In 2013, a Hong Kong resident, Pan Weixi, and his wife were grabbed off the street in the city and smuggled to the mainland by speedboat. The family wrote to Lam describing the abduction in detail and appealing for her help in obtaining the businessman’s release, according to people with knowledge of the case. Hong Kong police confirmed to Reuters that they sent officers to Guangdong who helped secure the wife’s freedom and escorted her home. The family later learned that Pan was sentenced to 16 years in jail in Guangdong Province. A Hong Kong police investigation into the case remains open.

After the bookseller abductions sparked an outcry, Hong Kong officials revealed in May 2016 they were in discussions with Beijing over formal extradition procedures. The talks failed, according to lawyers involved, because Beijing was unwilling to accept human-rights and legal safeguards.

Then, in early 2017, came the brazen abduction of Xiao, the billionaire who was a target of the powerful anti-graft agency CCDI. A Hong Kong government official said Xiao had crossed the border with the mainland. The city was scandalized.

These controversies didn’t impede Lam’s rise. As Leung’s deputy, she was closely involved in the government’s handling of the Umbrella Movement, a 79-day campaign of civil disobedience in 2014 in which protesters demanding full democracy occupied major thoroughfares. The movement got its name from demonstrators’ use of umbrellas to ward off police. Lam made conciliatory gestures, meeting protesters for talks, but that failed to produce a breakthrough. Police eventually cleared the protesters, and some key leaders were later prosecuted.

In March 2017, Lam was handpicked as China’s candidate to succeed Leung and easily won election by a committee of about 1,200 mostly pro-Beijing figures. She won plaudits in China for pushing through some unpopular policies. Within weeks of taking office in July 2017, her administration announced a controversial plan to let mainland officials stationed inside a Hong Kong train terminus enforce Chinese laws on travelers passing through.

Critics said this and other moves further eroded the city’s autonomy. Lam’s office rejected the criticism, saying the terminus arrangement made for more convenient travel.

Xi later praised Lam for her courage in taking on “difficult challenges,” after the two met in Beijing in December 2018, state media reported.

The killing in Taiwan came in February 2018. The two young Hong Kongers – Poon Hiu-wing and her boyfriend, Chan Tong-kai – quarrelled while on a trip to Taipei. Furious, Chan bashed Poon’s head against a wall and strangled her, packed her body in a suitcase and later left it at a park in the Taiwanese capital, according to a Hong Kong court judgment. Chan was arrested in March after returning to Hong Kong and confessed. He was convicted and jailed for crimes committed after his return, including using Poon’s ATM card to withdraw money. But because the slaying took place in Taipei, he would need to be sent to Taiwan to be tried for the killing.

Chan’s lawyer didn’t respond to questions for this article.

Lam later told a news conference that since the killing, her government had been spending “quite a bit of time” devising extradition proposals. In the meantime, Beijing’s political allies in the city started agitating for change.

The initial moves were low-key and attracted little attention. On May 4 last year, a pro-Beijing lawmaker, Priscilla Leung, called on the city’s Legislative Council to consider discussing judicial cooperation with Taiwan and “other places,” according to the minutes of a panel session in the council. Leung, a law professor, chairs a legislative panel on judicial affairs. She had no comment.

Within days, Leung’s proposal got a push from two lawmakers with strong links to Beijing. Starry Lee and Holden Chow went further in a letter to Leung, calling on the government to begin moves to conclude an extradition agreement with Taiwan “as soon as possible,” council records show. Lee heads the city’s biggest political party, the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong, which hews closely to Beijing’s official line. Chow is a vice chairman and the party’s highest-profile young leader.

‘This will destroy Hong Kong’

The next month, one of Lam’s top lieutenants dropped a clue that changing the law on extradition was under consideration.

In answer to a written question from Starry Lee about the efforts to return the killer to Taipei, Secretary for Security John Lee said Hong Kong was studying how to handle the case. And he reminded her that under the law, the city was barred from sending suspects to any region of the People’s Republic of China. Hong Kong shares Beijing’s view that Taiwan is part of the PRC. Taiwan vehemently disagrees.

Lee, 62, was a 33-year veteran of the Hong Kong police. He joined the government’s Security Bureau, which oversees the police and other law enforcement units, as deputy head in 2012 and was promoted to lead the bureau when Lam took office. Cops who served with him describe Lee as a shrewd and incorruptible crime fighter who was trusted with sensitive investigations before and after the handover. As security chief, Lee is responsible for liaison with the mainland’s powerful law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

There was “this huge degree of fear and anxiety … which we were not sensitive enough to feel and grasp.”

Poon’s family was begging for justice. Their pleas reached Lam. The chief executive said she was moved and promised to help. Lam later gave a tearful television interview to local broadcaster TVB in which she said Poon’s heartbroken father had been persistent, writing five letters to the government seeking justice for his daughter.

“That’s why I told John Lee that you can’t just write a letter back to them and only say, ‘Sorry, Mr. Poon, there isn’t a legal basis for this, sorry’,” Lam said. “I said you must find a way, and not let any possibility go.”

Poon’s father declined to comment.

Starry Lee and Holden Chow continued rallying support for the Poon family and for changing the extradition law. In mid-February, they appeared at a press conference with the mother.

“Even though it’s been a year since my daughter was murdered, my husband and I can’t accept this reality,” Poon’s mother, Kui Yin-fun, said, sobbing. “I always think of this cold-blooded and cruel scene. How the murderer dragged a suitcase, and moved the corpse, and then left it in the open, so that wild dogs could eat it.”

The only way to help her daughter now, Kui told the media crowd, was justice: extradite the killer. Then Holden Chow and Starry Lee took questions. Asked whether amending the law was the sole way to deal with the case, Starry Lee said: “In principle, without this amendment of the legislation, this cannot be done.”

Asked about his championing of the bill, Chow told Reuters the plan was introduced “to deal with the Taiwan murder case and to provide the victim's family justice.” Unfortunately, he added, the Lam administration was unable to explain the human-rights protections contained in the bill and persuade the public to embrace it. Starry Lee didn’t respond to a request for comment.

There was broad support for the Poon family in Hong Kong. But that didn’t translate into support for extradition to the mainland.

That same week, a Legislative Council agenda included an item on judicial cooperation with Taiwan and “other places.” The next day, the government showed its hand, revealing in an official briefing note that to resolve the Poon case, it was proposing amendments that would remove the ban on extraditions to other parts of China. The ban, it said, had created “loopholes,” allowing the city to become a haven for criminals.

Pro-democracy lawmaker Dennis Kwok was outraged. The next day, he confronted security chief John Lee in a meeting room at the Legislative Council.

“I told him don’t do this,” Kwok told Reuters. “I told him it is a crazy idea. I lost my cool with him. I said this will destroy Hong Kong. Don’t do it!”

Lee ploughed ahead, telling reporters in March that the restrictions on extradition to other parts of China were a “chain that has been put on my feet.”

Chinese leaders publicly began throwing their weight behind the effort. In March, Chen Zhimin, a former vice minister of public security, linked the bill to Xi’s crackdown. He told Hong Kong public broadcaster RTHK a pact was needed because there were more than 300 fugitives on China’s wanted list hiding in the city. Chen also revealed that before he left his post in 2017, mainland officials had been discussing an extradition pact with their Hong Kong counterparts – including John Lee.

In a statement to Reuters, Lee said it was “totally unfounded and erroneous” to suggest that the mainland and pro-Beijing parties were the driving force behind the bill. The alleged abductions of billionaire Xiao and others were irrelevant, he said: The trigger was the Poon killing, which exposed gaps in the law. The central government, he added, respected Lam’s views and “supported her all the way.”

By May, higher officials – including a member of the Party’s top decision-making body, the seven-member Politburo Standing Committee – were publicly backing Lam’s bill. Chinese leaders were also mobilizing support behind the scenes.

One was Zhang Xiaoming, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, the body that coordinates Beijing’s policy for the city. In May, Ronny Tong, the influential Lam adviser and top barrister, led a delegation of his political allies to the Chinese capital. In a 90-minute meeting, Zhang explained the importance of the extradition bill to China and Hong Kong, according to two delegation members. Zhang took a “hardline” position, they said, telling the visitors it was urgent that Hong Kong pass the measures.

Chinese authorities didn’t respond to questions about the roles of Zhang, Chen and other top leaders.

Outside of Lam’s circle, alarm was spreading through Hong Kong. Even the normally pro-Beijing business community was unnerved by the bill. People began coming out to protest by the hundreds, then by the thousands, then tens of thousands and more. On June 9, the government was shaken when an estimated one million people took to the streets in a peaceful protest. Demonstrations later turned violent.

On June 11, lawmakers were preparing for a second reading of the bill, scheduled for the next day. Pro-Beijing lawmakers had the numbers if the bill came to a vote. That day, protesters began surrounding the Legislative Council building in an effort to block the session.

With the demonstration snowballing, the Hong Kong liaison office, China’s official representative body in the city, had unwelcome news to report that night. According to two Chinese officials with knowledge of the matter, the office informed the CCDI in Beijing that the encircling protesters made it impossible to hold the debate the following morning. The CCDI suggested that lawmakers be assembled at another venue to vote, the officials said.

The protest had effectively shut down the legislature, however, preventing the second reading. Soon after, Lam crossed into the mainland and paid a call at Bauhinia Villa, a resort in the suburbs of Shenzhen where the Chinese leadership had set up a secret command center to manage the crisis.

There, Lam met with one of China’s highest leaders – Vice Premier Han Zheng, the Politburo Standing Committee member who had earlier signaled support for the bill. As Reuters reported last month, she proposed suspending the legislation. After consulting with other leaders in Beijing, Han agreed.

On June 15, Lam announced she was freezing the bill. The protesters, unmollified, insisted on a total scrapping. On July 1, a crowd smashed its way into the Legislative Council and ransacked the building.

The pressure began telling on the city leader once lauded by Xi for her steeliness. In August, at times choking up, Lam told a private meeting of businesspeople that she would quit if allowed to do so.

“Hong Kong has been turned upside down, and my life has been turned upside down,” she said, according to an audio tape obtained by Reuters. The bill was “very much prompted by our compassion” for the Poon family, “and this has proven to be very unwise.” It turned out, she said, that there was “this huge degree of fear and anxiety amongst people of Hong Kong vis-a-vis the mainland of China, which we were not sensitive enough to feel and grasp.”

In late August, Reuters revealed that officials in Beijing had rejected a proposal from Lam to scrap the bill altogether earlier in the summer and defuse the crisis.

On September 3, Lam declared the bill would be formally withdrawn. But the protests continued as the movement morphed into a broad pursuit of democratic rights.

Chan Tong-kai was released after serving 19 months in prison in Hong Kong. On October 18, five days before walking free, he revealed there was no need for an extradition deal in his case. In a letter to Lam, Chan said he was volunteering to return to Taipei to face justice. He remains free in Hong Kong while Lam and Taiwan wrangle over the details.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to correct paragraph 45, which due to an editing error inverted the sequence of Xi’s remark and Poon’s murder.

Additional reporting by Anne Marie Roantree and Clare Jim in Hong Kong.

The Long Arm of China By David Lague, James Pomfret and Greg Torode Photo illustrations: Maryanne Murray Photo editing: Kerk Chon Design: Troy Dunkley Edited by Peter Hirschberg