used as graffiti and a protest call, and that the ideology of it was being seen as a final resort. It is also used more broadly to refer to the idea of sanctions against Hong Kong bringing down China in general. Nonviolent Hong Kong protest advocate and law professor at the University of Hong Kong Benny Tai had written in April 2020 that he then saw lam chau as inevitable but thought it would take years, expecting Beijing to start by restricting freedoms slowly before bringing in a national security law and causing international sanctions themselves; in May 2020, when the Chinese government approved a decision allowing them to make the security law, he wrote that "Beijing has skipped straight to the endgame" and that "the CPC [is] speeding up laam chau". Reactions The Chinese Hong Kong Liaison Office responded negatively to the use of the term, telling protesters they "will only destroy Hong Kong". Chris Patten, the last Governor of Hong Kong before the UK handed the territory over to China, also criticised it. Patten supports Hong Kong protesters but felt that wanting to bring destruction "would only make the situation worse". Willy Lam of the Chinese University of Hong Kong described it as "a lose-lose situation for everyone". After the Liaison Office publicly denounced the doctrine, it spread more. To oppose this, pro-Beijing groups in Hong Kong tried to push an opposite idea and started using the phrase "if you burn, you burn with them" to suggest the lam chau protesters were only hurting themselves. Hong Kong political scholar Brian Wong also argued, in a piece published in The Diplomat in September 2019, that lam chau is dangerous; he wrote that the protesters advocating it do not have enough experience of Mainland China to see the differences between Hong Kong and Mainland China and recognise that Beijing sees the territory as replaceable. References External links Cantonese words and phrases Culture of Hong Kong