While she had shared the story as one of the memorable low points in her life, it is safe to assume that has been superseded in the past two weeks while Lam has been caught in the worst political storm to ravage Hong Kong in the two decades since the handover – one that has seen her sink to the bottom as far as public opinion is concerned.

The combative Lam doubled down even after an estimated 1 million Hongkongers marched on June 9 to protest against the bill, their presence on the streets scored by chants demanding her resignation. The massive turnout was double the number that took part in a historic 2003 procession that forced the government to shelve a controversial national security bill.

“We were doing it and we are still doing it out of our clear conscience and our commitment to Hong Kong,” said Lam a day after the march.

It took another protest on June 12 – which resulted in violent clashes between protesters and police, with tear gas and rubber bullets deployed and more than 80 people injured – before Lam decided to suspend the bill.

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But the fact that the legislation was not scrapped, and Lam’s written apology – one that she later delivered in person – failed to satisfy Hong Kong’s angry protesters, mostly people in their 20s. Demanding the complete withdrawal of the bill, they have since staged more drawn-out demonstrations, taking over roads and besieging government offices.

Lam, who marks her second anniversary in office on July 1, chose to stay out of sight for more than a week, halted all controversial policy initiatives – and now faces the wrath of even her loyal allies in the legislature.

What went so wrong for the top girl who became chief executive, one everyone now believes is a lame duck and a likely one-term city leader?

Interviews with members of Lam’s cabinet, pro-establishment lawmakers and Beijing insiders suggest it was a potent combination of policy failure caused by an overconfident leader trapped in groupthink, inadequate preparation of the ground and a lack of political experience on the world stage. There is no doubt that heads will roll once calm returns, but whose and when remain unclear for now.

HEADING FOR DISASTER

Lam’s journey to the brink of disaster began at 10am on January 29. Members of the Executive Council, Hong Kong’s top decision-making body, were given a policy paper outlining proposed amendments to the city’s extradition law. It was the last Exco meeting before the Lunar New Year holiday.

Lam was moved to change the extradition rules in late 2018 after receiving emotional letters from the parents of a pregnant woman who was killed while on holiday in Taipei with her boyfriend, who returned to Hong Kong alone. The man, Chan Tong-kai, was suspected of being the killer, but he could not be sent back to Taiwan to help with investigations because Hong Kong has no extradition arrangement with the island, which China regards as a renegade province.

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Aides said Lam took the pleas of the dead woman’s family to heart and decided to act after discussing the matter with John Lee Ka-chiu, the city’s first security chief to be promoted from the police force. His predecessors were either career bureaucrats or immigration directors.

The extradition bill they produced went considerably further than making it possible to send a wanted man to Taiwan. It also sought to allow the transfer of fugitives on a case-by-case basis to mainland China and other jurisdictions with which Hong Kong has no extradition arrangement.

Plugging that loophole would have fulfilled a long-standing wish of Beijing. Hong Kong had for years been a refuge for corrupt officials and businessmen fleeing the mainland, as well as a destination – albeit a temporary one – for political dissidents.

Sources said Lam saw that the Taiwan case presented a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to cross off an item on Beijing’s wish list for Hong Kong. But even though political crimes were not deemed extraditable offences under the bill, the very idea that people in Hong Kong could be sent across the border to face possibly unfair trials in a less than robust legal system made many jittery, a fear ready to be fanned by critics.

Lam and company dismissed such concerns as irrational. According to insiders in the pro-establishment camp, her confidence that the bill would be pushed through the legislative process, coupled with Lee’s background in security, resulted in an exercise that was hasty and rushed.

The pair also shrugged off the need for a full consultation exercise, giving members of the public only 20 days to submit their views. They argued that time was of the essence for the Taiwan murder case, and believed public sympathy for the dead woman would help the bill sail through its passage.

“Lee, with his police force background, only sees things from one perspective, to bring suspects to justice,” said a Beijing-friendly lawmaker who spoke on condition of anonymity. “While even some of the mainland officials we talked to said they had foreseen the political implications and possible backlash of the amendment, he and Lam failed to do so.”

In the first paper on the extradition bill, prepared by the Security Bureau, there was no indication the bill would spark major controversy.

“No red flag was raised in the ‘Public Reactions’ paragraph,” a source close to the government said. “The paragraph was quite short.”

He said there was nothing to draw the attention of Exco members: “It was obvious that the top echelons of the administration did not expect massive opposition.”

Early on, another high-ranking government source said, it became evident that security officials lacked political savvy on two counts.

First, they did not anticipate opposition from Taiwan, which was deep in the throes of politicking ahead of elections. Second, they underestimated the depth of Hongkongers’ distrust of the mainland’s legal system.

“Their lack of sensitivity may stem from the fact that all three political appointees in the Security Bureau, including Lee, are former police officers,” the source said, adding that the Department of Justice appeared to provide little meaningful legal support to the Security Bureau in the first few months after the proposal was put forward in January.

The government’s 20-day consultation exercise may have served to bolster Lam’s resolve, as two-thirds of the 4,500 submissions supported an amendment to the extradition law.

But there were murmurings early on, and even Lam’s advisers in the Exco had wind of them. The Exco members include those from Hong Kong’s finance and business elite, but they failed to convey the concerns of the sector.

Referring to his party colleague and Exco member, Liberal Party leader Felix Chung Kwok-pan said: “When I first heard Tommy Cheung Yu-yan mention the existence of this bill, I immediately sensed something was wrong.”

Chung, who has run a textile factory on the mainland since 1993, said: “Those who have not done business on the mainland would not be aware of our fears.”

Many businessmen genuinely feared that they might inadvertently break the law on the mainland, where some said the tax system was too complicated and bribery sometimes an inevitable reality of striking deals. They were worried that the extradition bill, once passed, might be used to bring them to book there.

Chung said these concerns would have been flagged to the administration early, if it had only bothered to engage the pro-establishment bloc fully.

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Instead, the lack of proper consultation meant the city’s two leading pro-business parties – the Liberals and the Business and Professionals Alliance – were unusually vocal in opposing the bill, despite being Beijing-friendly. They urged the government to exempt white-collar crimes from the list of extraditable offences.

In Hong Kong politics, 43 pro-establishment lawmakers dominate the 70-member legislature and usually side with the government, even on critical issues.

But this time, the fears of the business sector resonated with the wider community. In March, the American Chamber of Commerce became the first group of foreign investors to voice objections, warning that the bill could deal a blow to the city’s reputation as a business hub.

When Amcham spoke up, the international ramifications were laid bare. Several Exco members told the Post they asked top security officials if they needed to step up their explanations of the bill given the chamber’s statement, but their concerns were dismissed.

“The government was confident the bill would certainly be passed because the pro-establishment camp had an overwhelming majority in the Legco,” a person familiar with the issue said.

INSUFFICIENT AMENDMENTS

In late March, however, the government gave in to the business sector. It amended the bill to exempt nine white-collar crimes from the 46 extraditable offences and raised the threshold for extradition to only offences punishable by three years in prison, instead of one.

But the business community, including AmCham, was still not persuaded.

Up until then, and despite discontent already swirling in the pro-establishment camp, there was no clear reading on what Beijing thought, a source from the Business and Professionals Alliance said.

There were no “instructions” or “reminders” to support the bill from officials during the country’s two sessions meeting in Beijing in March, the Hong Kong delegates recalled. They realised then the legislation was not being introduced on orders from Beijing.

Even key mainland experts on Hong Kong affairs, including those specialising in the city’s Basic Law, did not know much about the bill or its rationale, according to groups in contact with these scholars.

In mid-March, the head of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Hong Kong issued only a mild statement calling on other countries to respect the city’s rule of law and its normal legislative process.

The turning point for Beijing came only after a group of Hong Kong pan-democrats went to the US, according to Tam Yiu-chung, the city’s sole representative in China’s top legislative body, the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress.

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The delegation, led by former chief secretary Anson Chan Fang On-sang, lawmakers Dennis Kwok and Charles Mok met congressmen and vice-president Mike Pence, and urged Washington to speak up against the bill. A domestic Hong Kong issue had become a potential new front in the geopolitical rivalry between the US and China.

In April, Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong invited a group of pro-establishment supporters to set up a pro-bill alliance. This outfit then set up street booths and collected hundreds of thousands of signatures from the public.

Breaking his silence in May, Zhang Xiaoming, head of Beijing’s Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office and Beijing’s top man in charge of the city’s affairs, insisted the bill was needed but also asked the government to address people’s fears.

At that point, outnumbered pan-democrat lawmakers were pessimistic about being able to block the bill. Knowing that even the 79-day Occupy protests of 2014 failed to get Beijing to agree to political reforms, the camp was splintered, listless, and unsure of its prospects.

“We weren’t optimistic,” Democratic Party leader Wu Chi-wai recalled. “We knew our hands would be tied once the bill was put to a vote.”

He and others decided to do their best to drag out the bill’s passage. The usually calm Wu got in a physical scrape in May as both sides fought to control a committee scrutinising the bill. Punches were thrown in unprecedented scenes of chaos in the house that landed one lawmaker in hospital and left at least three others injured.

Outside, their efforts to stoke opposition to the bill were producing results. A first march they organised in April attracted 12,000 people. A second one drew an estimated 130,000 protesters – the largest turnout since the 2014 Occupy demonstrations.

Pro-establishment lawmakers began sensing the ground was sour. One said it dawned on her in early April that the government had lost the propaganda war. “I urged security officials to produce ‘pamphlets for dummies’ about the bill,” she said. She was rebuffed as officials said they were still confident they could pull it off.

She also felt her camp had a blind spot. Many believed that the “lies” being spread by the pan-democrats about the negative effects of the bill would be exposed once the bill was passed and no one was extradited to the mainland as widely feared.

On the pan-democrat side, Wu recalled: “By around May, we could feel the escalating momentum. Ordinary citizens had started to care.”

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Some were unhappy with the government’s dismissive attitude towards the Bar Association, which had repeatedly criticised the bill and called on officials to find other ways to deal with the Taiwan murder case, he added. Pro-business lawmaker Chung said: “It isn’t surprising for the administration to ignore the pan-democrats, but it should not have turned a deaf ear to the Bar Association, which is a well-respected body.”

And when the more conservative Law Society also voiced concerns, it was obvious the bill was in deep trouble.

A FUNERAL FOR HONG KONG

By May, the anti-bill movement was no longer led solely by the pan-democrats. Now it began looking more like a grass roots movement, with plenty happening online.

Young, active members of the online forum LIHKG began dishing out anti-bill statements. Hundreds of petitions criticising the bill mushroomed online, drawing support from more than 100,000 people – students and alumni from more than half of the city’s 506 secondary schools, Christians, Hongkongers living abroad and even housewives.

A third march was planned by the Civil Human Rights Front for June 9, and it looked to many, including pro-establishment politicians, like it was going to be huge. But even then the government expected there to be about twice as many people than the 130,000 who showed up on April 28.

Instead, an estimated 1 million protesters showed up. Many wore white, as if attending a funeral for the death of Hong Kong.

“Until the June 9 march, most Exco members were not aware of the existence of massive opposition to the bill,” a source said.

Such was the gap of understanding between the government and the people. Insiders point to one deficiency in the administration: the inability to gauge public sentiment. Two years ago, the Central Policy Unit, which used to conduct regular polls on various topics for top officials, was revamped into the Policy Innovation and Coordination Office and surveys were abandoned.

A government source said officials did not expect people who were unlikely to be affected by the bill to believe it would put their personal freedoms at risk.

“The government lacks effective tools in gauging public opinion. It has been a problem for some years,” the source added.

Thus, he admitted: “We were outdone by the opposition camp’s public relations campaign. We couldn’t get our messages across effectively, particularly delivering them to young people.”

Among those on the streets over the past weeks were indeed youngsters like Jack Leung, 18, and his sister Mickey, 17, whose parents they said were apolitical.

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“The bill is like a knife held to our necks. It affects everyone,” Jack said. “We can trust Hong Kong’s rule of law, but we never know what could happen to a person extradited to the mainland.”

Tiffany, an 18-year-old Chinese University student who declined to give her surname, said she would do everything she could to stop the government from dismantling the legal firewall between Hong Kong and the mainland. Apart from joining the protests, she translated anti-bill materials into English to take the drive abroad. “I do not have a British National (Overseas) passport, unlike my boyfriend. All I have is a Hong Kong SAR passport … I do not want Hongkongers to live in fear of being handed over to mainland China.”

Also among the protesters were middle-aged Hongkongers who felt they owed the younger generation for not having done more earlier to prevent the deterioration of the city’s freedoms.

“We need to pay something back to the younger generation,” said cabby Fai Tam, 56, as he fought back tears. “I want to defend the rule of law and freedom in Hong Kong.”

Ahead of the June 9 march, the government amended the bill a second time, further limiting the scope of extraditable crimes and introducing human rights safeguards into the ad hoc agreements with jurisdictions that request extradition.

The move won the support of major business groups and political parties, but critics wanted the safeguards be written into the actual laws so they would be legally binding.

“I called an official and asked the administration to make a further concession by writing the human rights safeguards into the law,” said Business and Professionals Alliance lawmaker Priscilla Leung Mei-fun, also a member of the Basic Law Committee, after seeing the huge turnout on the news. “But I got cold-shouldered.”

At 11.09pm on June 9, before the protest organisers wrapped up the massive procession, the government issued a 569-word statement which ended with this tone-deaf line: “The second reading debate on the bill will resume on June 12.”

A senior civil servant said he and his peers were taken aback by the administration’s handling of the protests, including the way it issued that statement.

“What the government did went against our common sense. We are not trained that way,” he said.

He felt that the statement just “made things worse”. It shocked even the pro-establishment camp.

A Beijing-friendly lawmaker said: “I was surprised. I supported the bill, but after reading the statement I seriously considered not casting my vote. The government’s attitude truly crossed the line.”

The lawmaker said some of his allies still believed forcing the bill through would end the crisis.

It would take the eruption of two violent clashes on June 12 between police officers and young protesters outside the legislature to shock Lam into changing her mind.

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A literal red line had been crossed as images of bloodied protesters and policemen spread on social media. For Beijing, the bill had to be abandoned to avoid risking bloodshed.

And so, on June 15, Lam suspended the bill. At a press conference, the grim-faced chief executive started with a prepared speech to admit the shortcomings in her government. She expressed sorrow and regret for causing inconvenience and disputes in society. She promised to be humble, but issued no apology.

The next day, an estimated 2 million people – a historic high for Hong Kong – thronged the streets, carrying all manner of placards that included Cantonese expletives directed at Lam, for her analogy respectively likening herself and young protesters of the bill to a mother and her spoiled children.

Lam issued a written apology that day. Two days later, on June 18, she made a formal apology in person, but rejected all other requests by the protesters, including the retraction of all references to the June 12 clashes as “rioting” and to have an independent inquiry into the police force’s use of force.

That was Lam’s last public appearance until June 27. She cancelled the weekly Exco meeting two weeks in a row, and called off a public forum on proposed guidelines for November’s District Council elections.

CONTINUED PROTESTS

On the streets, meanwhile, young people have kept up spontaneous protests, occupying government offices and besieging the police headquarters twice in a week.

A source close to the administration lamented that Lam missed the opportunity to tackle the crisis because she dismissed advice to withdraw the bill immediately after the second mass protest, and to ask the police chief to retract the categorisation of the June 12 clashes as a riot.

Others blamed the government’s groupthink, buoyed by a previous policy success. “The government was adamant that all fears about the extradition bill would prove unfounded after it was passed, just as fears over the ‘co-location’ of joint immigration and customs arrangements at the West Kowloon terminus for the express rail link to the mainland subsided after it opened last September,” one person said.

“But top officials used the wrong analogy. Many people using the express rail gain from the co-location arrangement, given the shorter travelling time. But Hongkongers fear they have nothing to gain but everything to lose – such as the personal freedoms they treasure – if the bill is passed.”

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That criticism was echoed even among members of the pro-establishment camp, who found themselves in an embarrassing situation because of the government’s handling of the bill and opposition to it. More than one lawmaker shouted profanities at Lam during a closed-door meeting when she told them the bill would be suspended.

Others hoped the setback could allow for a reset of their working relationship.

“The government in the past often requested our party heads to back their proposals in a top-down manner without taking into account our views,” said a Beijing-friendly lawmaker. “We will just tell the truth from now on without much burden. It is probably a good opportunity for our relationship to return to normal.”

A heavyweight in the camp said Secretary for Security John Lee and Secretary for Justice Teresa Cheng Yeuk-wah had to be sacked to show accountability for the debacle and the Exco must be reshuffled to signal a willingness to start afresh.

Will Lam herself survive this tempest largely of her own making? All indications are that Beijing will not be in a hurry to abandon its chosen leaders lest it leaves others in the wings wary of the lack of job security. But two sources close to the government separately said her tenure exposed the weakness of a leader without adequate global political exposure and who had not had faced the vagaries of elections.

“During most of her career, Lam was a bureaucrat tackling domestic issues; if she could understand the political headwinds of the US-China tensions and see how the bill could be entangled in that, she would have thought twice from day one,” the first source said.

Another said: “Lam and the absolute majority of ministers are former civil servants who lack experience in elections. That’s why they underestimate the negative public sentiments.”

Political scientist Ma Ngok, of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said the extradition row had intensified tensions between the public and the police force, which had persisted since the 2014 Occupy protests when police were also accused of using indiscriminate force.

Even as others said relations between Hongkongers and the police had been slowly on the mend since then, Ma countered: “It takes a long time to build institutional trust, but it is very difficult to recover it once it’s spoiled.”

Lam’s credibility and relations with allies would be difficult to repair, never mind with others in society, he said. “In other countries, the leader and officials would have stepped down already if such a large number of people marched on the streets.”

While she has stayed away from the public eye since June 18 and kept to her official residence, Government House, Lam did hold several closed-door meetings. At one of them, she was quoted as saying: “Many people thought I died, but I won’t die.”

That was the top girl speaking. ■

Additional reporting by Xinqi Su, Olga Wong and Kimmy Chung