Hong Kong chief executive Carrie Lam said she would quit if she could, Reuters reported on Monday.
The outlet obtained an audio recording from last week where the embattled leader lamented igniting “unforgivable havoc” when her administration introduced a law which would allow criminal suspects to be extradited to mainland China.
{mosads}“If I have a choice,” she told a group of businesspeople, “the first thing is to quit, having made a deep apology.”
The semi-autonomous city has been wracked by protests for months that started in opposition to the bill but have since evolved to more general anti-government manifestations.
Lam suspended the bill in June, but that has not quelled the protests.
She noted that she has few options now that the issue had been elevated “to a national level,” a reference to the leadership in Beijing, “to a sort of sovereignty and security level, let alone in the midst of this sort of unprecedented tension between the two big economies in the world.”
In such a situation, she added, “the room, the political room for the chief executive who, unfortunately, has to serve two masters by constitution, that is the central people’s government and the people of Hong Kong, that political room for maneuvering is very, very, very limited.”
Three people who attended the meeting confirmed to Reuters that the comments in the audio were accurate.