 I'm Jay Fidel. This is ThinkTech. More specifically, this is Global Connections with Michael Davis, who joins us from Washington, New York. You get that right. Joins us from New York. Okay. And Michael taught for years at the Hong Kong University, and he's a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center, and he's a professor and faculty at the Jindal University in India. Good morning, Michael. Nice to see your smiley face. So we want to talk about Hong Kong today, because you've lived there, and worked there, and taught there, and you've sought up close for many years, and you still follow it closely today. You speak hither and yon about it, you write about it, and you must be concerned. Right? Yeah. You must be. I just wrote a book about it. So, yeah. What was the name of the book, and where can I get it? Well, it's called Making Hong Kong China, the rollback of human rights and rule of law, Columbia University Press. And you just google Making Hong Kong China, and it'll come up, and then it shows you how to order. It's actually rather cheap, because we wanted it for wide readership, so I think it's about 15 bucks. That's great. Okay. Well, can we get into what's going on there? It just seems every time I look, or every time I hear, every time I get a newsletter, email, what have you, things are worse in Hong Kong. Am I right? That's true. And especially in the last couple of years, since the protest in 2019, things have gone down very much. There's, I think, an attitude in the government that, well, look at all the protests in 2019, no country is going to tolerate that. And now there's arguing that only patriots should be running for office. And of course, arguing, well, every country wants their politicians to be patriots. But in the context of Hong Kong, patriot means something different than it does here. Here, you can be a patriot and oppose the government. There, the people that oppose the government then are being held not to be patriots. And I know that's one of the reasons we're talking today, because a bunch of them were arrested. Yeah. Yeah, the 47 most recently, on top of others before, all under that new security law a few months old, though. And it's pretty scary, because these guys are civilized, educated, thoughtful. They're legitimate democratic protesters, or media, like Jimmy Lai. And gee whiz, he's really that he, meaning Xi Jinping, is really going after them. Ruining their lives, making them miserable, completely miserable. How would you like to carry that around all day? Well, you can imagine that in Hawaii, if you imagine all the most popular political leaders all being arrested at once and told their threat to the nation's security just for participating in a primary election, then you get an idea of what we're talking about. That's essentially over many, many years when there's only a limited number of seats in the Legislative Council, a half of them, that have been directly elected over the years. And the opposition camp under the system, the way it's designed, would often lose seats because whoever got the most votes would get the seat. And if two opposition candidates ran against each other, then they would erase each other and the pro-government guy might get the seat. So with the design of trying to actually get a majority, even though all these years they'd want about 60% of the vote, 55, 60% of the vote in the popular vote, that is not narrow constituencies but in direct elections. And yet they would always hold about one-third of the seats because the system is kind of rigged against them, half the seats being chosen by what's called functional sectors. So they got the clever idea, one of my colleagues in Hong Kong, he was in fact led in creating this guiding benny tie, a professor who was recently dismissed. He got the idea last July of having a primary election so that they could choose among the opposition camp who would be the candidate in different districts for election. Something very familiar to you in Hawaii because of course you have primary elections there. And we know that sometimes they can be very competitive in a lot of debate so on. In this case they had it and 610,000 people participated in it. They organized it themselves and the idea was that they could win enough seats then they could control the government. Some of them had the idea under the basic law of Hong Kong that if they locked the budget then the chief executive have to resign and they'd have to be a new selection. So they're basically behaving like politicians everywhere trying to win and to control the government in a system that doesn't allow them to take charge of the government. So they were all in a primary election and Beijing, this was right after the national security law was passed on June 30th last year in July and Beijing was already saying well this primary election is subversion, one of the crimes of the national security law. But everybody kind of you know how can that be subversion all they're doing is having a primary election. In any case that stench was left in the air and then months I guess many months later the next year in fact just recently in January they were all arrested suddenly. 55 of them were arrested. Everyone who participated in the primary election was arrested. And recently they had a bail hearing right and one third of them got bail the rest of them were still in jail. What happened is in Hong Kong you'd be arrested then you have to be brought before the court to be charged and that was done last Sunday. They were told even though in January they said they wouldn't be called back until May they suddenly decided to speed it up. Now there's a put note here speed it up why because they're going to have meetings in Beijing and they want to you know get these guys in court and charge them with crimes as a prelude to the politics that's going on in Beijing. So in any case they were all brought in Sunday last Sunday not the one that just passed yesterday but the week before and told them to come back on Monday they would be charged 47 of the 55 were charged. And then under the new national security law something really horrible occurs because under that law it creates a presumption against granting bail. Now if you your listeners know anything about on bail they know that the idea is that people are innocent until proven guilty that's the basis on which in the common law which applies in Hong Kong and Hawaii the common law principle that you're innocent until proven guilty so you should be let off on bail unless you pose a danger to society in some way. And so that was the Hong Kong rule and you mentioned Jimmy Lye earlier that rule was overturned because Jimmy Lye the high court let him off on bail under very strict conditions. He's a very famous publisher in Hong Kong of the most widely read newspaper and he was charged with also with subversion and collusion with foreigners because he prints his ideas in newspapers and speaks to foreign press and criticizes the national security law. So almost all the people charged under this national security law over a hundred now are charged with speaking crimes. Only one as far as I know actually did something violent and that was on the first day of the law a guy ran his motorcycle into a cordon of police with signs on his motorcycle but otherwise almost everybody charged is charged with just something about speaking or freedom of speech. And so Jimmy Lye was granted bail during Christmas and then the government appealed it and the bail was withdrawn and well the government appealed it directly to the court of final appeal and when it did so when the court agreed to hear the case they put him back in jail and then when he finally issued its ruling they ruled based on the language of the national security law that there's a presumption against bail and that the defendant has to show us why you get bail. So this is why you were hearing about it in the news because now we got 47 people having to show that they pose no risk of committing these crimes and it's interesting you listen to the government the government calls them all dangerous people you know they're dangerous because the national security law is a law for subversion you can be sentenced from three years to life in prison okay and there's gradients under the law about which one should be given life in prison and so on. So the government prosecutes national security offenders as if they're murderers and they're a danger to society for speaking for in this case doing nothing more the only charge relates to having a primary and so by the way the one third of them that did get bail and I think was really token you know that did get bail the government appealed all of those cases they appealed the granting of bail they want them all in jail. Right and so they were all returned to jail but why it wound up in your evening news a lot is because it took four days of hearings why because the defendants instead of the government having to prove they are risked in society the defendants had to put on his best case they could to try to convince the court that they should be released on bail and so you can imagine under the national security law they have to convince the court they're not going to violate the national security law but the national security law is so vague that no one knows what's a violation of the national security law the government keeps making it up as it goes along so you have a bunch of defendants and a judge who don't even know what is a violation of the national security law in its totality and they're all trying to show that they pose no risk of doing that and so that's why four people were hauled off to the hospital during these hearings because they they fell ill from exhaustion as four defendants and so it was a horrendous experience and so then you're right eventually all of them were denied bail except for 15 and then the government immediately appealed that court and so the 15 were sent back to jail as well so all 47 were sent back to jail and then a day or two later the government says well we won't pursue the appeal against four of them so four of them did eventually get released but this is a kind of intimidation when we look at something like this we have to look beyond it's not just 47 people whose rights are at risk when these kinds of things are doing are taking place virtually anyone who opposes the government will understand that opposing the government is risky and and so that's the way free speech is you don't have to arrest all the journalists you don't have to arrest all the politicians you just have to arrest enough of them to send a message to the rest and that's kind of what's happening in Hong Kong to they must be terrified the average person the average person who might speak even to his his you know his close circle must be terrified that he also can be dragged into court he also can be exposed to a long sentence which presumably for a lot of them will be carried out in mainland China far away from friends and family and in retraining and and prison camps that will be very very unpleasant and and really end their lives as they have known their lives well see this is what we don't know now the security law itself one of the several of the provisions near the end create an office for safeguarding national security which is staffed by members of the mainland public security bureau and state security officers and this office can if it judges a case to be and this is quoting from the law complex can transfer the case to be tried on the mainland where virtually of course all rights go out the window even any courageous judges effort to protect rights would not be part of the case so that that could happen in fact when Jimmy Lai's case that first time that the case was sent on this bail issue to the highest court in Hong Kong there was a big article in the people's daily that in a very veiled sort of way seemed to suggest well if you guys in the court of final Jimmy Lai they said is a dangerous individual and if you guys don't get it right well one thing we can do under the national security law we have the ultimate power of interpretation so we can overrule you on the one hand but also I think there was a kind of veiled threat well we may take Jimmy Lai to the mainland so you can imagine no matter how good a common law judges are in Hong Kong they're going to feel the heat do we rule against the government and then risk having this taken out of our hands entirely or do we have to try to go along to get along so there's a kind of pressure to be very strategic which which judges in any authoritarian regime who are committed to justice pretty much have to do if they don't want to be slapped down and dismissed entirely from the process or have the process taken over by the hardliners in the regime so this you know whether the courts can defend rights in Hong Kong is not going to be just you know about the good intentions of judges and their commitment to justice it's going to involve their need to calculate the risk they will encounter and what is best for the society they're trying to protect they're being compromised the whole system is being compromised can you can you talk about other things that the that the you know the Chinese government is doing to limit freedoms to limit the rule of law to limit democratic process in Hong Kong well you know what I've talked about so far tells you how many institutions are under threat so our conversation so far we know that the chief executive is always beholden to Beijing so that institution is not going to be up to defending Hong Kong's autonomy when it comes to the legislature before what they did this week and I'm going to I know your question goes to what they're doing this week before that Beijing had already authorized the dismissal of four members of the opposition camp from the legislature for their that they were not patriotic enough because they were opposing the national security law and when the Beijing authorized that the Hong Kong government promptly dismissed the four and then all the opposition camp resigned from the legislative council so now the legislative council according to Kerry Lam she's very happy with it now she can really do business there because nobody opposes her so that's kind of what's what happened already now Beijing wants to fix their problems for long term so what they did is during this same week they declared in this meeting going on in in Beijing of the National People's Congress they alerted us that they were going to amend the annexes to the basic law of Hong Kong to talk about how the political system will function until you know there's full democracy which of course now seems like it'll never occur and so they're going to amend it and they we haven't seen the final text yet because there's still going on up there but we've been alerted to what is planned and so in the past the legislative council had you know I guess 70 members and 35 of them were directly elected in some form and 35 were kind of functional sectors well Beijing is going to expand it to 90 every time Beijing wants to talk about being more democratic it just wants to increase the number of heads in the room it's not going to actually increase who chooses the people to get in the room in fact what they're doing now well up until now given that the democrats will not the opposition will not win every single directly elected seat they've been able to hold on in the past to over one third of the seats which gave them the ability to block legislation not to pass it okay and so that was their their the only power they had to push back in the legislature but now Beijing is going to increase it to 90 and it's going to take out the votes of the that used to come from the district council which was five of the seats and then it's going to have these probating groups including uh Hong Kongers who sit in the national parliaments to then choose or to be a part of the legislative council so that basically the the pandemocrats even if they could run will never be able to get that one third again but of course that might even if actually matters because what they're also doing is they're going to increase the election committee that chooses the chief executive it's been 1200 they're going to make it 1500 and again pile on all the probaging people they can to increase the number not to increase the people who vote for the members of that committee and now that committee is not going to just choose the chief executive it's going to vet every candidate that's running for the legislative council so it's going to start functioning like the guardian council in Iran to vet for patriotism all candidates that run for the legislative council so the pandemocratic people in Hong Kong who are not in jail they're not too many of them but the ones that are not in jail have been interviewed by the press and of course they say well there's no way i'll be able to run for this office so we don't know whether Hong Kong's reaction will be to to boycott these elections when they finally take place one of the other things they've done they had already delayed the legislative council elections by a year last year that that primary election was to choose candidates to run last September for the legislative council well they not only condemn the primary election and threw four members out of lejko last year but they also delayed the election for a year now out in last night's press conference there's hints they're going to delay it further uh and so it starts looking a lot like Myanmar's approach to democracy uh now and and it's been a lot it's a big concern it's not just a concern for Hong Kong people but it's a concern for everyone who relied on promise the promises China made to Hong Kong and i think for a lot of us who just care about Hong Kong because Hong Kong is it's like New York London Paris it's one of the great cities of the world and it's been such an extraordinary place for China to have such an asset that that is in the first league of the world cities uh and now it's all these things are happening now i wonder where's all leading us i'm sure that would be your next question but one of the questions i wanted to ask is yeah what about you know i tell you where it would lead me i'd be trying to get out of there i mean because you know it's the walls are closing in um and there were some you know allocated uh visas uh by the uk to allow Hong Kongers to come to the uk but i understand that that program is in jeopardy what's going on with that can i get out yeah well that's it you just said one of the solutions if you can't go along with all of this somehow submit to everything Beijing's doing to control Hong Kong is exit exit is of course a tried and tested thing that's why we have such uh you know passionate debates in America over refugees and admissions of people into the country because people have to exit if they they can't change the government in any way and the government is a danger to society well Britain was really forthcoming because it said that sort of roughly half the population of Hong Kong could come to Britain because these were all people who hold what's called a British national overseas passport which was given to Hong Kongers when Hong Kong was handed over it didn't in the past give them the right to stay in Britain but only to stay for i think six months or something but now Britain has said all those bno passport holders and their families can come to Britain now Beijing is trying to threaten that trying to block people from exiting in some ways are threatened to do so but so far i think they can still apply for this visa if they're one of the things that that seemed to be needed at first was they actually had the bno passport and not simply that they were entitled to it but i think Britain relaxed that so all so that Beijing couldn't block them by blocking them from getting the bno passport so Britain is prepared to give visas to all these people when i think a great thing for Britain Hong Kong people are so industrious and after brixen in england it's probably they could use a few you know good entrepreneurs to come to town so i think they would benefit from having Hong Kong people come there but china it's kind of it's hard to figure out whether china wants this or not i mean obviously it would lose a big talent poll if people started all going to britain i think even carry lamb the governor chief executive hong i think her her husband is even a british national if i if i'm not mistaken but uh i'm just somewhat somewhere i heard that well it all sounds yeah so it all sounds pretty oppressive and you know and what one has to wonder um why there's a huge big looming question why why i guess the the people's congress for happening right now in beijing and it must be it must have some political connection with that and with the Xi Jinping's aspirations to get another five-year term and to be the biggest guy on the block um you know what what is the why here why is china being sort of tough on hong kong why i think there's a number of factors at play we can take our pay i think one is Xi Jinping is kind of a tough guy he he's uh taken a very hard lined approach to rule in home in china generally he arrested defense lawyers he's gone after all minority groups that he views as some kind of security threat in Xinjiang and Tibet and in mongolia even imposing a chinese language on people who speak a mongolia a mongol language or other languages the Uyghur languages and so on uh so all of that is part of what's going on uh and of course there's a there a claim well look at Hong Kong it was a big mess in 2019 no country would tolerate this according to the chinese official statements and so we're going to clean up this mess there's no regard to the fact that they caused it that the people were protesting because they weren't carrying out their commitments under the sign of bridge treaty on the base of law they wasn't like Hong Kong people just got up one day and decided they were going to wreck havoc on the streets of Hong Kong but they it's been years protesting and and you know and trying to persuade Beijing to carry out its commitments to Hong Kong and and seeing more and more Beijing interference in Hong Kong's autonomy so there was a reason for the protest but rather than address the reason you know they want to crack down now that that raises another reason that another answer to your question which is really I think part of the problem is Beijing doesn't did never did not ever know how to run an open society it just they just don't have it in their DNA to trust ordinary people to make decisions and to hold power in the way they promised in the basic law so if they could keep their fingers off of it then Hong Kong could manage it somehow although even Hong Kong officials are so complicit in Beijing's policies that they never carried out their duty either of defending Hong Kong's autonomy and this is why Hong Kong people have continuous and demented democracy so Beijing's DNA I think gets in the way and then what about what about American American policy Taiwan in their eyes Taiwan and then his policy with the the United States America so you got you got these huge international factors working that that must be affecting Xi Jinping's thinking though yeah in his perception America, Britain, Western democracies are all wanting to interfere in China's internal affairs that's their kind of constant refrain that you know don't in fact we heard it from the Chinese Foreign Minister even today that accusing foreign governments who were criticizing these new democracy cut back and you know that we've already they're they're under attack for doing that and that this is attacked by them as being an interference in China's internal affairs. The U.S. as well as the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act so we sanctioned people who are thought to be party to the national security law that we discussed and are carrying it out so each Kerry Lam has been sanctioned she can't any assets she have has in the United States would be seized and the banks she views it as a risk she was bragging at one point that she no longer takes her salary which is by the way one of the highest salaries for a political leader in the world I think more than the U.S. president that she takes it in cash so everybody was joking about her government house being full of cash under her mattress but in any case these sanctioned regimes have been and and one of the things that's on the table now as this crackdown ensues further is whether there could be ways to tailor sanctions to be more effective not just targeting a few politicians who probably don't have assets in the United States or may not care but rather including companies that are complicit in this crackdown or supporting Beijing because Beijing puts companies that do business in Hong Kong and China under pressure to support Beijing's policies how much pressure can foreign governments assert that they not do that if they do what they do it at the risk of you know access to American markets and so on so all of this is up for debate it's we don't know where it's going to go so how likely is Joe Biden how likely is it that Joe Biden would you know to take additional sanctions including I suppose the Donald Trump style of trade trade trade tariffs and sanctions or is he going to hang back and wait to see what happens well I think he's he's he certainly seems to be indicating that he's not going to roll back the sanctions that are in place so quickly he does take a hard line on Beijing he disagrees with Donald Trump really in strategy not in what wants to be achieved so I think he he's going to hold on to his sanctions but what he wants to do strategically is to restore US alliances so that the United States is not a lone cowboy that was kind of Donald Trump's problem he just out there on his own making a lot of noise but not necessarily accomplishing much because Beijing is the guys in Beijing are quite smart and clever they can get around a leadership in America that's kind of unpredictable so there's they they even reach deals with the European Union on on train and so on in the midst of all this which Biden didn't want Europe to do and I think there's a lot of pressure now to stop the European Parliament from approving those agreements so the US is I think by you're going to see that there's a safe harbor act in the US Congress but I think Biden will support which would open the door to Hong Kongers to come to the United States as well refugee kind of bill so those things are going to happen and whether they will sharpen the sanctions regime we'll have to see one of the things that is to Biden's advantage is that at least on their views on Trump not on Trump on China there's agreement across the aisle in Washington that everybody is very unhappy with Beijing's policies right now and so is it is it fair is it fair I mean we talked before the show about this contention between two sides of that discussion one is you know that China is essentially for the future a good partner for us very important we have to maintain a good wholesome relationship on the other side the other hand you know we have a lot of people that that take Donald Trump's message about how China it's all that and we have to beat it up at every opportunity and we can't have any trust relationship with it you know now or ever and I wonder you know what's what's the reality there is that somewhere in the middle should we be working toward a more robust a better engagement with China or should we just be freezing the map well they're both I think are very prominent in the debate I think business interests may want to keep things going with China but there is some capacity in US political leadership to redirect US investments into other regions and Southeast Asia and so on when it comes to things like manufacturing at low cost and and such so there's some of that which can be used in a kind of leveraged sort of way to try to persuade Beijing to ease off some of these policies which is something I think there's wide agreement on they want want this to happen there's some areas where working with Beijing is more promising like climate change maybe dealing with North Korea so some areas that I think all sides would like to to see still available but yet there are some really gnarly problems I think especially with the theft of intellectual property some of Trump's sanctions over tariffs and stuff were so out of date because China's the advantages China had set up for itself had long disappeared before Trump even got in office so he was targeting some out of dated problems but the one problem that he was talking about at least didn't do anything about was these technology transfers and so on that area I think the Biden administration is going to want to work on as well and I think there's a lot of agreement on China's human rights policies on both sides of the political spectrum in the US and so the new Secretary of State has also agreed with the Pompeo the former one that the behavior in Xinjiang for example can be viewed as genocide and so there there's a hard push on that now how can you use things like sanctions you know you might be able to use them against a very poor country but even there the success rate is not good so I think there's more disagreement about how to do it than what to do just how can you effectively create pressure that will bring Beijing's behavior around to a comfortable sort of thing it's regrettable that you you know you have many more options if you have a multilateral agreement I mean between a number of nations that you speak up not only on behalf of the United States but on behalf of a group of nations all of them are led by the United States I mean and that goes to Taiwan you started to talk about Taiwan a little while ago it strikes me that you know unless we have a multilateral agreement of nations that want to control China's you know avariciousness if you will in the South China Sea and elsewhere in the in the region we alone don't have that many options to stop China right and I think China's rise and you know China likes to describe the rise of China is going along with the decline of the US I'm not sure how much the US has declined rumors of the US decline have been around for decades but it's sort of remained a very powerful country and well hopefully its standing has not gone down but yeah I think working with allies in the face of the reality that China is a much more powerful country much wealthier country and it has its own resources went over support for its policies so working with others I think is is really a vital part of what any policy direction that's likely to be more constructive but of course the end of the day you don't want to hate China you want to find a way to bring it in and help it to understand your objections to what's going on in Xinjiang and Hong Kong now the Xi Jinping hasn't been very attentive to those concerns so we don't know if it's possible to push him to relax some of these things it seems very unlikely but it's the sort of I think the objective that's on the table now well it seems like it gets more and more interesting and if you will more and more threatening more challenging anyway and I hope you and I can we can follow it going forward we can I know there's going to be other events that'll be a deep breathing exercise in the next weeks and months not only about Hong Kong but other things like you know emerging out of the People's Congress so Michael I hope we can circle back there's so much more to discuss and there's so much more that will come down the pike to discuss absolutely so I'm always happy as you know I'm from over there in Hawaii and so getting I wish I were able to walk into your studio but I can see you're in your house as well so one day one day one day soon Michael Michael Davis thank you so much for joining us again on this discussion