Hong Kong's Carrie Lam resists protesters' demands for more action

Hong Kong

HONG KONG leader Carrie Lam said that her decision to scrap extradition legislation was only the "first step" to addressing the city's unrest, but resisted protesters' calls to immediately meet the rest of their demands.

Mrs Lam told a news conference on Thursday that her decision to formally withdraw the controversial bill allowing extraditions to China and other moves would only be the "first step to break the deadlock in society".

The legislation sparked almost three months of historic protests and its withdrawal has been a key demand of demonstrators through increasingly violent clashes with police.

"It's obvious to many of us the discontentment in society extends far beyond the bill," Mrs Lam said, citing political, economic and social issues including housing and land supply. "We can discuss all these deep-seated issues in our dialogue platform to be established." Mrs Lam said the decision to scrap the bill was hers and not made in Beijing, although she added that the Chinese authorities backed the move. "They supported me all the way," she said.

Although withdrawal is the most significant concession Mrs Lam's embattled administration has made, it's unlikely to end the turmoil that has engulfed the Asian financial hub for months.

The protests have since expanded well beyond the bill, and previous attempts by Mrs Lam to placate protesters have been met with suspicion and anger.

Pro-democracy activists and lawmakers dismissed her concession as "too little, too late" and still want their remaining major demands met, including an independent inquiry into aggressive police tactics and a push to nominate and elect their own leaders - a proposal Beijing has ruled out.

Police announced on Thursday that they had now made a total of 1,187 arrests throughout the unrest - a figure one person higher than the 1,186 people who voted in the limited election that brought Mrs Lam into office as chief executive in 2017. She received a total of 777 votes from a 1,200-member committee stacked with Beijing loyalists.

Opposition lawmakers predicted that protests would continue, with another "stress test" planned for transportation networks around the city's airport planned for Saturday.

While investors reacted positively on Wednesday, giving the local benchmark Hang Seng Index its biggest gain in 10 months, many analysts saw the jump as a temporary bounce for a market that has been battered in recent months.

Mrs Lam disputed that the bill's withdrawal represented a "change of mind", noting that she had already declared the legislation "dead". Withdrawing it "doesn't make a difference in substance", she said.

Increasingly aggressive police tactics, supported by both Mrs Lam and Beijing's top body overseeing Hong Kong, have helped fuel more rallies and marches, including some that have disrupted the city's subway network and shut down its busy international airport.

Lawmaker Jeffrey Lam, a member of Carrie Lam's advisory Executive Council, said protesters and the local administration "should all sit down and talk it over". But he added that the government couldn't possibly meet all of the demands, including requests to drop charges against protesters.

"By requesting that, they are not respecting law and order," he said. "I don't care whether one is the chief executive or one is a hawker in the street, if a crime is committed, we should let our entrusted legal system deal with it. How can the government just say yes to that?"

Protesters' next moves will telegraph whether Mrs Lam and her backers on the mainland bet correctly that conceding on the bill's withdrawal will calm the movement after three months of outcry over Beijing's increasing grip over the city.

Students and other groups staged small peaceful protests on Thursday morning to express disappointment with Mrs Lam's speech.

"The content of her speech announcing what she did announce is just too unacceptable," lawmaker Claudia Mo, who has been an active presence in the protest movement, told Bloomberg TV before Mrs Lam's briefing.

"She kept blaming the young in Hong Kong for conducting what she called violence. But she wouldn't talk about, she wouldn't even mention police brutality, which has been so abundant and so transparent and obvious." WP