Hong Kong's beleaguered chief exec says the extradition bill is "dead" but won't make it official

When the Chinese politburo gave itself the right to veto nominees for Hong Kong elections in 2016, it ensured that any future legislature on the supposedly independent island would be a puppet regime, its electors literally beholden to Beijing for their office; and by 2019, the puppet regime of Carrie Lam began to deconstruct Hong Kong's independence by introducing the "extradition bill," which would allow Beijing to demand that political dissidents be rendered to the Chinese mainland for show-trials and arbitrary detention.

It was a terrible political miscalculation, and it triggered a month of mass protests on a scale never seen in Hong Kong history; a month later, the protests are still going strong and popular sentiment is with the protesters, thanks in part to the violent police suppression tactics, which cast the opposition in a very sympathetic light.

The protesters want Lam to formally withdraw the extradition bill and then resign, but she won't do either (yet). Instead, she keeps using informal, nonbinding language to say that the bill is "on pause" and now "dead." These aren't terms that correspond to any formal processes within the Hong Kong legislature. If Lam wanted to actually take the extradition bill off the table, she would have to invoke Article 64, which she has steadfastly refused to do.

But there is some progress: Lam did shift from saying that the bill was "on pause" to saying it was "dead" and to explaining that this meant that while it would be part of her government's "legislative programme" until the government recesses in summer 2020, it would not come up for further consideration. Read the rest