After erratic control months against the epidemic, the executive chipper, Carrie Lam, answers the concerns of the business community in the face of isolation.
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New Cap Change to Hongkong in the fight against COVID-19: Monday, March 21, the executive chipe, Carrie Lam, announced the lifting of the ban on flights from nine countries (including the France, the United Kingdom and the United States) and the reduction of the duration of the mandatory quarantine at the hotel for arrivals, which will increase from fourteen to seven days, from the 1 er April. Carrie Lam also “suspended” the large universal screening operation. However, it was the flagship measure of its vast fighter plan against the fifth wave of the epidemic, made public on February 22, following the very direct summons of Chinese President, Xi Jinping, a week earlier, the Intimant to control the epidemic and assume responsibility for this crisis.
This new bar stroke in the erratic management of the crisis arrives at a strange moment, since Hongkong is still in the fifth wave, a virulence significantly greater than the previous four. As for China, which had managed to isolate oneself with the virus by imposing a zero covid strategy, it seems, in turn, to face an uncontrollable invasion of the Omicron variant. “If someone is attached to the status of Hong Kong International Financial Center, it’s me,” Carrie Lam said, seeming to have suddenly understood that because of Isolate Hong Kong, she was likely to make him lose his main asset , both in the eyes of the world and the eyes of China, that of the third financial center of the planet.
Although there is still far from a complete reopening of borders (only people with resident status are allowed to return to Hongkong), these measures have been well received by the business community, from the Finance and diplomatic and expatriate communities that desperately demanded them for months or even years.
“Lack of humility”
It must be said that criticism against the government now came from everywhere, and no longer only pro-Beijing newspapers, which serve as a voice in the discontent of the Chinese central government. “At the heart of this crisis is a leadership problem. More specifically a lack of humility and an excess of unjustified self-confidence of some of our leaders,” wrote, in the English daily South China Morning Post of March 17, Ronnie Chan, one of Hongkong’s great landowners. The splash explicitly targeted Carrie Lam. Several rising open letters addressed to the executive cheft circulated on social networks and in the press, even though the main opposition media no longer exist.
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