 percent, up 7.6 percentage points compared with the month before. The same poll showed that 44.5 percent of respondents
China last week announced that it picked two Pakistani astronauts for its Tiangong space station mission, indicating the maturation of the two nations’ relationship from terrestrial infrastructure cooperation to extraterrestrial strategic domains. For Taiwan and India, the developments present an opportunity for democratic collaboration in space, particularly regarding dual-use technologies and the normative frameworks for outer space governance. Sino-Pakistani space cooperation dates back to the end of the Cold War in the 1990s, with a cooperative agreement between the Pakistani Space & Upper Atmosphere Research Commission, and the Chinese Ministry of Aerospace Industry. Space cooperation was integrated into the China-Pakistan
RSS