Hong Kong doubts China to soften stance after election shock

Bloomberg

In early June, chief executive Carrie Lam kicked off unprecedented chaos when she dismissed enormous crowds of Hong Kongers who marched peacefully to oppose legislation allowing extraditions to China.
The masses again spoke clearly and peacefully — this time giving 85% of 452 District Council seats to pro-democracy candidates, a swing of more than 50 percentage points. Nearly 3 million people cast ballots in the first vote since the unrest began for a record turnout of 71%.
While District Councils don’t have much power, for Lam it represents yet another chance to find a political solution to end some five months of increasingly violent unrest. On Monday she vowed to “listen to the opinions of members of the public humbly and seriously reflect.” She’s scheduled to hold a regular press briefing on Tuesday.
Investors looked on the bright side, sending Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index higher on the hope that the government would now soften its tone. Stephen Innes, chief Asia market strategist at AxiTrader, based in Bangkok, said it “will be difficult for Beijing to ignore these results.”
But many others didn’t expect much to change. While Lam’s Beijing-backed administration belatedly withdrew the bill allowing extraditions to China that spawned the demonstrations, it has since refused to meet other demands including calls for an independent Commission of Inquiry into police abuses and the right to nominate and elect the city’s top leaders.
“I don’t think that there will be a political compromise from either camp any time soon,“ said a 26-year-old office worker surnamed Mok, who has been on the front lines of the demonstrations. “Carrie Lam does not have to give in since her mandate was not from the people in the first place, but from Beijing,” he added. “The protesters will keep on fighting.”
The first comments from
Beijing weren’t encouraging. Speaking to reporters in Japan, foreign minister Wang Yi said the results wouldn’t change the fact that Hong Kong is part of China. State-run China Daily wrote that it’s “hard to imagine how many people’s opinions the election result represents” given the violence that occurred in the past few weeks.
“Stopping violence and restoring order is the paramount task in Hong Kong at
the moment,” Geng Shuang, a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, told reporters in Beijing. “Hong Kong is China’s Hong Kong. It is purely the internal
affairs of China.”
China’s failure to understand the city’s politics managed to turn a specific mistake by the government into “a major crisis” that has turned Hong Kong from a peaceful metropolitan city into one marked by daily chaos, said Steve Tsang, the director of the China Institute at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and the author of several books on Hong Kong.
“Neither Beijing nor Government House in Hong Kong will understand it,” said Tsang, referring to the election results. “And I think they’re more likely to react negatively.”
While the protests have disrupted daily life in Hong Kong, the election results showed the public remains firmly against Lam’s government.