Hong Kong leader says she won’t resign from post

HONG KONG — Beleaguered after three months of increasingly violent street protests, Hong Kong’s chief executive said Tuesday morning that her emotions were in turmoil but that she had not tendered her resignation and had no intention of stepping down.

“Even if my personal emotions are fluctuating greatly, the ultimate decision is in regard to Hong Kong citizens and whether I can help Hong Kong citizens and help Hong Kong out of this difficult situation,” Carrie Lam, the chief executive, said during her weekly news conference.

Senior Hong Kong officials and Beijing advisers have been saying for weeks that Lam is deeply unhappy in the job, but that Beijing’s leaders will not allow her to resign even if she decides that she wants to do so.

“She is very frustrated, very downhearted, but she is also a very resolute person — she has a job entrusted to her by Beijing, and she intends to do it,” Ronny Tong, a member of Lam’s Executive Council, or cabinet, said in an interview in late August.

Lau Siu-kai, vice chairman of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies, a semiofficial advisory body set up by Beijing, said: “After things settle down, there may be a reshuffle of the leadership team.”

After a summer of protests that began with huge marches and has evolved into battles in the streets between masked protesters and the police, Lam has remained a personal target for demonstrators. They assail her for having introduced a bill earlier this year that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be extradited to the opaque and often harsh judicial system of mainland China.

One of five demands by protesters has been that Lam must resign and that a successor be elected through universal suffrage. In an audio recording of a closed-door meeting last week between Lam and local businesspeople that was leaked to Reuters, Lam is heard to say that she longed to resign.

But one key obstacle to her doing so is that she lacks an heir apparent to run this fractious, semiautonomous territory of China. Beijing also remains opposed to allowing any general election in which pro-democracy candidates could run.