Ready For Open Talks With Students, Says CE

Chief Executive Carrie Lam on Tuesday agreed to one of the demands of student unions and announced that she was ready to hold an open dialogue with them about the extradition bill controversy.

"I now readily welcome and agree to this open dialogue with our student representatives and we will follow up," she said.

Lam's office had last week tried to invite student representatives from Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and Chinese University for closed-door talks, but they rejected the move.

On Friday, in a joint press conference, student leaders at eight tertiary institutions said they would consider talking to Lam only if she offered open dialogue and promised to drop all charges against anti-extradition bill protesters.

But the CE said she hopes there won't be any preconditions to these talks. "I hope this open dialogue will be conducted without any prerequisites, on my part or on the part of the students," she said.

Lam said that five years ago as the chief secretary, she had dealt with the Occupy Central protests, and is now seeing this anti-extradition bill agitation as the Chief Executive.

"Both exercise have caused a lot of grievances, unhappiness and tensions in society. I believe they reflect not only one incident but some fundamental and deep-seated problems in Hong Kong," Lam said.

She said that since the Occupy protests in 2014, things have moved on but there has been no effort to address these problems.

"But this time I don't think we could continue to ignore those deep-seated and fundamental problems in Hong Kong society," the top official said.

The CE said together with other community leaders she hopes to go deep into these problems and find solutions for them this time. She also said she hopes to have an open, constructive and interactive platform to communicate with the people, especially the youth.

Lam said the government will take the initiative to establish such platforms, but she and her officials will be glad to interact on such platforms set up by others.