Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators have given China’s rulers a clear rebuke
story told in tears. The most obvious were those streaming from the eyes of protesters in the shadows of Hong Kong’s glass-walled office towers, while police tried to disperse them with tear gas, as well as plastic bullets, water hoses and clubs. The protesters had gathered late on June 11th to try to stop a debate in Hong Kong’s legislature on an extradition bill.
Mrs Lam, who was hand-picked by a panel dominated by politicians and tycoons loyal to Communist rulers in Beijing, says the new bill will plug a “loophole”—as if previous leaders somehow forgot to draft rules for sending suspects to China’s courts, which take orders from the Communist Party. Its opponents, she says, would make Hong Kong a refuge for fugitives. Besides, the authorities there note, the law excludes those accused of political crimes.
Anson Chan, who was the chief civil servant in the Hong Kong government both under the British and for the first four years of Chinese rule, notes that the colonial government considered granting Hong Kong courts extraterritorial powers to try serious crimes committed by Hong Kongers in the mainland as long ago as 1986. It did so precisely because it believed that Chinese courts were not trusted. Under China’s current leader, Xi Jinping, she says “there is even less” trust today.
Officials in Beijing, too, were probably not expecting such widespread opposition to the bill. By now, 22 years after Hong Kong became a Chinese Special Administrative Region, the country’s rulers had expected the territory’s people to have accepted their allotted fate: a life of well-fed but politically neutered domestication, like so many golden-egg-laying geese.
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