 Matani, and also Tim McClelland. Now, Shabani is the international investigative journalist for the Washington Post. She had previously worked for the Wall Street Journal in Myanmar and also in Chicago and in Singapore. Tim is the contributing writer for the Atlantic. She had previously worked for the Reuters based in Myanmar and in Chicago. And they have both reported strongly on the protests in Hong Kong in 2019 and events in Hong Kong since. And the talk is based on this new books that they have published, which is a very interesting and insightful book on what happened to the protesters in Hong Kong. What I would propose we do is that I will ask them to make a very, very brief introduction on why they write the book and how the book is relevant to our understanding of Hong Kong today first. Then we will have a bit of conversations with me asking them a few questions. But I will be allowing for a lot of time for you to put your questions and for them to respond to you. Given that we are dealing with the subject of Hong Kong and the protests in Hong Kong since the introduction of the Hong Kong National Security Law, I want to very much underline that if you would like to raise a question without reviewing your identity, you are very welcome to do so. And to do that, please use the question and answer command on the Zoom platform. If you could provide some information about yourself, whether you want to put down your names or not, it's up to you, but some identifiable information for me to know where the question comes from. It will help me to pick the questions to put to the speakers. But if you say from the very beginning that you would like to stay anonymous, your wish will be respected, and none of those information will be revealed in this session. But all the questions and comments being raised will be saved, and they will be shared with the speakers so they will see them after this meeting. With that, let me now invite teams to begin with to talk about why they have written this book. Open to you, team. Yeah, great. Well, thank you very much. And yeah, thanks for having us and for all the people that have joined to listen and bought the book or read it. Very much appreciate the support and the interest in Hong Kong. Yeah, so Shibani and I both moved to Hong Kong in 2018. I think both of us, when we got there, Shibani had a new job with the Washington Post, and I just started working for the Atlantic. A lot of the work and focus of what we were doing was outside of Hong Kong, and I think there's a belief that this city was kind of slow on the news front, that we would spend a lot of time traveling around and visiting other countries to do a reporting, but that Hong Kong itself wouldn't be that kind of news worthy. That obviously turned out to be totally an incorrect sort of reading of the future there. And so we were both there when the protest started and attempted to go to as many events, protests, marches that we could go to throughout the time there. We both wrote a lot of stories for the Post, for the Atlantic, me for a few other outlets along the way. And I think that there was a feeling that there was still a lot to be said and a lot to be written about the protests and the people involved. And a big part of that was because obviously the pandemic started right as the NSO was implemented and the world's attention really obviously shifted to the pandemic, to COVID, to figure out what was going on in the world. So it felt unfinished to us, I think, in a way. The ending was not wrapped up neatly. It just died off in this very strange, once in a lifetime kind of way. So I think that was our impetus for wanting to do the book and we had so much stuff that we still wanted to say and people were gonna want to talk to. So that was kind of really the driving factor behind it was to just get more of the story out. And we chose four characters to do that. And we used them to kind of talk about different parts of the protest movement, different bits of history of Hong Kong. Yeah, I think just to build a little bit on what Tim said, I think there was, and sort of linking it back to the present day and the contemporary, right? I mean, I think we had the sense that there was an urgency to sort of record down what really happened in those years and in fact, what led up to the explosion of protests in 2019 because we were already starting to see these signs of narrative control and rewriting of history coming from both the Hong Kong and the mainland authorities, right? Even when we first started sort of kind of conceptualizing the book and so on, we had the sense that things were moving much more quickly than anyone really anticipated. We had meetings sort of set up with a few of the people who eventually became kind of main characters or main people in our book. One of them was Gwyneth Ho and within that week, that was when the arrests of that big group that became known as the NSL-47 that is now still detained, well, many of them still detained and awaiting the result of their trial against the accusation is that they have plotted to subvert the authority of the state, right? And suddenly, all these people that we talked to so frequently, all these people that we interface with a lot were all locked away and their views were all then gonna be silenced for the next few years. So really, I think the exercise of this was really playing catch up in many ways and trying to get down everything before it started getting erased, removed, before all the Apple Daily archives got taken offline, before Stan New shut down and Citizen New shut down. And we really felt this sort of responsibility, right? As journalists to be able to kind of capture what we saw, what we witnessed on the ground, right? And again, just to bring it to what we're experiencing and seeing in Hong Kong today with the trials, particularly of Jimmy Lai that's underway in the courts right now, we see this real kind of attempt to frame the protests as like something started by a single mastermind who was influenced or manipulated by the US potentially, the UK, Japan has been thrown into there as well and Jimmy Lai is this kind of like single figure, right? Who, as the narrative goes, influenced, you know, millions of people either through Apple Daily or his money or whatever. But, you know, people who have been watching this closely know that wasn't true, right? And so in highlighting, you know, the motivations and sort of the histories and desires, I think of, you know, the people that we've chosen in our book, right? We hope to show that really this was a sort of generational ground up thing with, you know, its roots in history, decades-long grievances, fundamentally around the idea that Hong Kong people have never been able to choose for themselves, their own destiny, their own faith, their own leader. And we hope to have encompassed those sort of themes and ideas in this book. Thank you. That's very, very helpful. Let me now start off by asking you. You have this absolutely fantastic title for the book called Among the Braves. It gives readers or potential readers a sense of the braves being people of Hong Kong as a whole. And the braves here also specifically referring to a particular subset of the protesters in the 2019 Hong Kong protests. The people who are taking more direct actions rather than protesting in the more traditional Hong Kong way of very, very peaceful and ordinary demonstrations, not even quite to the extent of the civil disobedience that was being practiced by Gandhi, was even more moderate than that, which was really quite an achievement. So who are the braves that you're talking about? What bind them together? I do not. Yeah. I think this is also a bit of a roller-versal. We're usually the ones asking you questions for our own story. So yeah, I think you're right there. We wanted to highlight kind of Hong Kong as a whole and I think the bravery that we saw of many people, of all the people that came out, or even didn't come out to the streets, people who were working kind of in the background in a kind of support way as well. I think everybody, especially towards the end of the protests when the risks were much higher, not just for physical violence, but also for losing friendships with family or relationships or money, there was a different risk factors for different people. So I think we wanted to encompass that. And then when you talk about the subset, I think we did want to highlight, at least with three of the characters, kind of the younger generation of protesters who we kind of identified, I guess, pretty strongly with the movement, who kind of reflected the people that we had met day to day, weekend to weekend, covering the movement. So I think that was certainly part of it, though one of the characters obviously older to kind of guide you through the history of things. But I think there was a choice by us to kind of choose younger people. I think we were also interested in their views on the mainland, on Hong Kong's relationship with the mainland, how that may be different from the older generation, the kind of Martin Lee's of the world. I think there's definitely some divisions over kind of how they view the mainland, how they view democracy on the mainland and how those efforts have progressed. So yeah, I think you're kind of right there and we did choose those people. And then I don't know if Shobani has any bits that she wants to add to that, but. Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things that we were very, very interested in, especially with the book, right? We had more space to kind of document and trace this, is how that kind of subset of the braves, as in the people who took the more radical and violent action became radicalized, right? Over the cause of Hong Kong's history, as you say, in 2014 during the umbrella movement, it was unheard of or shocking to even have people break a window or something, right? And people were criticized for even showing that kind of level of quote unquote violence, anybody familiar with protests in the UK, for example, no, that's kind of half of the cause, right? In most like normal democratic societies that are used to protest. And so how did we get from that, right? Whether it was chiding or dissatisfaction for even the most like light sort of violent action to then all of society kind of actually tolerance and support, even for quite violent quote unquote violence or radical actions, right? Like for example, breaking into the legislative council on July of 2019 and so on. And so Tommy, who is one of the main characters in our book, he's sort of a bit more of an every man protester. We sort of chart that his journey from just being a kind of apolitical sort of student, sort of like class clown, kind of a goofy sort of guy to then picking up eggs and pelting it at the police headquarters to then learning how to make Molotov cocktails. And later on, you know, sort of growing like deeper and deeper and deeper into these sort of like factions that were really backing a lot more sort of violent action against the police. And I think that to us was very interesting to try to figure out the psychology and the reasons behind that evolution. Actually, that really leads very neatly as to what I wanted us to ask you next, which is about the four anchor individuals in the book, the four people who really formed the pillars for your narrative of the book and what unfold and how people's minds changed. Could you talk us through, perhaps as briefly as you can, the four main anchor characters in the book? And perhaps if you could also share why do you choose them? What are they meant to do in terms of the reflections of the big story and the trend that you are chronicling in this book? Sure, so maybe I'll do two, and then Trivani can do two so we split it up here. So the first one I think is Reverend Chu Yu-ming who was involved. Yeah, I mean, we chose him because he's much older than all the other people that we write about in the book. His life in a lot of ways mirrors Hong Kong. He was born in Hong Kong, moved to the mainland, then ended up coming back to Hong Kong, kind of fleeing the persecution that was taking place in China and then gets involved in the pro-democracy movement around 1989, was at Tiananmen Square, helped rescue some people from there to Hong Kong then on to third countries in Operation Yellowbird. And then through that, he's kind of been at or part of almost all of the sort of big moments in pro-democracy movements in Hong Kong in 2014, a little bit less so in 2019 given his age. But yeah, I mean, we thought that his history kind of reflected a lot of Hong Kong's own history and the people of Hong Kong's own history. And then, I guess kind of opposite of him was Finn Lau, a guy who was involved in the protest movement in an online kind of anonymous capacity at the beginning before he outed himself as the author of kind of the lamb chow, you'll burn with us mantra. And I think we picked him because we wanted someone who could talk and reflect a little bit about the online nature of the protest movement, the use of forums. And I think kind of get into a little bit of like, are there limits to that type of online participation? Can it have a real world impact? How good is it and effective is it for organizing? And then I'll let you mind take the other two characters, I guess. Yeah, so I mentioned Tommy just now and Tim mentioned Reverend Shoe's role in Operation Yellowbird. One of the most striking things, which is sort of the anchor narrative also for our book is that Tommy, after he gets arrested in Hong Kong and is facing potentially more than a decade in jail, chooses to flee Hong Kong to Taiwan with four other people by boat crossing the Taiwan Strait. And eventually does reach Taiwan and not to spoil the ending, but he gets asylum, gets resettled in the United States. And to us sort of looking at Reverend Shoe and his role in Operation Yellowbird in 1989, where Hong Kong was a safe haven, where Hong Kong was this real refuge, for as it had been for generations, for people fleeing either persecution, famine, just awful conditions on the mainland. By 2019, that role of Hong Kong had really deteriorated and Hong Kong itself became the place to flee. And so I think we really wanted to use those two kind of touch points to show through Hong Kong's history how that role morphed. Hong Kong is the safe haven and then the sort of breaking of that. So that's a big reason why we chose to highlight Tommy as opposed to obviously many, many other sort of young frontline protestors that we could have featured. And our last but perhaps the most important character in the book is Gwyneth Ho, who was a journalist when the first has happened. She was studying in Europe and back on her summer vacation when she was covering the events for Stan News. And I think most people will remember her because she was beaten up in Yunlong on July 21st, 2019, which was when essentially probationing thugs, tried members, sort of attacked protestors and sort of regular people at this subway station. And I think we really wanted to sort of highlight her, not just because she was such an important part of this extremely pivotal day. I mean, Yunlong, seven to one, it's like a definitive, right? But for the movement definitive for Hong Kong that year, right? Because I think it really was the day that shattered the trust that Hong Kong people had in the police and indeed in the government. But Gwyneth herself is also very, very thoughtful about the way she looks at the movement, very thoughtful about the way she looks at her own role. And in the end becomes the only one in our book at least who chooses actively chooses jail over exile. She could have left, but she chooses to stay and then gets arrested and swept up in this big national security case. And I think by the end of the book, we really wanted readers to come away with this idea that there was really only two binaries for a lot of people who was so deeply involved in the movement, exile or jail, right? And people made their calculations differently as things were sort of closing in. Thank you. That's actually very, very interesting. I think particularly when you talk about somebody Gwyneth who at the start of your book really in a sense was, and I meant no disrespect to her and nobody. She was just a student studying overseas and paying attention to what happens in Hong Kong. So in the end, choosing to stay and face the consequences that she knew would be very, very harsh. With somebody you mentioned somewhat in passing in the book, but perhaps not intentionally, presented in a somewhat contrasting light. And that was what happens to Joshua Wong. That you have come out with interesting and important information indicating that when he knew the game was up, he did try to seek asylum in the United States unsuccessfully and in the end have to face the music, the way that Gwyneth did. Now here is a contrasting of one of Hong Kong's best known activist protest leader, perhaps not among the Braves, but in terms of the more measured weight of protesting but a long standing one with a newcomer who really just came out. Was that intentional? I mean, what were you trying to bring out in highlighting that contrast in the book? Yeah, so I mean, I think part of it, there's probably multiple parts, but I'll talk about it a little and then it's probably add on some, I think. I mean, I think, you know, in Joshua's situation, you know, he was understandable sort of because his profile, you know, he thought and the people around him, I think, also believed that he would be better served being outside of Hong Kong, right? That he had this international presence, that he had the international kind of stage that very few people in Hong Kong had, right? Maybe him and maybe one or two other people, but I think him by far kind of the most prominent, right? So, you know, I think you saw him take up a more international role in the protest once he was released from jail. And certainly, I think trying to leave Hong Kong was, you know, part of his thought process from what we understand was that he would be much more valuable to the movement and to continuing on advocacy about Hong Kong and about China from abroad, right? Right now, he's obviously in jail. You know, we hadn't seen or heard, you know, publicly any kind of letters from him or anything like that. You know, if part of the plan for the authorities was to kind of, you know, silence him, it's certainly been effective. You know, had he landed somewhere else outside of Hong Kong, you know, I think you would see him a lot more in the news. I think you'd see him a lot in front of lawmakers. I think you'd see him, you know, really taking up his international lobby position that he had kind of filled, right? So that was certainly sort of part of the thought process there from his side. And then I think maybe Shivani can talk about Guena's position. Yeah, and I mean, I think, you know, it's not, it wasn't like a direct sort of contrast, right? But different people would just sat very differently with this idea of being an exile, right? I mean, Gwyneth, I think herself has written a lot about how she would have just never been at peace overseas or she would have never been comfortable or, you know, safe in her own mind, right? I think is the way she put it, right? And it's an incredibly difficult sort of decision or sort of pathway to kind of choose. But at the end of the day, I mean, I think, and she's written about this publicly, like she wrote that, you know, you have to, you know, do what's right by you, right? And the decision of her being an exile would have never been sort of right by her. But I think primarily the reason that we included the situation with Joshua and his asylum bid was to kind of show really the limits of how far the US was prepared to go when it came to offering safe haven and pathways to fleeing Hong Kongers. And I mean, I think, you know, that's what we really wanted to kind of interrogate here because obviously Washington is as you remember, right? During the start of the protests or even, you know, through 2020, I mean, I think no other countries sort of pledged as much support to the Hong Kong movement, right? When including, you know, lawmakers from the US arriving on the streets of Hong Kong, like Josh Shawley and Ted Cruz, you know, actually being there among the protesters, right? I mean, it was kind of a stunning thing to see. And, you know, at the end of the day, we wanted to see whether those same people kind of fought as hard for Hong Kong, not just in Joshua's case, but also, you know, more broadly for kind of establishing a asylum pathway or immigration pathway for other Hong Kongers. I mean, the truth is that they really didn't, right? And so that's what we were hoping to kind of highlight by, you know, reporting that out. Okay, thank you. That kind of leads to a question about whether the braves or indeed the wider protest movement in Hong Kong, being naive or did they really know what they were doing and they knew that they had no choice and the course of protest they took whether it was the massive peaceful demonstration or the substantially smaller part of people who were taking direct actions, that was the only way forward. They knew what they were doing. They knew what they were going to expect. They knew what the Chinese government responses would be and they knew the odds against them, which was the case. I think that some people who maybe had more exposure kind of to the mainland and a bit more kind of understanding sometimes of the political system there and of Xi Jinping were a bit more aware of how bad things could get. I think to circle back to Gwyneth, she's a person who I started interviewing well before we had this book idea. And I think she was always very clear-eyed in her discussions with me and with other journalists about the risks involved here, right? That they were taking on a superpower authoritarian government. She I think was very, again, clear-eyed and kind of open and kind of knew that. And I think that's true for some other people that we've interviewed, that we've interacted with over the years. And I'm talking about, I guess kind of the more well-known, pro-democracy lawmakers or activists here. Certainly I do think then after that, there's a subset of people who totally, from the same group of lawmakers and activists who totally I think misunderstood this and really didn't anticipate how bad things were gonna get that the national security law was gonna happen. I think you've seen some of them in court and then some people that have been, I think really, really kind of caught off guard by what has occurred. So it's hard to know if how many people or what subset of people thought this or thought that. I think in our conversations, it varies, right? There's some people who were very kind of prepared in a way for this. I think there's other people who were not at all cognizant of how things could get. And I think just kind of bringing us back to the mindset that a lot of people were in in 2019, right? I think a lot of people just felt like they had to do this. If they didn't, then they couldn't sleep at night. They couldn't live with themselves. They couldn't face themselves in the mirror. Like that mentality was very real. I mean, people were just kind of doing what they believed was right in that moment. And the questions that we're sort of talking about came much later. I mean, I think it was that, you know, a very weird period between, you know, the start of COVID, which was January of 2020 to the imposition of the national security law that everyone was then trying to make that risk calculation in their mind, right? Okay, if I get arrested, how long would I be facing? So on and so forth. But I don't think anybody could have really been sort of prepared for like sort of the extent of the national security law. I mean, even today when I talk to people that I interview for stories in Hong Kong, you know, at the present and we kind of bring us back to that mindset of that moment then. I mean, people were still judging their consequences by the Hong Kong legal system and the Hong Kong framework, right? Which was very, very different from what happened when the national security law, you know, sort of came into place. And I think really, really upended that, including from a legal system point of view where you're denied bail and, you know, you're afraid that one day you even might get extradited back to China and so on, right? I think that that was a very new element that people were not prepared to deal with at all. Can I come back to you? Because the issue of naivety, if that is the right word for it, I think in a sense goes a bit deeper than that. We all now criticize the harshness of the national security law. And it is draconian. I wouldn't disagree with that or argue against that. But given the history of the people's, people's topic of China government, the way how they're doing it with the national security law is by no imagination, the harshest way that they could have responded. They could have responded in a way that's similar to how they responded to the protests in Beijing in 1989. They didn't. And Hong Kong people of an earlier generations were deeply involved in supporting the protests in Beijing in 1989. And that was in a sense, the birth of the mass or ordinary demonstrations in Hong Kong. It was in response to the military crackdown in Beijing in June, 1989. And for your new generation of activists and protesters in Hong Kong to have not taken on board, that's the worst case scenario would be something similar to Beijing 1989 as a possible way of response from the Chinese authorities. That seems to suggest that they really were not thinking very hard about what they were dealing with, weren't they? And then the other dimension of the naivety is not so much with how the Chinese government will respond, but with how the Western governments would respond. Yeah. The idea that Washington is coming to write to Hong Kong's rescue, that London is going to send in the world marines, that was never on the agenda. No, and I think part of this that we've discussed, and we don't write about it too much in the book, but I think it's certainly that there is a sort of boy who cried wolf factor maybe, right, that after 1997, there wasn't the great fears of the death of Hong Kong weren't realized, right? That at midnight and at the handover, it things the next day didn't change in a way that people had kind of the most bearish look had been, right, in Hong Kong carried on. And there were certainly incidents over time that kind of rose the alarm and kind of obviously show that the basic law and the declaration are being contorted and pulled a bit. But I definitely think that part of that was maybe this, that over the years for so many decades, the death of Hong Kong had been foretold so many times and really every time things had carried on in a way that for a lot of people wouldn't see drastically different. So I think there's a little bit of kind of maybe complacency over time that things with the status quo would kind of remain. Yeah, and I mean, just to add to that, you know, on your point about naivety, right? I mean, I think there was this idea or actually this bravado that was present in 2019 that people actually did say to us, like, well, let the tanks come in, like, let everybody see what Beijing is really like, let everybody see what China would respond, right? Arguably, the strategy of responding through a national security law that's so kind of draconian and sweeping and remaking the institutions and so on actually gives enough space for the international community to respond a little bit, but not force their hand to respond quite how they did after 89 if you see what I mean, right? I mean, I think that there were people who definitely told us that they would prefer this unambiguous sort of brutality because then the international response might be a little bit more unambiguous, right? Whereas today, what we see is actually sort of a desire to kind of get on with it, right? I mean, in 2020, there were sanctions, you know, obviously the BNO pathway was created by the UK and so on and so forth, but you really do see a normalization around Hong Kong, especially, you know, with the economic side of things and the economic engagement coming back and you do see a desire, right? I think that even the British consul general said, right? We can't have any more megaphone diplomacy, you know, we have to just kind of, you know, work together and strengthen the economies, right? And I, yeah, I sometimes think about that, right? Whether this response responding through kind of a legal way and sort of undercutting institutions and so on over like a dragged out sort of period, right? Is actually a much smarter way of responding than sort of the straight up brutality. So what did they really want? I mean, here we're really talking about the subset of the Braves, the people who were taking direct action because they are the people who were, in a sense, pushing for the kind of response that you were talking about, that they could hope for that. Your massive number of people who were protesting only peacefully and orderly, they were not doing actions that expected trigger every response like that. So what were the Braves hoping to achieve by doing so? Just to show one. Well, I think there was just- How much of a Chinese community? I think there was just like a subset of people who really wanted the sort of quote unquote mirage of Hong Kong gone, right? For it to no longer be a place that, you know, has a financial system that plays the role that it does for China, right? I mean, I think the sort of burn with us sort of mentality among a certain subset was very serious, right? Like, if we are to be punished, then we have to drag the whole thing kind of down with it, right? And I think that people who really would have wanted to see that in that year. Yeah. And I think some of this is not even up to speculation, right? Some of it was laid out by, you know, Professor Tai and the 35 plus kind of scheme, right? I mean, that was ostensibly the next kind of step in moving the protest from the streets into, you know, ledge code into kind of like the halls of, at least the halls of Hong Kong power, right? So I don't think it's a totally kind of abstraction, right? There was a plan of sorts. And I do think, you know, had things played out differently that, you know, they could have gotten that majority and, you know, how far down the line they would have gotten with kind of monkey wrenching the system and, you know, voting down the budget and things like that, that there were detailed, I don't know, you know, I'm sure Beijing would have intervened at some point. But I do think that 35 plus getting those seats, you know, if COVID doesn't happen, if Carrie Lam doesn't, you know, hold off the election, these are a lot of ifs I realized, but, you know, the national security law doesn't come in. You know, I think that at the time that that plan was hatched felt realistic. It felt doable in these parts of it. But we not actually made a distinction between the classic civil disobedience acts that Benny Dye was proposing. Trying to use the institution in place, including the elected elements of the legislature to incapacitate the government and bring out the problems less civil disobedience. The direct actions that the Braves were taking in the streets, throwing stones, throwing Molotow cocktails was a very different set of actions from the civil disobedience of Benny Dye or the other protests. So what were they trying to achieve? Right, so I mean, I think that's true. I think that on the surface, they're obviously different actions, but I do think they have to look at the support that went across those, right? That the people that were involved in 35 plus were also not, you know, strongly condemning the more radical elements, right? There was still broad support, even the district council election that happened right after Hollywood, right? Which was the worst, you know, strategically, a terrible idea, you know, for the movement from a standpoint of the arrests, from the crazy violence that happened there that was really extremely dangerous. I mean, it's shocking that nobody was killed during that, you know, event. But in terms of, you know, what they were kind of trying to achieve, I do think it is also a challenge. In some ways, I think the Hong Kong protests is extremely simple. And the fact that it started with one demand and then it went to five. And that was, you know, and in that sense, it's a very clear cut. But in terms of speaking for, I guess, what every single person wanted, I think is hard. I think, you know, ultimately, you know, as Shivani said, I think they wanted to show, you know, show the world and how they would do that is different. I think, you know, sanctions were a big part of it. I think there was a lot of push there that people like HSBC, like institutions, would get sanctioned. That they would kind of show that Hong Kong and China had become, you know, so close that they couldn't be treated differently. And again, some of these actions were, you know, achieved when Pompeo said that Hong Kong is not fully, you know, autonomous anymore and it has a policy change from the United States. You know, some of those things did, you know, did indeed happen. I guess it's just a question of sort of how far and what proportions there were going to go to. Okay. We are now 41 minutes past the hour. I'll perhaps raise two more questions with you and then I will be bringing in questions from the audience. And so far we have eight questions from eight anonymous attendees. Nobody has feel comfortable to identify oneself, but I will certainly encourage those who feel that they could give some indication of who you are. And I'll come to your questions next later. The other question I want to put to you is about the four anchor characters and how they relate to your focus of the book as among the Braves. Now, the simplistic interpretation is that among your four anchor individuals, Tommy was clearly one of the Braves. He was a direct action type. It's easy, straightforward. Gwyneth was an incredibly courageous person and she was not living to any kind of interpretations because she consciously chose to stay to face the music, but in fact, relatively little that she was directly, actively involved in. Yeah. And in many ways that is, one classic definition of a very brave individual. What about the other two? Finn was essentially an online protester, contributing more like ideas. Then taking any kind of real protest in Hong Kong or choosing to face the consequences. Reverend Chu is an incredibly admirable person who has done a lot over a long period of time. Yeah. But in the end, he was not that directly actively involved in the 2019 protest. And in the end, he decided that he needs to relocate out of Hong Kong for his own and his family's safety. How does that come into anchor your book which is focused on among the Braves? Are we looking at very different dimensions of what being brave means in the context of Hong Kong in the 2019 into 2022? Yeah. I mean, as you noted in the beginning, Braves has obviously a double meaning. So one is that the subset of the Braves itself which meant something very specific in the movement in 2019. But I think we did want to use the title to nod to the fact that obviously anyone who was participating in the movement throughout the generations was in fact doing something very courageous and very brave. I mean, the courage and the sort of middle of the Hong Kong protest movement was really something remarkable and was kind of on display for I think the whole world to see. I mean, it was really one of the world's most enduring pro-democracy movements in that year and every weekend, after every weekend, after every weekend, we saw it evolving and changing in different ways. I mean, you know that the phrase, right? The brothers climbing the mountain each to his own ability. Like that we really felt that the four characters sort of exemplified that, right? Because they all did such different things and they spoke to such different aspects of the movement. I mean, Finn was indeed online, but in fact, the online activism that they stand with Hong Kong sort of pioneered in that movement led to some real world actions, right? I mean, you saw observation missions from the UK, you saw people being sort of essentially pushing for sanctions and further relationships through the formation of IPAC, for example, which is the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance of lawmakers, right? All across the world who have come together to take quite a strong stance against China. I mean, those were all pretty direct consequences of what they were doing that year and the price that they've paid for that sort of individually has been quite high, right? I mean, Finn was related to just sort of Andy Lee who is part of the same group who today is one of the key witnesses in the Jimmy Lai Shua. So they all kind of link together, right? We wanted to talk about this whole sort of kind of ecosystem and this whole world, right? And Reverend Chu, I mean, for somebody of his age who really came into this movement through the church and through being a pastor, right? I mean, what he and his family have had to kind of endure because of his generational long commitment to democracy and let's not forget his compatriots, you know, Lee Chu-Kian, Martin Lee and so on who are all still in Hong Kong and all sort of, you know, elderly but are sort of facing such consequences for how they've pushed for very basic things in Hong Kong, right? I mean, I think to us that all sort of exemplifies the sort of courage of this movement. Okay. Last question for me before I go to the, by now, 13 different interventions. What would you like your readers to see as the key takeaways from the book? Yeah, I mean, I'll start. I mean, I think the, you know, for us would be, you know, seeing the people, you know, of Hong Kong and kind of I think understanding, you know, as you know, through your work and as a historian that, you know, that people have been, you know, very much marginalized and left out of discussions about their own future. And, you know, the agency, you know, has many key moments in history been taken away from the people of Hong Kong in terms of, you know, colonialism and then Chinese rule. So I think that, you know, is certainly one part of it. And then I think we'd also, you know, like people to look at it and kind of maybe, you know, interrogate what kind of, you know, allies or promises are made by foreign governments to people going through situations like in Hong Kong, kind of, you know, how much the world really stands up to those promises, especially the US, you know, stands up to the kind of what they're preaching, you know, when it becomes a challenge when things don't go the way that people, you know, want, you know, will they really kind of take up and do difficult things? And in the case of the United States, we've seen them not really do that, right? This became the Hong Kong issue, became one of kind of democracy and a chance for some photo shoots. And then it became an immigration issue in the United States. So when that happened, we saw a lot of the people who were the biggest champions, the most vocal proponents of Hong Kong totally turned their back on people that they had been advocating for. So I think, you know, there's a lot of, you know, I hope some kind of, you know, through the reporting and through the writing in there, you know, taking a hard look at kind of both the Trump and Biden administrations and the US more broadly, kind of what they've promised or I wouldn't say promised, but what they've kind of preached to the people of Hong Kong and what they held up. Yeah, and just to add two more things that I think, you know, we want people to take away. One is, you know, how like people can be very complicit in the eroding of these institutions, even though they seem sort of Western educated and sort of, you know, relatable, right? I mean, one of the things that was really remarkable that we always heard from diplomats in Hong Kong is, you know, foreign diplomats in Hong Kong was how much the Hong Kong government was sort of like them, right, you know, studied at the same institutions, partly served under the British. So, you know, they consummate civil servants, they kind of understand how the West works, they understand sort of global financial systems and so on. These same people were the enablers really of Beijing's crackdown, right? I mean, you don't need to be a Xi Jinping kind of character who obviously went through the Cultural Revolution and was exiled to a cave to kind of, you know, be complicit in and sort of lead the erosion of democratic institutions, right? And I think that has some really important implications for the whole world really, right? I mean, even if you look at the U.S. and sort of Trump and the people surrounding him, I mean, you see that people, you know, can actually be very willing collaborators, right? In the erosion of democratic institutions, even though they have sort of grown up understanding, you know, what democracy is, right? And benefited from those systems. And I guess the last point I would make is sort of the fragility of institutions, right? I mean, I think a lot of people have still been very shocked at the way the Hong Kong legal system has sort of been kind of corroded and exploited, right? In the wake of the national security law. And I think that is something that people had a lot of faith in, right? Even if they, you know, believed other things could be sort of, you know, malleable, like for example, the schools and so on and so forth. And those threats, you know, have been known to Hong Kong people before, right? You know, national education and so on. I think people really did have faith in the courts, right? But now you see the courts and, you know, the DOJ and the prosecutors being, you know, very, very much hand in hand with sort of the crackdown that's happening from Beijing, right? And I think in some ways, you know, going back to what you said about Tiananmen and the crack, the nature of the crackdown, perhaps, you know, the sort of nature of what we've seen in Hong Kong is really had, you know, big lessons, right? How you can manipulate systems without needing to, you know, rely on force. Okay. The first question I picked is from an anonymous attendee. What is your sense of how regular Hong Kong residents view the protest in retrospect? We went from a pretty open society with the ability to protest, post freely on social media, read free and robust criticism in the approach daily to now living with the consequences of a post-protest environment where we are too fearful to post on social media. Our regular media is gone and we no longer protest about anything with the risk of having our lives being ruined by over-settled police. Hong Kong is a different place. Our youth are in crisis and the economy is in free fall. Was it all worth it? That's a big question to start with. Yeah, look, I mean, I think for us, for the characters in our book and the people that we interviewed, I think most of them would say that it was worth it. And I think that that is worth it in the sense that at the time, like Shivani said, there was this drive to do something, right? This whole societal push to be part of this, to do something, right? And I think when you're lifted up, when you're a million people strong on the street, that is life-changing and motivating and feels very worth it. Now, I think in that moment, right? And then I think if we look back now from the position some people are in, living alone in foreign countries because they have to leave Hong Kong, restarting their lives and new jobs, that's a totally different kind of situation and it's a totally different kind of question to ask, I think, and to look at, to look at those kind of two very different sort of time brands. I think that there is a, and this is a bit of a divergence, but I think there's, it's something that's on my mind, we're in Taipei at the moment. There is a thought that nothing was achieved from this, but I do think that that's kind of selling the movement short in the way that when you look at the implications for, again, Taiwan for existence, right? Where one country, two systems will never probably be enacted here in the shorter medium term because of the consequences in Hong Kong. It changed the course of history here with the election of the DPP again in 2020. So I think when we're talking about, was it worth it, were there things that were achieved? It's a big question. There's a lot of layers to it. And I think it's also deeply personal for certain people, right? Again, certainly every person that we, that we track in our book, I think absolutely their response would be that we would go back and then we would do it again. I think if I could just add a little bit to this, this was a question we indeed posed to, I think a lot of the people we spoke to actually and spoke for many hours about this question. I think when you look at somebody like Tommy who started actually protesting the anti-extradition protests quite as early as April, when he used to leave those smaller protests, he would feel very lonely. Like, okay, there was so few people. Maybe I'm a fringe kind of in my mentality. Maybe they're not many people who feel the way I do or who have the same feelings and desires for Hong Kong dreams for Hong Kong as I do. But by June, July, August, I think what we saw was the creation of a community that was reiterating to people, no, you're not alone, right? What you're feeling, what your emotions and your heart, what your desires of Hong Kong, we millions of us feel the same way too, right? And I think to bring us back to that moment, that was a very, very special kind of thing that was created in Hong Kong in 2019 in the movement, right? And obviously what's happened since is I think obviously the state and Beijing and the Hong Kong government have worked to erode those bonds and eradicate those bonds, right? But if we remember that they were actually still there and that there were a lot of people who feel the same, they just can't express that anymore, right? I think that gives us a lot of hope and a lot of strength even today. Let me move on. Next question I picked comes from Stephen Lyons, whom you probably almost didn't know. As Sibani said, there was no central organizer in 2019. In fact, there was no central organization. The slogan, no big platform, was a response to what the protesters thought was a weakness of the Umbara movement of 2014 with clearly identifiable and identified leaders. So do you think that the absence of central leadership was a major fall of strategy in 2019? So, yeah, I think it's understandable kind of why that formula or that kind of makeup became popular given what happened again in 2014, the disagreement in fighting that took place, right? It's a way more democratic movement in itself, right? We saw in real times people kind of voted on Telegram and on LHKG, just decisions of the day in the moment of where they should protest, what they should do, where they should go. So I think that, especially that coordination element was fascinating to watch. What Steve's getting at, and I think that there is some kind of probing to be done here is about the limitations of leaderless protest, right? That there wasn't opportunities for not just the Hong Kong government, but we know from our reporting of diplomats of other people who wanted a better understanding of what was going on, who wanted to talk to someone so they could bring what was happening back to their governments, who didn't kind of know where to go and there was no one to kind of talk to, right? And so I think that makes it a challenge when if there's an opportunity to kind of negotiate or talk or discuss kind of de-escalation, it's like, who's the point person here? Like, who do we talk to? That's one issue. I think the second issue is, when there is this vacuum, for the leadership to deliberately so, some people who aren't kind of, have the best interests of a lot of people in their hearts, kind of can sometimes step in and kind of proclaim themselves to be in leadership positions, right? Who aren't agreed upon by people who are kind of faking it, I think, I guess. So I think that it leaves open the kind of imposters a little bit. If that makes sense. And I think we saw some people kind of put their hands up and speak for the movement of times and say things or do things that were pretty foolish. And again, I think that's a consequence of really not having a strong kind of leader to direct things. So I think there's certainly a benefit from it that we saw with the spontaneity, with the way that it moved, with the democracy aspect of it. And then I guess, absolutely, I think there's limitations to kind of, what that kind of movement can look like. Okay. Let me now, without a more like a comment than a question, but I certainly like to see whether you would like to respond to that comment. And that comment comes from an anonymous attendee. Two features of the kind of structure of feelings at the time of the protests among the protesters need to be highlighted in addition to what have been discussed. One, the very deep disillusioned and feeling of lack of representation and the idea that former forms of less confrontational protest had not given any result. Yeah. And two, the fact that many protesters had gone through some kind of political socialization by taking part in some form of protests or events early on, like the 2014 Umbara Movement or the annual June 4th vigil. And the kind of harsh reactions of the police to the protesters at the very stage, early stage of the 2019 protests from June 12th onward. We'll have triggered a further radicalization among some protesters. Would you agree with that? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think one thing that we haven't explicitly discussed but colored everything that we saw in 2019 and indeed reported on the book was the police response, right? I mean, I think it's when you had that kind of erosion of trust in authorities and in particular the police, people were really sort of finding ways of going into themselves, right? And responding to what they saw as persecution of other Hong Kongers by themselves, right? And so that's why you have more kind of like vigilante actions, especially after 7 to 1, where there was this idea, right? And I did a story at the time that, you know, even like white collar, you know, people will have worked as accountants and bankers were learning how to make Molotov cocktails because they felt, okay, if the police are, you know, attacking our people, if it's sort of quote, unquote, war on the streets, then we need to find ways to defend ourselves, right? And I think that, you know, I read quite a lot at the time, you know, about kind of the troubles and Belfast and, you know, we never saw that kind of extent in Hong Kong, but it was trending in that direction, right? One action from the police, one action from the protestors, one action from the police, one from the protestors and the radicalization ticked up and ticked up and ticked up till we got to Poly-U, right? And I think that was a spiral that we felt like we were locked in all through those months. Right. Let me now move to somebody who is a very long-term residence in Hong Kong, but not born there. The Hong Kong movement has been so suffocated and suppressed that is essentially dead locally, apart from the incredibly widespread simmering resentment. You also make the point that Western support has evaporated and international attention has very much moved on, like over to Gaza, Ukraine, et cetera. And so many Hong Kongers who have been able to have left. Hong Kong is now simply Shenzhen South, isn't it? Where can Hong Kong identity and perhaps in politician, in bracket pseudo autonomy go from here? Yeah, I mean, I think this is something else we've been discussing recently because we've been seeing a lot of Hong Kongers and people, Hong Kongers that have moved to Taiwan. Yeah, I mean, I think that one, if we want to call it a silver lining, I'm not sure it's a silver lining, it's something that this has sparked an interest, I think, in some academic institutions, in the study of Hong Kong, of Hong Kong history, of Cantonese, I think we've seen new programs pop up at some universities and some places. So I think that is something that's been kind of taken out of this, that there is an interest, there was, I hope it will stay, of kind of studying Hong Kong and looking at Hong Kong. So I think that's kind of a little bit of, maybe an answer to that question, but in terms of kind of wholesale replication or finding that, I think it's a challenge. I think there's, again, things that are happening. We were in Toronto for a book talk. I think there's a multi-generational kind of Hong Kong community there, talking to them and seeing some of the stuff that they had done in the past years around like cultural events and a Hong Kong fair that had shown like thousands of people. I think we find those things very heartening, right? That the diaspora community, there's a tendency, I think, particularly by provisioning and state media in Hong Kong, to write about the diaspora community as total failures, that everyone's going there, they're losing their jobs, they're not making any money and they're all depressed. That's certainly not all of it. There are plenty of success stories. There are these kind of exciting things that are happening. So I think we found it in doing the book tour and visiting kind of various Hong Kong communities across the US and in Canada, we were certainly emotional time, but I think we were both heartened by some of the stuff we saw and some of the people we met and some of the things that are taking place. Yeah, and I mean, just to add to that, like in the UK and in Canada, both, I mean, Hong Kong is there's so many of them that they're actually a voting block in a constituency in certain districts, right? I mean, there are certain districts where there are enough Hong Kongers that they are politically relevant to whatever local dynamic is sort of going on there. And I do think in that sense, right? As with all sort of diaspora and exile kind of communities, there is a way to make a difference within your local community, sort of wherever you go, right? So I think, I don't think this sort of like, actually, I think, if it's true that people in Hong Kong are very suppressed, which is true, I think people who have left feel this really strong desire to keep Hong Kong identity and to keep the story and kind of the spirit of Hong Kong alive, right? And you see a lot of efforts to do that across the diaspora, yeah. And I think one last thing I think that I'll touch on that we saw a little bit of too, is that greater interest amongst Hong Kongers in the diaspora community connect with other groups, whether it's talking about what's happening in Xinjiang or with Tibet or with just kind of pro-democracy activists from the mainland, you know, I think Hong Kong, they didn't have a diaspora community in that sense for a long time or if they did it was very small, you know, I think they're kind of new to the scene. And I think that it's interesting, you know, and I think for us, it's been, again, heartening to see some of our friends and people that we know, you know, learning about these other communities, you know, connecting with them, you know, building this kind of coalition. I think you see it a lot on, you know, college on some college campuses. Yeah, so again, I mean, I think I get where, you know, the person who's asking the question is coming from, you know, give them kind of the downbeat feeling of all of this, but certainly I think there are some sort of hopeful moments and things that we've seen. Next question from another anonymous attendee. Isn't Hong Kong about working hard and earning money? Why does democracy matter? It wasn't that democratic under British colonial rule. Yeah, I mean, I think this was something that we, you know, as we looked back at a lot of news articles, right, to do research for this book, there were so many sort of foreign correspondents coming in the 80s around, especially around Tianwen, asking people that, saying like, oh, you know, aren't you more concerned about your sort of economic sort of future and trajectory? Why are you guys suddenly so impassioned about what's going on in Beijing in, you know, in 1989? I mean, I think as you pointed out, you know, Professor, like 1989 was really sort of the birth, right, of the modern sort of pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong. I think that was sort of the moment where all the fears and anxieties about what things would look like under Beijing were very, very real and very true, right? And when people started interrogating, like, wait, why has there been this handover that we haven't had any sort of direct role in and any sort of, you know, direct say in, right? I mean, nobody's arguing that Hong Kong was a democracy under the British. The many of the worst laws, including sedition and so on, in fact, hold of this, right? From British colonial times, it's not a binary between, you know, what's better or what's worse, right? But I think, you know, there was this idea of disenfranchisement throughout the generations, right? And if there was this one promise, which, you know, is a political thing, right? Being able to vote for your own leader, but in fact also has an economic element to it. Now I'm from Singapore, and even when I talk to a lot of the pro-establishment in Hong Kong, they would love to tell me about how, you know, Lee Kuan Yew came to Hong Kong to study public housing, you know, models and see how that could be applied to Singapore, you know, back in the 60s. But really, I mean, it is true that like to get a house even public housing in Hong Kong, the wait's very long, you know, it's one of the most difficult real estate markets in the world still today. I mean, people did feel like their own economic aspirations, their own sort of growth was limited because the government wasn't working for them and working for the things they wanted, right? And so I think it's very hard to separate that idea of people's political aspiration and people's economic aspiration too, because a lot of people saw this as totally linked and very tied together. Next question, something completely different, another anonymous identity. To what extent do you see the Hong Kong movement and its seething but now suppressed public sentiment, a potential beginning of the end of the Communist Party of China, where the effective dissolution of the movement has the moment for pushing changes in the mainland now passed, is Hong Kong be coverable as a distinct political and jurisdictional entity? In terms of, you know, the bit there about the mainland and the end of it, no, I mean, I think, no, because we saw, you know, the white paper protests that they kind of popped up in the mainland around COVID and the lockdown, the Shanghai, you know, I think that that was a moment, a big moment, right? I mean, I think that showed and it certainly showed some people in Hong Kong were very skeptical about, you know, people in the mainland and their kind of, you know, thoughts and wishes and feeling towards the government, that there are, you know, feelings out there of resentment and anger towards the government. I think sometimes the people in Hong Kong and maybe not just Hong Kong elsewhere don't understand how difficult it is to voice those opinions in China and how huge the consequences are for that, right? I think a very naive thing that we heard from U.S. officials from other people over the time is, you know, China, a lot of the people just stand up and fight, something like that, right? Which is incredibly kind of remarkably naive and foolish thing to say, right? So I think that there is, you know, at times, you know, an appetite for pushing back, for protests, for talking back to the government. I mean, did see that in the white paper protests in terms of, you know, Hong Kong's, you know, distinct identity, you know, a lot of obvious, you know, the identity I think we'll live on in Hong Kong or is, but I think in terms of the place itself, when you look at, you know, obviously a lot of focus on 2047, but I think again, something that we've discussed a lot recently is like, is 2047, you know, but does that date fold as much meaning now as it did say 10 years ago? And my response would be probably no, because you see these large-scale infrastructure projects that are happening, this kind of physically changing Hong Kong to draw it closer, right? With the Northern Metropolis, with the Lantau Islands, you know, by the time we get to 2047, how much will have to change that next kind of, that year or how close will they already be, the two places already be by the time we reach that point, right? You know, is it still kind of this big date on the calendar? Yes, certainly, but I think that the overall kind of importance of it has been diminished a little bit because of, you know, what's happened with the national security law, what's gonna continue to happen with Article 23, with again, the physical integration of the two places. So, yeah, I'm a little less kind of, I guess, upbeat on that point, right? Next question from Saint-Holst Curie. Do you see Hong Kong becoming a separate identity like Taiwan in a short to medium term? Or is its population covered out now? I think they had that sense of identity very strongly, right? And I think that's what we saw manifested in 2019, but the reality is that obviously the legal framework around Taiwan and around Hong Kong is sort of totally different, right? At the end of the day, Hong Kong was always under Beijing's jurisdiction, right? Whereas Taiwan is in fact not. So, you know, I think that is sort of a fundamental thing that makes the two places a little bit hard to kind of directly compare in that way. But I think, you know, you do see Hong Kong is also trying to preserve that identity. One thing that we didn't kind of mention is a lot of activism around Cantonese, right? And the Cantonese language and sort of strengthening, you know, Cantonese as part of the Hong Kong identity, I mean, I think those efforts will still, you know, sort of continue kind of among people. But, you know, I think also if you look at immigration stats and you look at what's kind of happening currently in Hong Kong, you know, as it becomes sort of less, you know, I mean, the fact is a lot of businesses have moved away from Hong Kong, right? To Singapore primarily, but to other cities because, you know, if you're a tech company or if you're a company dealing with something sensitive, now you feel like you're not protected if you're in Hong Kong compared to being in the mainland. So you either be on the mainland or you de-risk from, you know, mainland China and Hong Kong, both, right? So there are a few experts coming in, that's a fact. And a lot of these talent schemes and talent visas are being reserved for people coming in from mainland China who, you know, in comparison, Hong Kong is still much freer and much more open than mainland China, right? I mean, that I think continues to be true to quite a large extent, especially if you're not involved in any way in sort of political, you know, sort of activism of political parties or political activities in Hong Kong. So I think that what's gonna happen is you see the blurring of Hong Kong identity more and more within the city itself, right? Because more and more immigration and it's borne out in the statistics is coming from the mainland, Hong Kong also has a declining birth rate. So they're gonna have to backfill, right? A lot of what they want their population sort of numbers to be, you know, from this mainland migration rate. And so I think that's gonna change also the look and feel of Hong Kong in the next few decades, next generation. Sorry about the phone. No worries. Next question is a bit of a rhetorical question, but let me put that to you anyway. Do people in Hong Kong want to be rich and lived in an ordinary and stable country? Or do they want to live in a poor, chaotic, democratic country? Is it a binary? Yeah, I mean, I think they wanna live in a place where they have a say in their own kind of leadership and their own future. You know, I mean, that's not speculation. I mean, we have plenty of data from years and years and years to back that up, right? Again, I think this goes back to probably one of the, you know, there's plenty of bad kind of tropes and cliches and misunderstandings about Hong Kong. The worst is probably one pushed by, for many years by Laos-Hukai, that the people of Hong Kong are not political, right? I mean, this is an absolute kind of falsehood. And I think that that goes back to this, that this is either war, right? And I think it also ignores the fact of the politics involved in the Hong Kong economy. You know, why did they have this yawning, massive wealth gap? Why is the, you know, the land crisis that's been simmering in Hong Kong for decades never been solved, right? Why have, you know, if that was really the only issue underpinning the protests as Beijing and pro-Beijing figures in Hong Kong said for so long, why not fix it? Because that would be mean taking on these, you know, vested interests and tycoons of pro-Beijing companies, right? So I think that it's kind of a total misnomer and total joke to try to cleave those two things off the economy and politics from each other and also to claim that you can have one and not have the other. Next question, again, somewhat impenetrable to the previous one, but from a different angle, another anonymous attendee, who is pushing the democratic agenda in Hong Kong? The Americans or the EU? Storos. No, I mean, come on, I think the people of Hong Kong were the ones pushing it, right? You know, this was, you know, the people of Hong Kong, there's no, you know, black hand or foreign forces behind that, you know, that not only is untrue, it robs Hong Kong people again of their agency, you know, and this is the same kind of narrative we see around Jimmy Lai, that he's some sort of, you know, puppet master, that he was the one who kind of commanded people to the street. This was a movement that was born out of the Hong Kong people's own mindsets, their own desires, their own wants, nobody else. And just to add to that, you know, I think we spent a lot of time in our book really documenting the early sort of protests and kind of the rise of the momentum around the anti-extradition bill. And particularly focused on the former Chief Executive Carrie Lam, her role, her responsibility, her personality, and indeed her missing of many, many off ramps at the start of the protest, right? Which kind of blocked us into this sort of escalation and kind of radicalization pattern that I referred to earlier. And I think, you know, we spent quite a lot of time documenting that within the book to show that so much of what happened in Hong Kong was truly a local response to a local issue. It wasn't even a push by Beijing at that point, right? I mean, the extradition bill as we documented in our book was Carrie Lam's idea and her initiative, right? And so I think, you know, what we saw was really a local political issue that kind of grew and grew and grew from then. Yeah. Next question's completely different. Have the ethnic minorities in Hong Kong participated in the democracy movement? Or is it mainly an ethnic Chinese movement who were more radicalized? Yeah. So I mean, I think, you know, one of the most kind of interesting, I think, things that I observed during the protest was, you know, Jimmy Sham, a pro-democracy activist, the leader of the Civil Human Rights Front, you know, was attacked. You know, he's left kind of bloodied on the street. You know, and at the time, there was a kind of a lot of rumors and speculation that South Asian people of South Asian descent were behind it or they were hired thugs or someone had put them up to it. And so in a protest that followed that, you saw like a real outreach, kind of a really fascinating thing happened where there was a real effort, I think, to kind of buy a lot of people from Hong Kong, to kind of learn a bit more about, you know, the South Asian population, about the people that were living in Hong Kong, many of them for a long time. You know, there was tours that people put together of Chunky Mansion, you know, where people went there, people who had lived in the area for a long time would never have been inside, right? They had, you know, these awful stereotypes about what kind of place it was. Who went and met people, who went and met ethnic minorities who walked around, who got to know people, right? And so I think those moments are to us, probably the most kind of memorable and interesting and say the most about kind of the Hong Kong movement, right? And they didn't get a kind of coverage, but if you were there, if you saw them happen, you know, on the streets, I think those were kind of one of the more kind of special and kind of really cool things that we saw take place. Yeah, and I think that really gets to the heart of like what it means to be a Hong Konger, right? And I think, you know, in 2019, 2020, you know, there really was a sense that people who were sort of standing on the side of, you know, democracy and fairness and, you know, all of the values that, you know, the movement championed, you were a Hong Konger, right? No matter what you look like or no matter who you are, as long as you love the place and you care about the place, you know, I think you were sort of a big part of the fold in that way, right? And I think that was, yeah. And then there are obviously many, many communities who call themselves Hong Kongers, right? And who have been there for generations too. Next question, somebody who's actually read your book clearly. Also anonymous. In your book, you wrote about Hong Kong government and the police knew about the Yuan Long attacks beforehand. Also, the book writes that a government political assistant participated at a banquet and gave the participants a specific dress code before the attacks happened. In my experience working in the media field in Hong Kong, it is difficult to get in touch with such sources. So my question is, as a foreign correspondent, how do you verify the information you gathered, especially when it is related to the government and local organizations and even the triad organizations? Yeah, so in this case, obviously, because we had a much longer lead time with the book, right? We had a lot of time to actually travel to our sources more to have conversations with them in person, to actually verify looking at their evidence, right? So looking at messages that they may have had, so on and so forth with the banquet, that was also public information. Actually, quite a lot of people posted about events around Yuan Long. I think not realizing that maybe people would look at their Facebook and eventually find that all out later on when something happened. And as is journalistic practice, we obviously reached out to all sources concerned before the publication of the book so that the government especially had the right to respond and we made sure that the book was also fact-checked externally and somebody could review all the evidence we presented. I mean, I think we kind of knew we wanted to write a book that was unimpeachable, right? Any factual inaccuracy, any error could really cast doubt on the whole thing. And when our sort of motivation or our goal is to kind of make sure that history and the truth is recorded and we're really going against, right? This kind of narrative control that's coming from the state, we really needed to make sure everything was very accurate. So we worked very hard to ensure that. And I think on the kind of Yuan Long attacks, right? I think really our biggest takeaway was that there were so many moments that somebody could have raised that or raised to the level of the government or the highest level of the police, for example, that there were very credible rumors that something was about to happen, rumors that had obviously reached the government itself. And so, I guess the next level of probing is like why wasn't it done, right? Why weren't the police better prepared? Why wasn't the government better prepared? Because it was clear that they were not prepared at all when it ended up unfolding the way it did. Next, I'm going to read out to you is half a comment, half a bit of a slightly rhetorical question in fairness to others that I think I need to read this one out to you too. It says, Wu Mao, the five centers have clearly invaded this conversation. On that note, how much have they swayed Western opinion on her own and smear the movement and us rioters? Would you like to respond to that? Yeah, so look, I mean, I think that unfortunately, that is happening. That's part of a bigger kind of wholesale movement that's taking place to kind of discredit and rewrite the history of the Hong Kong protests. We see it from the government, from organizations involved themselves. Remember, when we look back at statements from Kerry Lam's government around marches, she thanked people for how peaceful they were, for coming out, for voicing their opinions. People like the Hong Kong General Chamber of Commerce, generally seen as very probaging, backed an investigation into the police. All these things happen, right? These are facts, the statements are still out there. As much as they want us to forget or to erase them, those things took place, right? Only now do we see John Lee and Chris Tang change these black rioters to this independence movement. That was never the government's position before and it's just shifted over time. And unfortunately, that has sort of bolstered, I think, this narrative that has always been out there, floating around about violence and rioters. And I think just to take a step back and in the book that we put together, we're journalists, we're not advocates in a sense for Hong Kong in a way that we've been working for Human Rights Watch or something, there's certainly, we do certainly have pieces in the book where we are critical of times of the moment where things became very ugly, where things became very, very dangerous, where there was anti-mainland xenophobic sentiment. So I think we try to be even-handed here. It's the government, I think, and these people online and various voices that are recasting as this mass violent operation. But yeah, and just to add to the specific question about disinformation and so on, I do think it's been sort of effective within certain quarters, especially among sort of parts of the left in the United States and in kind of the broad, quote unquote, Western world, really have been very susceptible to narratives that paint not just Hong Kong, but Taiwan is sort of kind of like making the world less safe by like, causing this militarization or this militarized response of China, and because they're so close to the US or whatever, sort of essentially being the ones who are driving this kind of chaos and instability that we're experiencing geopolitically, right? Between the US and China. And I think there's so much more work in investigation that should be done on how this disinformation and how these narratives are kind of seeping, especially among certain political sectors in Western society, right? Because I think, yeah, I think it's a very, very important topic to kind of do more work on. In light of the time, I'll put the very last question that I can pick for you. Where do you see the future of Hong Kong now that the Chinese government is rewriting Hong Kong's history and removing its colonial past? Yeah, I think that's an interesting question. I think the government doesn't really want to remove its colonial past, right? They continue to use colonial laws to lock people up and they continue to use sedition. They continue to use the public ordinance offenses. They continue to have British police officers in their ranks. So I think this narrative about decolonization, we've heard it from some people about changing the university system, maybe changing the road names in Hong Kong. This strikes me as terribly superficial and not really getting obviously at the roots of what that research is really about. In terms of the future, I think this year will bring probably more national security focus in Hong Kong. We know that Article 23 is gonna be coming in. We know that there was huge protests in 2003, but will there be protests this time? I would very much say no. So I think that that's coming. I think that Article 23, because the national security law and sedition have been used, or the national security law has been used kind of in one way. I think that Article 23 might be kind of focused at the media and an online discourse. We know that the government has been upset with online platforms with Google, with YouTube, with the glory to Hong Kong or Fuffle. So I think we can see more controls of the internet. Yeah, I mean, I think that this year, and then of course, the Jimmy Lai trials ongoing, we're gonna have the verdict in the 47. So yeah, I think more focus on security above all else for Hong Kong. I mean, I think that John Lee and his other people have made that very clear. Well, thank you very much. And many warm congratulations on your fantastic book. And I hope people who have participated, who have not yet read your book would read it. And apart from thanking you for the webinar, let me apologize to those who have raised questions that I have not been able to find time to squeeze them into the speakers. But let me reassure you again that we will be saving those questions and putting them to the speakers after the event. So they will know what comments or questions you have put to them. With this I can push today's webinar. Thank you very much. And for next Monday, we will be back on to the regular 5 p.m. slot, physically at Sovast for our seminar. Thank you and goodbye. Thank you.