Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor wins Hong Kong S.A.R’s top job, the Chief Executive
SCMP - 2017-03-26
Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and husband, mathematician Professor Lam Siu-por and son
Lam will be the City’s first female chief executive-elect. The votes have been tallied, and Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor has won by a landslide.
The three HKSAR CE candidates: Woo Kwok-hing (L), Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor and John Tsang Chun-wah (SCMP)
Lam, 59, won 777 votes from the 1,194-member Election Committee. The former chief secretary beat former finance chief John Tsang Chun-wah and retired judge Woo Kwok-hing, who took 365 and 21 votes respectively.
Hong Kong S.A.R Chief Executive election official results (2017-03-26 - SCMP)
Lam was widely seen as Beijing’s preferred candidate while Tsang was said to have lacked the central government’s full trust. As for Woo, winning the race was seen as mission impossible.
On Sunday morning, the brief election period began with election committee members casting their votes between 9am and 11am at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre in Wan Chai.
Lam, who turns 60 in May, joined the British colonial government in 1980 after graduating from the University of Hong Kong, where she majored in sociology.
In the 1990s, she spent almost seven years in the finance bureau working on budget planning and expenditure control. In 2000, she was made social welfare director. As welfare chief, she introduced several controversial reforms, such as tightening the social security assistance scheme.
To some, however, Lam has a tender side too. A citizen named “Uncle Fook” wrote a letter about his hardship to Lam when she was director of social welfare. She helped him move into a housing unit for the elderly. Since then, she has kept in touch with him and visits him regularly.
During the Sars outbreak in 2003, Lam, together with three other senior civil servants in their personal capacity, set up a fund to help the long-term education needs of children whose parents had died from the disease.
Lam was appointed as permanent secretary for housing, planning and lands in 2003 and was posted to head the government trade office in London the following year. In 2006, she returned to Hong Kong to take up the position as permanent secretary for home affairs.
In 2007, she was appointed by then chief executive Donald Tsang Yam-kuen as secretary for development.
Lam became chief secretary in Leung’s administration in 2012
Lam had earlier denied any ambition to contest the top post, but she made a U-turn on December 10 last year and said she would “reconsider” running for the job – less than 24 hours after Leung’s shock announcement that he had decided not to seek a second term.
On January 12, she resigned as the chief secretary and ended her 36-year civil service career. Four days later, with Beijing’s endorsement of her resignation, she declared her candidacy for the leadership race.
Lam married to the mathematician Professor Lam Siu-por. The couple married in 1984 and have two sons.
The professor had expressed his wish for his wife to be elected and “contribute to the implementation of one ‘country, two systems’”.
Despite the ups and downs in her civil service career and her electioneering missteps, Beijing, believing she was a person it could trust, did not waver in its support for her.
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Congratulations Mrs. Lam!
I hope this Lady Chief Executive will be an "Iron Lady" of Hong Kong S.A.R to deal decisively with those alien-injected yellow pests.
