Mrs. Lam is heard saying in the recording, “for a chief executive to have caused this huge havoc to Hong Kong is unforgivable.” Quite so. Especially since “havoc” is a gross euphemism for what Mrs. Lam has done. She has undermined constitutional guarantees and political freedoms. She has politicized what was once a professional police force and turned it into a tool of oppression that acts at the behest of Beijing. She has given the police unheard-of license to make arrests in hospitals and bully patients , and to mistreat — my euphemism this time — protesters and reporters at the front lines. The special governance system that Beijing had promised would govern Hong Kong and keep it distinct from the mainland until at least 2047 has been thoroughly trampled.

Yet it is to a small group of businesspeople — and presumably a very select bunch of those — that Mrs. Lam made “ a plea to you for your forgiveness .” But forgiveness for what, from them? For allowing the protesters to close down the airport for a couple of days? For sending a little tremor through the real estate market, still sky-high, which has made developers so very rich for so very long ? For knocking some 5,000 points off the Hang Seng Index since May? For hurting the city’s big corporate families?

Mrs. Lam has yet to properly ask for the forgiveness of Hong Kongers. (In June, she said, “I offer my most sincere apology to all people of Hong Kong,” but then flatly refused to do anything they asked.) In her talk to the business group, she recited almost verbatim from the Basic Law, Hong Kong’s mini-Constitution, that in her capacity as chief executive she is required to serve two masters: the central government in Beijing and the people of Hong Kong. In fact, she seems to be serving only Beijing and a small business elite in Hong Kong.

Only, other swaths of the business sector have had little patience for Mrs. Lam’s intransigence. The Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce pointedly asked her to make serious concessions toward the protesters in late July.

And so finally on Wednesday, Mrs. Lam announced the formal withdrawal of a bill that would allow the extradition of criminal suspects to mainland China, one of five of the protesters’ demands. This is ridiculous on her part, after holding out all summer as she has while protesters have been tear-gassed, maimed and subjected to cruel treatment by the police — and while much of the city’s population has supported them, turning up for marches in the hundreds of thousands. At this stage, nothing short of the government’s addressing the protesters’ fifth, and most sweeping, demand — real universal suffrage for both executive and legislative elections — can be enough. Some protesters have already declared on the online forum LIHKG, “ Five Demands. Not One Less.”