 Okay, we're back. We're live in Community Matters. I'm Jay Fidel here on Think Tech, and we have a very interesting guest for you this afternoon. He's here in Honolulu, and he has just come back from China. He's Russell Liu. Russell Liu is a lawyer, a Hawaii lawyer who has been practicing and teaching in Beijing for at least a decade. He's going to tell you how long, and he's going to tell you what schools he's involved in. And we're going to talk about, guess what, the coronavirus. Russell, welcome to the show. I hope you're feeling okay. Jay, I'm alive and well, hopefully not kind of would. For the audience, again, I have been practicing law with a firm called Kingsfield Law Office with my office in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and in Beijing. And I'm also teaching law, teach at the law school at the Beijing Ford Studies University, and also for Temple University's Beesley School of Law, and I teach at their law program on site in Beijing. And I've been in China for 16 years, Jay. Wow, sorry. I got the number wrong. It only seems like yesterday. And right now, you're broadcasting to us from Marino. Am I right? Yes, that's correct. I met the Marino School where they have an innovative Mandarin language immersion program. So I've been discussing their program with them. Yeah. Needless to say, Russell is completely conversant in Mandarin. So Russell, you came back, but we needed a snapshot of how it was for you, how it was over there, what you saw, what you heard, what you experienced, and how you came back because not everybody could come back. So very exciting time. So tell us about your experiences over the past few days. Yes, Jay. It's been a very tense situation. It's been an ongoing process for me for the last two and a half weeks. I was here in Honolulu during the Christmas time. I flew back in early January for meetings in Hong Kong where I was there for a week. And then I flew to Beijing. Everything seemed to be normal. I would get an update about the coronavirus. Then after the first week in January, I think everything broke loose that the coronavirus was a major concern. And in fact, my colleagues in other cities were telling me, for example, in Chengdu, that they had shut down the city. And then I read about Wuhan being shut down, which means that the residents of these large Chinese cities, especially Wuhan, they cannot leave the city. And you cannot enter the city. Everything's in total lockdown. And this is something that I think only China can do. There's a lockdown of millions of people, 13 million people in Wuhan. Wuhan is comparable, or it's actually three times the size larger than Chicago. So you can imagine what this lockdown is. It's very nervous for many people. And this is happening through the Chinese new year, which makes it even all a more tense situation because people usually this time of the year are celebrating going to parties. But that's not happening this year. A very tense situation, Jay. So when you say lockdown, you mean the military, the police are out there, and they don't let anybody come in or leave Wuhan or the other cities that are locked down? Does it mean that if you're trying to do that, you can't do it? And if you persist, then you'll be arrested? Is that what it means? Well, not in that sense, Jay, but I'm in Beijing. I'll give you an example. This has never happened in Beijing in all like 16 years. And what happens is every community, your living community, or actually shut down, there's a gate, for example, my community, you just can't leave. You have to bring your ID. You have to explain the reason and you have, they will log in your, your name and ID, time and a phone number. And when you enter the premises, you have to show your ID. Nobody gets access into the community. You have to have an ID and you have to be shown on the log that you left. And this is really for control measures. They're trying to monitor very carefully if there are any potential breaches where there's an infection in community, so they can contain it very quickly. The idea is to restrict the movement of people in the city. And in fact, there's discussion in Beijing, at least that I've heard when it left a day ago, that they're considering closing down public transportation, which means the city will come to total standstill. I was leaving Beijing. I was worried because for the last few days, I actually had a flight, Jay, on a China Eastern flight from Beijing to Shanghai, and then connecting on a direct flight from Shanghai to Honolulu. I hesitated and my friends advised me to cancel the flight, which I did, but it was nerve-wracking for several nights. I was days I was trying to get on a different flight. I finally was successful to be booking one-way ticket on ANA, which connects Osaka, Japan, and then flies out to Honolulu. And it was a little nerve-wracking, Jay, because several things. First of all, Beijing was considering shutting down the airports, at least I heard rumors about it being shut down. If it's shut down, I could not leave. I was worried for you, Russell. I was thinking about you and I was worried for you. And thanks. I did have other friends, like retired judge Shackley Raffetto, who was emailing me, sending wait chat messages saying, Russell, get out of there. And so I think there's a lot of concern. I've left a lot of friends back there. I've never seen that the first time this happened. I've seen other expats leaving, writing messages like, I've never seen this in 30 years. I'm leaving and I feel like I'm abandoning the place. And it is a very different Beijing. I think there's some photos of what the street looks like. There's nobody there. Nobody is there. And where are they? If they're not there, if the streets are empty, where are they? Are they all hunkered down at home? And if they're hunkered down at home, how do they eat? How do they find water and food? That was my big question, Jay. Most of them are hunkered down in their homes. Most people are not coming outside. This is a typical street, Jay. There's nobody there. It feels like a ghost house. Imagine 20 million people. Nobody's there. Where is everybody? Well, they're at home, Jay. This was taken a day ago before I left. So we understand the grocery stores are still open. People are afraid to go in there. You know, luckily for me, somebody gave a huge piece of meat as a gift for Chinese New Year, and I've been actually slowly cutting away at that and eating like ramen, dried ramen noodles. You know, there's nothing to buy, but you have to do what you have to do, Jay. I was more worried about water because, you know, bottled water, if I run out, that means I have to get water sources outside of my community where I live. But it was a nerve-wracking, Jay, because I finally got my ticket, and then I learned or heard word that other countries were actually shutting down and refusing to accept anybody who would pass through China or who originated from China. And I heard that there was consideration that that might happen in Japan, where I was catching a flight from the ANA to a flying airlines back to Hawaii. So it's been a very tense situation, Jay. Did you meet any resistance when you landed in Japan? Did they stop you, take your temperature? Did they, you know, inspect you there? And furthermore, when you flew from Osaka to Honolulu, did you run into any resistance there? Well, that's a very good question, Jay, but let me take you of how it's done. You know, I found that the facilities, the equipment, the monitoring was vastly better than in the U.S. When I'm leaving China, they have these checkpoints where they have this advanced equipment that monitors your body heat temperature as you walk through certain zones, and they actually check on you. And you have to fill out a declaration form, who you are, your passport, your phone number, so that if there's a potential issue on these computer artificial intelligence kind of equipment, they know what time you pass through the checkpoint. Okay, so we have this in China when you're leaving. It's not as though the China government says you're free, you can go. They're monitoring so that if they suspect that you might have it, you're actually taken and pulled aside, and they won't let you go. Now, getting on the Japan side, similarly, when we arrived, if you were on a transfer flight, I was in the transfer line, you had to go to the checkpoint again, and they checked for your temperature checks. And by the way, just to tell you, in my community, where I live, they actually have guards at the front where you do a temperature check. You know, one of these temperature checks where they actually will get the individual thermometer, putting a forehead, and they do a reading. And you can't go until that clears, and then they look at it. And they actually monitor, and I think they actually may rip right down the temperature be going in and about. So it's a very careful process. What shocked me more, Jay, was when I was in transit at the Osaka airport, I won't name the airlines, but it's a local airline, everybody in the hall, the Japanese, Chinese, and all the Asian travelers, wore masks, you know, Jay, like this. Oh, okay. And it shocked me because the flight attendants, the crew attendants of this airline that flies out of Hawaii, were not even wearing these at the lobby at the Barclay gate. They were there for like 35 minutes, and I could hear people kind of like horrified that you're not taking seriously. And fast forward, when arriving in Honolulu, there's no equipment to check temperatures either. You know, and everything was more cavalier, you know, that it's not a big problem. So what happened in Honolulu? Did they inspect you at all for health? Did they ask you questions? Did they do anything to examine you to see if you had a temperature or what? There was no inspection, no temperature check. It was like you just go on, walk your way from the gate to the immigration and home life security. That was it. Very interesting, and that's only yesterday, right? That's yesterday morning. Very interesting, very interesting, and slightly worrisome, because if somebody was on that flight originating in China, it'd be easy to find out, and you know, to protect the health of this community, there ought to be some kind of inspection. Don't you think retrospectively? I think so. And in fact, what horrified the passengers on this flight on White Airlines, I mean from Osaka, is that everyone wore masks, and the flight crew didn't wear masks. They did it for a few minutes, took it off. It was like not comfortable, and when I flew the ANA flight from Beijing to Tokyo to Osaka, the flight attendants wore masks all the way through. So there's a big perception issue that it's not being taken seriously, and I think that that has to be looked into. And I think that we should have equipment at our airport, like in China and in Japan, where it's walking through, you will do a body scan of your temperature and all that. So you get pulled out. Yeah. Well, you know what I've heard is that wearing a mask only part of the time doesn't work. You have to wear it all the time, and that includes, you know, you don't eat, and you don't take it off to scratch your nose. And furthermore, it has to be a certain kind of mask in order to prevent the virus from coming through the mask. So if they're taking them off and putting them on at random like that, or if they're not using a mask that is a heavy mesh mask, whatever they call it, it's like not wearing a mask at all. Yes. And you know, I think it's a real cultural gap in perception, because in the 16 years in China and Japan and China were similar, when somebody's sick, they always wear a mask so that they won't get infected or spread it to somebody else. And we don't do that in the U.S. People get horrified when they see you wearing a mask. But I think in this crisis, especially if you're on a plane and it's emerging out of Asia, I would think that it would be very wise for the flight crew to wear the mask. Yeah. And I really think that their lives really should be penalized for this. Well, let me go with one of the word crisis, who used crisis. And indeed, a headline today was that the World Health Organization has designated coronavirus to be a global health emergency. There's a CDC and Atlanta has not done that yet. I'm really not sure why, but they differ. In any event, I like your impressions, because I know you've been thinking about this. How could you not think about this? It emerged while you were in China. You managed to find your way back home. Now you're here thinking about what is happening and what you can do about it. So my first question on this is, what's the status of the crisis? Have you looked into it? Can you speak about it? Not only in the United States, but in the world? Well, I think a couple of things that really drives it at the point is that, first of all, I look at what the China government does. Okay. That tells me a lot. What they say may be a little different from what is done. But when you do lockdowns of cities like Wuhan, 13 million plus, and you start to lock down other cities like Chengdu and Beijing as actually when I left, they have actually restricted access to people coming from different provinces to Beijing. And they're starting to do lockdowns of individual communities. That tells me that it's a real crisis. Second of all, if we remember the SARS lesson, at this point in time, this originated out of a Chinese city versus SARS came out of Hong Kong. So the Chinese government is well aware that it needs to do drastic measures that have to be taken in place to prevent the transmission of the virus. So it's taking very seriously. And I think that what drives it is that today, I believe the statistics now is that there's more people infected by this confirmed cases than there was in SARS. So that's a tone point that why the global teleorganizations are now saying it's a global issue. And the virus... I think the other thing that's factored into that, I think, is that they've determined by examining the factors that the incubation period is longer than they thought. It's two weeks, that's a long time. And in the two weeks, even if you don't not present symptoms, you can pass it along to someone else. So if you're wandering around for two weeks not knowing you're sick and you're shaking hands and coughing droplets on other people, you can infect a ton of other people. And they won't know they're sick for another two weeks. So you can see how the geometry works on that. And I think that has to be involved in the analysis that the World Health Organization made. We're going to take a short break with Russell Liu. We'll be back in a moment. We're going to find out exactly what he's doing now in order to ameliorate the crisis from his point of view. This is Jay Fidel and ThinkTech. We'll be right back. Hey, hello, everyone, and welcome to the ThinkTech Hawaii studio. My name is Andrew Lanning. I'm the host of The Pretty Matters Hawaii. We air here every Tuesday at 10 a.m. Hawaii time, trying to bring you issues about security that you may not know, issues that can protect your family, protect yourself, protect our community, protect our companies, the folks we work with. Please join us and I hope you can maybe get a little different perspective on how to live a little safer. Aloha. Aloha, my name is Duretian. You are watching ThinkTech Hawaii. I will be hosting a show here every other Wednesday at 1 p.m. and we will be talking to a lot of experts and guests around sustainability, social justice, the future here in Hawaii, progressive politics, and a whole lot more. So please tune in and thank you for watching ThinkTech Hawaii. Okay, we're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. We're doing community matters today and we're connecting with Russell Liu, who is a Hawaii lawyer practicing and teaching in Beijing. And it was just recently, yesterday, as a matter of fact, returned from Beijing. It was a harrowing experience and he's here now and he joins us by Vamek's call from Marino. And we're going to talk about what Russell has been doing even since his return only yesterday, try to help the people in China, more specifically the people in Wuhan. So Russell, you've started a number of initiatives only in one day. Can you talk about them? Sure. We're reaching out to a lot of the American businesses who have interests in China, doing business there. We're reaching out to the large religious organizations and communities in the U.S. who have the manpower and support to mobilize. And one of the key things is also to keep pushing the interest of the American businesses to make them aware of the situation. And we have contacted a very large church organization, for example, and they are donating about 220,000 masks in China. We've spoken to one of the large pharmaceutical supply medical companies. And in fact, they are working on the, as we talk now, they're one of the lead companies trying to develop the actual medicine and vaccine. They're sent to China to handle this insulate crisis. And today at 3 a.m., I contacted my New York contact. And it's very touching because they responded in minutes to the Jewish community, to the Sheba University, where I have contacts. And the dean of the law school, they're mobilizing now, they're alumni in New York to figure out what they can do. We're getting the word out, which is amazing. We just can't sit there and wait. The longer we wait, and we start to say, well, for example, 3 a.m. is a large company. They should be doing something. We should wait on it. I don't think that that's the approach we just need to get this out. People are dying. And the most important thing is the more they die, the more the potential risk that's going to happen here in the U.S. If we can stop it in China, we can stop that risk from going overseas. So that's important. Well, what motivates you to do this, Russell? I mean, you're back on the ground. My immediate reaction would be kissing the ground. Happy to be back in Hawaii and the U.S. And so my question is, why are you heading headlong into this now? Well, this is something that's not a problem that China's problem. This is a global problem. I work and live there for 16 years, and my home is there in Hawaii. And we just need to make sure we're in the same global community. Okay? This is not a political issue. This is not a geopolitical issue. This is one concern because today we really don't have borders, except for the checkpoints when we land on country soil. Because things pass so easily, because people travel with the internet. Communications worldwide. So it's part of this realm that we live in, unlike 60, 70 years ago, when you didn't have the ability to travel, you didn't have the internet. So now that means it becomes part of our problems. And we have to take ownership of these problems, even if it's in a small way. But who knows? If you don't ask, you get nothing, right? So we're trying to push out there. So we can ask people, especially a lot of the lawyer expats, who have great relationships with large companies. For example, one of my relationships is I hired a lawyer to teach at our law school, an American lawyer. And his wife was the executive in China for a large company. So we got access really quickly up the chain to ask for help. And it will relieve that they're actually doing something on this whole situation. So I think if we don't get anything and we hear people doing things, that's great. But we need to get the awareness because these companies that are in the US are going to be aware, too, that we want to make sure it's our problems also that it doesn't come to the US. Well, there seems to be a missing link, Russell. You know, the CDC has $85 million that it can spend immediately on emergency medical situations just like this epidemic. And it has not declared an emergency, even though the World Health Organization has declared an emergency. And, you know, Senator Schumer a couple of days ago made the point that the administration, for reasons that are really not clear, has decided not to push that button, not to release those funds, not to spend anything to deal with the crisis either here or in China. So, but, you know, my question to you, isn't it better to have government step in? All the arrangements you're talking about, all the efforts and initiatives you've mentioned, involve private organizations, private businesses, private individuals, such as yourself, trying to help and trying to stave off, you know, a pandemic. But isn't it better to have the United States government do something? They have the resources, don't they? Of course, of course. And, you know, I don't have all the information or knowledge or background what's going on in communications between the governments and the US. All I know is that I just saw a video of Vice President Pence who gave a speech that says we're behind China. We are committed to helping China to fight off this avarice. So, I would like to believe that something's been done, but in the meantime, again, sometimes maybe the low-level type of relationship, not the high political government, can actually mobilize, release faster. Like, for example, the church I talked about that's sending 220,000 masks to China, things like that. That's mobilizing before the government will do anything. There are reasons why, but I don't know the political or the governmental relationship for communications, but I think that people are trying, and, you know, collectively maybe that there's going to be a lot of fiber-release, but some people are saying, well, you're wasting your time, you know what? But when this happened, if this happened on our soil, I would do the same. And I would expect the Chinese to do the same. Well, Russell, one last thing before we break, and that is, you know, you're here, you're back, you've been thinking about this, you're acting about it, and not a lot of people in Hawaii, individuals, or for that matter, Hawaii businesses that are taking affirmative action. And I wonder if you could give us your thoughts and advice. What should the people in Hawaii do about this, if anything? What should the government of Hawaii do? Take a minute and tell us your thoughts on that. Well, I don't think Jay, it's a Hawaii problem. I think it's the U.S. persistent China. We don't know China. We don't know the language culture. It's sort of like us and them. We've been going through this trade war. And I think the most important thing is, for us in Hawaii, we're supposed to be a very important travel destination for people around the world, okay? And we're bringing people here. So the risk is very real that somebody, one person, I don't think it's one person, could come here flying on a flight, and we may have a problem. You know, we may have cases here. That's all it takes. So again, it's an orchid. Also, from a global business perspective, many of the things that are manufactured for American companies, like Apple, products that are assembled in China. And companies like this are going to be hurt. And that hurts our American economy. So again, it is something where we're all globally. Indeed, it's going to affect the economy. It is affecting the economy. And it's easy to see that going forward, unless this thing burns itself out, or we find a way to stop it, is going to have a profound effect on all of us, everyone. Anyway, Russell, I hope we can catch up with you again. I think you should stay in Hawaii for a while. And while you're here, we should speak to you at least a few more times to find out how you're doing in your projects, and find out how China is doing in its attempt to deal with this epidemic. Thank you so much. Russell Liu. Aloha.