HONG KONG Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor will be the first female chief executive of Hong Kong, but there is no fervor like that seen last January when Tsai Ing-wen was elected Taiwan's first female president. Lam not only lacks a mandate due to the territory's undemocratic electoral system and her low popularity, but she also has to govern a divided society. Syaru Shirley Lin, a scholar of both Taiwan and Hong Kong affairs, told the Nikkei Asian Review that the situation in Hong Kong is much more tense than that in Taiwan, and Lam faces a number of difficult challenges.
What are the chances of healing the rift that exists in Hong Kong society? Lam is known to be a hard-liner on welfare, the environment and political reform. But these are exactly the issues she must tackle right away. Hong Kong is facing a high income trap -- low fertility, high inequality, high housing prices and so on -- and it is the most inequitable among all advanced economies, with young people having limited housing and job opportunities. In the Umbrella Movement of 2014, Lam was the hard-line face stonewalling the students.
