IT WAS a remarkable climbdown in the face of mass protests. Just three days after suggesting that to retreat would be like spoiling a child, Hong Kong’s chief executive, Carrie Lam, announced the indefinite shelving of a proposed law that would allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China. Mrs Lam now says she wants to avoid “chaos” in Hong Kong. Her U-turn came after the bill had provoked the biggest demonstration in many years, and another protest that escalated into the most violent social unrest in decades.
Few had expected the government to make such a concession, let alone so soon. The government had earlier planned to get the bill adopted by the Legislative Council by the middle of July, when the body is due to begin its summer break. It had described getting the law passed as “urgent”. But on June 15th Mrs Lam told reporters that the government would suspend the proceedings and would not set a deadline for resuming them.
It appears that public pressure has succeeded—for now, at least—in making the government reconsider a policy that had strong backing from the Communist Party in Beijing. Protests have not always proved so successful. In 2003 the government shelved a controversial anti-subversion bill after hundreds of thousands of people took to the streets. But in 2014 protesters occupied streets in busy commercial areas for 79 days to push for democratic reform and secured no concessions. Since then many observers thought leaders in Hong Kong and Beijing had become even less inclined to give way to public opinion on sensitive political matters.
On this occasion, however, opposition has involved far more than the usual critics of the party’s policies in Hong Kong. Businesspeople, lawyers and foreign governments have expressed considerable anxiety about the legislation. Although the proposed bill would allow extraditions to more than 170 other jurisdictions, the protests have focused on the potential for people in Hong Kong, including foreigners there, to be sent to mainland China, where courts are explicitly under the Communist Party’s control and dissidents are jailed on trumped-up criminal charges.
Opponents of the bill have been organising what they hope will be another large demonstration in Hong Kong on June 16th. They say it will go ahead despite Mrs Lam’s announcement, in order to push for the complete scrapping of the bill and to protest against what they say was the excessive use of force by the police during the outbreak of violence on June 12th. Amid reports of suspected protesters being sought among the scores of wounded in hospital, some also want Ms Lam to guarantee that there will be no prosecutions. It is telling that Mrs Lam has not retracted her claim that the unrest had been “a riot”.
Hong Kong’s government had argued that the main reason for introducing the bill now was to enable a suspect to be sent to face trial in Taiwan, where he is alleged to have murdered his girlfriend. The man is currently in prison in Hong Kong for a money-laundering offence and is due to be released in October. The bill would remove a provision in Hong Kong’s current law that excludes extraditions to “other parts of China”, which in Hong Kong means the mainland, as well as Macau and Taiwan. But Mrs Lam noted that Taiwan has said it will not accept the suspect’s extradition under the new law. She said that since the bill would not solve that one case, it was no longer urgent to pass it.
On June 12th Liu Xiaoming, China’s ambassador to Britain, told the BBC that the government in Beijing had nothing to do with initiating the bill. At her press conference, Mrs Lam said the central authorities had supported both her efforts to introduce the bill and her decision to shelve it. But there has been widespread speculation that the central leadership has been far more actively involved. Mrs Lam owes her position to a committee of local residents that is deliberately stacked with sympathisers of the Communist Party’s policies in the territory. She would be highly unlikely to make any move on such an important matter without seeking the party’s blessing. She declined to comment on local reports that she met one of China’s most senior politicians, Han Zheng, in the Chinese border city of Shenzhen on June 14th.
The U-turn is a humiliation for Beijing, which has sought to tighten its grip on Hong Kong. But at least it is one the Communist Party can pin on Ms Lam rather have the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, portrayed in poor light. Even within the limits imposed by the Communist Party, Hong Kong enjoys a degree of free expression and political flexibility, which is more than can be said for mainland China.
Mrs Lam, for her part, deflected reporters’ repeated questions about whether she would heed the demands of protesters that she resign. There would be a precedent for doing so. Tung Chee-hwa, who was chief executive when the anti-subversion law was shelved, stepped down a few months later, apparently because of his handling of that bill. Mrs Lam said the central government had shown her “understanding, trust, respect and support”. To keep her job, she will need more such backing.
