David Zweig

Opinion | As Hong Kong’s protests rage on, Xi Jinping’s meeting with Carrie Lam and China’s fourth plenum promise more interference

Chinese leaders’ expression of confidence in Lam means that it is unlikely that the PLA or Chinese police will soon be seen on Hong Kong streets

The attention paid to Hong Kong during the fourth plenum and news that central government officials will come to the city to explain the meeting’s communique should arouse concern

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Why you can trust SCMP

David Zweig

Published: 9:00am, 12 Nov 2019Updated: 4:32am, 13 Nov 2019

What do Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s meetings with China’s top leaders in Shanghai mean for Hong Kong? Viewing those meetings with some scepticism is warranted on several fronts.

First, while President Xi Jinping and Vice-Premier Han Zheng expressed full confidence in Lam and acknowledged the work she and her team had done to resolve the crisis in Hong Kong, no one here really shares that view.

And why should we? Since the spring, we have watched as Lam’s extradition bill exploded from a “single spark” into a “prairie fire”, even as rational Hongkongers begged her to reconsider. We watched her ignore public opinion polls released in early June that showed just how unpopular the bill was.

We watched her stoke the fire on June 10 when she announced that she would reject the concerns of the million protesters who had marched the day before.

Throngs of people march against the extradition bill in Hong Kong on June 9. Despite the march’s organiser reporting that over a million people joined the protest, Chief Executive Carrie Lam announced that the government would press ahead with the reading of the bill in the Legislative Council. Photo: Bloomberg

Her effort to ram her unpopular bill through the Legislative Council triggered the first serious violence between protesters and the police.