Hong Kong markets rallied Wednesday after Carrie Lam, the city’s Beijing-backed chief executive, formally withdrew the extradition bill that had triggered months of massive weekend protests. But it’s unlikely to put the genie back in the bottle.
In a televised address, Lam said the government would “formally withdraw the bill in order to fully allay public concerns.”
But she also admitted: “After more than two months of social unrest, it is obvious to many that discontentment extends far beyond the bill. It covers political, economic and social issues.”
Indeed: Hong Kongers initially marched to stop the threat of a law that would let the mainland government extradite them for trial in Communist Party-controlled kangaroo courts. But then they saw police they’d largely trusted doing Beijing’s will in beating and jailing protesters — with Hong Kong’s own government even rounding up leaders of past protests in a demented effort to end the current ones.
And Lam axed the bill only after refusing to do so for weeks, because her gesture of tabling it indefinitely plainly didn’t suffice. She even implied at the time that she’d bring it back someday: “We are still doing it, out of our clear conscience, and our commitment to Hong Kong.”
Nothing prevents her, or some successor, from bringing it back — perhaps passing it quietly before opposition can mobilize.
That’s why the demonstrators now have other demands: an independent inquiry into police brutality, amnesty for the arrested protesters (more than 1,000), an end to the government’s calling them “rioters” — and, most provocatively, free elections.
Some, at least, won’t give up now. “Applying a Band-Aid months later on to rotting flesh simply will not cut it,” one masked protester, part of a group called Citizens’ Press Conference, said Wednesday night in front of the Legislative Council building. “We are one demand down, and we have four to go. We will not settle for less.”
Lam and her masters plainly hope that her move will take enough air of out the movement that it will gradually peter out. They’ll start to get their answer this weekend.
