Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) yesterday replaced five senior officials, including the official overseeing ties with Beijing, in the biggest Cabinet reshuffle since hundreds of thousands of demonstrators took to the streets last year demanding her resignation.
Lam named Hong Kong Director of Immigration Erick Tsang (曾國衛) to replace Patrick Nip (聶德權) as Hong Kong secretary for constitutional and mainland affairs and appointed Nip as secretary for the civil service — two agencies at the center of Beijing’s demands for greater political loyalty from the former British colony.
The heads of the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau, the Innovation and Technology Bureau, and the Home Affairs Bureau were also replaced.
Photo: AP
Lam told a news conference that she hoped the changes would help lay the ground for the territory’s recovery from a year of protests and pandemic.
“This reshuffle is aimed at taking us forward,” Lam said.
The appointments were announced earlier by Xinhua news agency, which said that the Chinese State Council had approved the nominations, as required for all top positions in Hong Kong.
The move comes as the territory tackles a second wave of COVID-19 cases while trying to soften the pandemic’s blow to the economy.
Hong Kong has also been battered into recession by the US-China trade dispute, and months of historically large and often violent protests that erupted in opposition to Lam’s effort to allow the transfer of criminal suspects to the mainland.
While Lam has said her government deserves the blame for the “entire unrest,” Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) has continued to back her and she has refused calls to resign.
Lam’s approval has risen from historic lows in part due to her early success in managing the coronavirus outbreak, with 18 percent supporting her in a Hong Kong Public Opinion Research Institute survey released on Tuesday, compared with 9.1 percent in February.
The reshuffle follows Xi’s own shakeup of the agencies that oversee Hong Kong, which was guaranteed a “high degree of autonomy” after its return to Chinese rule in 1997.
Nip apologized earlier this week for causing “confusion” and “misunderstanding” with a series of contradictory news releases from the Hong Kong Constitutional and Mainland Affairs Bureau attempting to explain a claim by the Hong Kong Liaison Office that it has the authority to supervise Hong Kong’s local affairs.
Meanwhile, his replacement, Tsang, received fresh scrutiny for giving a recent interview with a portrait of Xi over his shoulder.
Under Tsang’s watch, the immigration department in 2018 denied a visa renewal for Financial Times journalist Victor Mallet after he hosted an event at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club featuring the founder of a banned pro-independence party.
Lam said that reshuffle was “completely and entirely unrelated” to recent events.
She deflected a question about the Xi portrait, saying Tsang was chosen because of his capabilities.
The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday inaugurated the Danjiang Bridge across the Tamsui River in New Taipei City, saying that the structure would be an architectural icon and traffic artery for Taiwan. Feted as a major engineering achievement, the Danjiang Bridge is 920m long, 211m tall at the top of its pylon, and is the longest single-pylon asymmetric cable-stayed bridge in the world, the government’s Web site for the structure said. It was designed by late Iraqi-British architect Zaha Hadid. The structure, with a maximum deck of 70m, accommodates road and light rail traffic, and affords a 200m navigation channel for boats,
PRECISION STRIKES: The most significant reason to deploy HIMARS to outlying islands is to establish a ‘dead zone’ that the PLA would not dare enter, a source said A High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) would be deployed to Penghu County and Dongyin Island (東引) in Lienchiang County (Matsu) to force the Chinese military to retreat at least 100km from the coastline, a military source said yesterday. Taiwan has been procuring HIMARS and Army Tactical Missile Systems (ATACMS) from the US in batches. Once all batches have been delivered, Taiwan would possess 111 HIMARS units and 504 ATACMS, which have a range of 300km. Considering that “offense is the best defense,” the military plans to forward-deploy the systems to outlying islands such as Penghu and Dongyin so that
WHAT WAS ALL THAT FOR? Jaw Shaw-kong said that Cheng Li-wen had pushed for more drastic cuts and attacked him, just for the outcome to be nearly identical to his bill The legislature yesterday passed a supplementary budget bill to fund the purchase of separate packages of US military equipment, with the combined amount of spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.8 billion). The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) used their legislative majority to pass the bill, which runs until 2033 and has two main funding provisions. One was for NT$300 billion of arms sales already approved by the US for Taiwan on Dec. 17 last year, the other was for NT$480 billion for another arms package expected to be announced by Washington. The bill, which fell short of the NT$1.25
‘CLEAR MESSAGE’: The bill would set up an interagency ‘tiger team’ to review sanctions tools and other economic options to help deter any Chinese aggression toward Taiwan US Representative Young Kim has introduced a bill to deter Chinese aggression against Taiwan, calling for an interagency “tiger team” to preplan coordinated sanctions and economic measures in response to possible Chinese military or political action against Taiwan. “[Chinese President] Xi Jinping [習近平] has directed the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. China has a plan. America should have one too,” Kim said in a news release on Thursday last week. She introduced the “Deter PRC [People’s Republic of China] aggression against Taiwan act” to “ensure the US has a coordinated sanctions strategy ready should
RSS