The Hong Kong Cantonese phrase “lam chau” (攬炒) literally means 'embrace fry',[2] which journalist and City, University of London lecturer[3] Yuen Chan explained as meaning "if I'm gonna fry, I'm gonna drag you in with me", comparing it to the English language idiom "if we burn, you burn with us".
[5] After the Hong Kong national security law was enacted by China at the end of June 2020, the LA Times reported that the idea of lam chau was "radical" when it emerged in the protest movement in 2019, but "is becoming a reality [...] accelerating each day as China and the U.S. stoke the flames of a conflict that looks set to explode in Hong Kong".
[2] In June 2020, after the announcement of the security law, The Daily Beast reported that the term was being used as graffiti and a protest call, and that the ideology of it was being seen as a final resort.
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".
[1] 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.