The Pulse：Carrie Lam as CE: discussion with Ronny Tong & Rachel Cartland, OC arrest & REO lost lapto

After months of speculation over which way Beijing would finally declare the wind should blow, last Sunday provided little surprise. Former Chief Secretary Carrie Lam is to be Hong Kong’s next Chief Executive. Unlike Leung Chun-ying, who won with just 689 votes in 2012, Mrs Lam managed to garner 777. Her rivals, former Financial Secretary John Tsang, had 365 votes leaving Woo Kwok-hing, with just 12. Several electors from both pro-establishment and pro-democracy camps reported that they had received calls from the Liaison Office and other middlemen “familiar with the Chinese side” telling them precisely what Beijing expected them to do. With us in the studio are Convenor of Path of Democracy Ronny Tong and former assistant director of social welfare, Rachel Cartland.
Carrie Lam may have received 88 more small-circle votes than her predecessor Leung Chun-ying, but according to most polls she’ll be taking up her position with a much lower popularity rating than Mr Leung when he came into office. One reason is that she was running against a considerably more popular opponent.
Given that Beijing representatives had made their preferences pretty clear, the insistence on installing Mrs Lam has been interpreted as a sign of a continued hard line stance towards Hong Kong. That impression intensified when, the day after the election, the police arrested and charged three main leaders of, and six key participants in, the 2014 Occupy Central movement. And that wasn’t the only sensitive post-election development. The Registration and Electoral Office also revealed that on Sunday two laptop computers, at least one of which contained personal data of all Hong Kong voters, had been stolen.