 Welcome and Aloha. My name is Mark Shklav. I am the host of ThinkTech Hawaii's Law Across the Sea program. Today we'll go across the sea to Hong Kong. My guest is Carol Peterson. Carol is a law professor at the William S. Richardson School of Law and the graduate chair at the Matsunaga Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution. She has a broad and deep personal and professional connection to Hong Kong. She lived and worked there from 1989 to 2006 at the University of Hong Kong as a law professor and also with many community-based groups including disability rights groups and women's rights groups. Hong Kong has been in the news quite recently. There's been large civilian protests that have brought parts of the city to a standstill. Chinese officials have sent a warning to the Hong Kong protesters that quote those who play with fire will perish by it end quote. I've asked Carol to share her knowledge and understanding of the current events in Hong Kong. My first question to Carol is very simple. The answer may not be. Carol, welcome. Thank you very much. Glad to be here. What is happening in Hong Kong? Well, what is happening in Hong Kong is that there have been unprecedented protests. And when I say that, I mean that Hong Kong has always been a city of peaceful protests. It's the only city in China where people do have the right to go out and peacefully protest against their government. But we have never seen the numbers that we are seeing this spring and summer. Two million people at one point in June were in the streets protesting against the local government's proposals to amend the extradition law in Hong Kong. And most recently this weekend, we had 1.7 million people in the streets. And we have had some incidents that have been violent, sadly. But for the most part, the protesters have been very disciplined, but very brave because this weekend, for example, it was an unauthorized march. The police refused to give a notice of no objection. And so every person who took to the streets was risking being arrested. But the police knew better than to try to arrest 1.7 million people. All right. I want to ask a couple of follow-up questions. But first, let's take a couple of look at some images of the protesters. A couple images and that is a lot of people. It's stunning, isn't it? Yeah. Yeah. And I can tell you, it's unbelievably hot in Hong Kong right now. And a lot of those people would have waited three, four hours before they could even start the march. They would have been told by the police, you have to stay in Victoria Park, which is a very big park, not nearly big enough to accommodate everyone. And so the civil human rights front said, we've got to start marching. Ask the police to close the streets. And you know, it's in everyone's interest for the safety of people to open the streets and let them march. And eventually they did. I've been in marches like that in Hong Kong in 2003. We had a march that maybe had 500 to 700,000 people. And I can tell you, it's a long, hot log. Let's take a look at the next photo. And while we're doing that, what was the extradition law? What was... So Hong Kong is a special autonomous region of China. It used to be a British colony. And one thing that a lot of people don't understand about Hong Kong is there's still a very strong immigration border between the two, between the mainland and Hong Kong. And there are entirely separate legal systems. There is no appeal from Hong Kong mainland China. The final court of appeal for Hong Kong is in Hong Kong. So if you are arrested and charged with a crime in Hong Kong, you know that you will be tried by an independent judiciary and you will have a right to fair trial because Hong Kong has very strong procedural protections. For the last 90 years, and that would include time as a Hong Kong special administrative region of China, but also time as a British colony, there has been never any extradition from Hong Kong mainland China. And this is because the Hong Kong government and the legislature knew that there is no right to fair trial in China. And this year, this spring, Kerry Lam, the appointed chief executive of Hong Kong, tried to introduce, tried to get the legislature to approve amendments to the extradition law, which would have allowed her government on a case by case basis to extradite people to jurisdictions with which there was no extradition agreement. So in other words, she would have bypassed the legislature. And the Hong Kong people said that's it. I mean, the Hong Kong people have been angry about a lot of things, but this crossed the line because this gave them a fear that fear that people who might be doing things that are in Hong Kong are completely legal, such as publishing a book that China doesn't like might suddenly be extradited for trial, a fear that the Chinese government might trump up charges against someone. And just a fear that this just the possibility of extradition would have such a chilling effect on critical speech in Hong Kong that Hong Kong would no longer be the free place that it is. So the people went to the streets, if Kerry Lam had been smart and had more political sense, she would have withdrawn the bill right away in June. But she didn't. She tried to insist that no, these are just rioters. These are terrible people. We're going to press on with the bill and the marches kept coming out and coming out. And eventually she was compelled to suspend the bill, but she has still not agreed to formally withdraw the bill, which is a huge mistake in her part. What would that mean? What's the difference between suspension and withdrawal of the bill? It's largely symbolic because we know that she's not going to try to reintroduce the bill now, but it is a refusal to admit that the Hong Kong people were right. It's just simply being stubborn. It's ego. It's partly ego. Is Beijing behind this? That's an interesting question because nobody knows for sure whether Beijing asked Kerry Lam to do this or whether it was the idea of her own government. The excuse she used was that there was a horrific crime committed in Taiwan and the person had taken refuge, the accused had taken refuge in Hong Kong and Hong Kong also has no extradition agreement with Taiwan. Now, the Hong Kong people would not mind if the Hong Kong Legislative Council wanted to draft a law that would allow extradition to Taiwan, because frankly, Taiwan has a very high quality legal system and does protect civil liberties now. But of course, it would be such a slap in the face of Beijing to say, Oh, we'll extradite people to Taiwan, but not to the mainland that she decided to do this omnibus, this sort of amendment that would allow her government to propose to extradite people to all sorts of jurisdictions where there is no agreement. Well, was this a was this to avoid a slap in the face or was this an intentional act? I honestly don't know. It might have been an intention. It might have been a convenient way. In other words, she may have been thinking, Well, this horrific crime in Taiwan and our inability to extradite the defendant gives me an excuse to open the way for extraditing people to the mainland. I don't know that. Slip it in because that's what we heard about a lot on the news. That may be the case, but we don't honestly know. It could also be that she just got very bad advice. Harry Lam herself is not an expert in international law or international human rights. So she's relying to some extent on her Secretary for Justice and other people in her Executive Council. And I think that she may not have gotten very good advice. I think that she may have really underestimated the the opposition to this. She should have realized though, when the bar association came out against the bill, the law society came out against the bill, so many organizations critiqued the bill, she should have realized that she was in fact playing with fire. And I think it's going to be the end of her political career eventually. But let's take a look at the third slide for for a minute or two. And wow, you know, again, another huge group of people protesting. I think this was quite, quite recent. Yes, I mean, there have been many protests. And some of them have been very large. Some have have been smaller. Some have been specialized. There have been, for example, there was one demonstration by teachers who wanted to show that they support the students because so many of the protesters are young people. We've had protests, we had one protest, very peaceful demonstration by medical professionals, saying they wanted to come out and critique the police because the police were overusing tear gas and other dangerous crowd control mechanisms. So there have been small protests and big protests from all walks of life. Okay, no, let's come back and focus a little bit on a couple questions I have. The extradition law, it sounds like it's not going to go through. It's not going to pursue it any further. I think that's correct. What else is happening? What else is going on here? Because it seems like this has been going on, I understand for 11 weeks or so with these huge groups of people. The extradition law, she's not going to pursue it. They don't I guess there's a lack of trust in Kerry Lam very much by the people. What else is going on? So there are five other demands now that the protesters have asked for and that's why I think Kerry Lam made such a huge mistake. If she had been smart, she would have come out after the first big protest and said, I'm sorry, I messed up. I didn't fully understand how sensitive this subject was. I'm withdrawing the bill. No, we have a photo of Kerry Lam. That's what she should have said. Instead, she was extremely defensive and accused, really referred to the peaceful protesters as rioters, which is very serious allegation because you can go to jail for a long time if you are rioting. And so she made people even more angry. And now there are five more demands. What are those? So one is to formally withdraw the bill, which she hasn't done. She's only suspended it. Two is to conduct an independent investigation. And that would mean say a retired judge or someone unconnected with the government, an independent investigation into violence by the police. And it could also include violence by some protesters. But people want to know because they believe that the police have used a festive force, right? Indiscriminate use of tear gas sometimes in neighborhoods where elderly people have been affected, shooting tear gas in even actually in an MTR subway station, which is very dangerous. So they want an independent investigation into the use of force because I will say this is new. The Hong Kong police have usually in previous years been pretty restrained. They want a general amnesty for all the protesters. They don't want anyone to go to jail or perhaps marching in an unauthorized march. They want Carrie Lam to resign. And they also want the government to reinitiate democratic reforms. That is part of what the Hong Kong people were promised in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, which was ratified in 1985. They were promised they would be able to maintain this high degree of autonomy, keep all the civil liberties they had as a British colony, and also develop local democracy. And that's what Occupy Central was about in 2014, because that promise had not been kept. So they want that reopened. And there are ways that they could do that gradually. For example, the legislature right now is only one half elected from geographic constituencies. The other half is elected from these very funky functional constituencies, which can be very elitist and are tailored in a way to give the government a pro-government majority. If they started to expand the number of legislators who are elected from true geographic constituencies, I think that would make the people feel better. If they started to reopen the issue of electing the chief executive through universal suffrage, I think that that would make people feel much better. So the problem right now is the protesters are very angry with the local government, very suspicious of Beijing. And so they're not going to go home until they see some concrete steps in the direction of giving the Hong Kong people what they were promised. Is there a leader of this group? I mean, we see masses of people. I mean, we see thousands of people out there. Is there one leader? Are there many leaders? Or how does it work? There really isn't. And I think that is both deliberate, but also problematic. The reason I think it's deliberate is people are nervous about being sent to jail, right? Or inciting some kind of unlawful assembly because there are people sitting in jail. Benny Tai, who initiated Occupy Central with Peace and Love, right? He is in jail. And so I think people are being very careful not to be associated as the leader of anything. In fact, it was suggested one day on social media that everyone should just go downtown with a sign that says, I'm here to have a picnic by myself, right? And you would just have thousands of people holding up that sign. I'm picnicking, really. In fact, what they're doing is having a sit-in. So part of it is people are nervous about being accused of being the leader. But the difficulty with that is then you wonder who do you negotiate with as well. And so there are, of course, some people who are playing somewhat of a leadership role. And there are also some people who are playing somewhat of a, they're trying to be mediators. Some of the pan-democrats we call them, some of the legislators have sometimes gone to the protest and trying to make sure that the protesters remain peaceful and tried to negotiate certain agreements with the police. And I think going forward, if we're going to have a resolution to this crisis, Harry Lam has to reach out to those people in the middle and try to initiate some kind of negotiation. And we're going to take a short break right now. And I want to ask, when we come back, are the protesters naive or is this realist? So we'll take a short break and come back and try to answer that question. Thank you very much. We'll be right back. Thanks to our ThinkTech underwriters and grand tours, the Atherton Family Foundation, Carol Mun Lee and the Friends of ThinkTech, the Center for Microbial Oceanography Research and Education, Collateral Analytics, The Cook Foundation, Dwayne Kurisu, the Hawaii Community Foundation, the Hawaii Council of Associations of Apartment Owners, Hawaii Energy, the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, Hawaiian Electric Company, Integrated Security Technologies, Galen Ho of BAE Systems, Kamehameha Schools, MW Group, the Shidler Family Foundation, the Sydney Stern Memorial Trust, Volo Foundation, Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Welcome back. I'm Mark Schwab with Carol Peterson and we are talking about Hong Kong and is Hong Kong playing with fire, Carol? And are the protesters, and let's take one more look at another slide of protesters while we're talking about it, are these folks out on the street with all this police, are they realistic about these demands? I mean or are they naive? I mean they're out there or are they just saying we don't have anything to lose? I think it's the latter. The protesters, I think for the most part, realize that they're playing with fire. They know that there are troops assembled right across the border, right, mainland Chinese troops. There are also PLA, the Liberation Army, stationed in Hong Kong, but so far they've never come out of their barracks, right? They've never gotten involved in crowd control. So people know there is a risk, but I think they also feel that China has begun to encroach on the high degree of economy in so many ways and have breached the Sino-British Joint Declaration in so many ways that if they don't stand up now for their freedoms it'll be too late in five years. And part of it is that promise of high degree autonomy was made initially for 50 years until 2047. We're getting close to the halfway and I think people are beginning to feel and some have completely given up hope and just started to try to emigrate. But people are beginning to feel that 2047, even before 2047, we will be fully integrated with China. We will no longer have an independent judiciary. We will no longer have freedom of religion. We will no longer have the freedom to go out and protest. So they're saying we have to do it now even though maybe it's over. And I have to say they've already achieved more than I thought they could because in early June when people were talking about this I remember thinking to myself, you know, I wish I could be there to join them. I don't think they're going to be able to stop this bill. And then they did. They stopped the bill. And I remember feeling the same way in 2003 when the national security legislation was pending. I went to the march and I participated with my son and my husband. But we didn't really expect it to be as big as it was. We thought maybe there'll be a hundred thousand people and suddenly there's more than a half a million. And suddenly Tung Shi Wa, the chief executive, was coming out and saying apologizing and giving in really to the protesters' demands. So sometimes you have to be a bit naive, right, in order to take that risk. Whether it will come out well for the Hong Kong people in the end or just speed up China's efforts to wash Hong Kong's economy, I really cannot predict. I don't know. And, you know, it is Hong, it is Beijing. But how is Beijing reacting? Are they worried about this with respect to all of China? I mean if if Hong Kong is successful, oh, maybe Shanghai will be next. And as Carrie Lam worried about Beijing herself for her personal safety and her reaction. I don't know if she's worried about a personal safety, but it's possible that they're putting quite a bit of pressure on her. For all we know she would like to resign. For a few weeks there she barely showed her face. Some people said they thought she was having a breakdown. I honestly don't know. But it's possible that she would like to resign, but there's no one who's willing to take her place and so Beijing may have said you can't resign. I really don't know. But what I can say is that the Chinese Communist Party has always been nervous about Hong Kong's civil liberties. They desperately wanted to get Hong Kong back. That's why they wouldn't renew the lease on the new territories. They insisted on taking Hong Kong back. They made a lot of concessions in the Sino-British Joint Declaration to get Hong Kong back. I mean that's why they promise this high degree of time. Civil liberty type stuff. Civil liberties. Hong Kong still has its own currency. I mean it has to some extent its own international legal personality. It joined the WTO on its own, right? So Beijing made a lot of concessions to get Hong Kong back. That's because it's part of their national goal to regain territory. They also had to worry though, and that's why they haven't wanted local democracy to develop, that other parts of China might well say well if Hong Kong can have that why can't we? Right. And so I think Beijing is very nervous about Hong Kong and they probably want to take a hard line, but they're also nervous about what it could do for their reputation internationally. Tell me why is that stopping them? I mean why should they not just go in with troops? Well one reason is Taiwan because Beijing originally proposed the one country two systems model of autonomy for Taiwan. Long before the British even started to negotiate the Sino-British Joint Declaration. So far Taiwan has always said we would never go back under one country two systems. However for many years people thought that Taiwan was sort of an insurance policy for Hong Kong in the sense that Beijing wouldn't want to be seen as overtly violating the treaty because then if they propose once again that Taiwan come back under one country two systems why would the international community support that? I'm actually working on an article now where I'm arguing that it would be immoral for any government or the United Nations to support Beijing's request to regain Taiwan because they've already shown that they won't keep their promises. So you see there is sort of a strategy there. Beijing has to be a little bit careful. Beijing also has to think about the capital. In June and July there were many reports of foreign capital leaving Hong Kong and businesses moving their assets to Singapore and other places partly because of this proposal of the extradition bill but also because of the unrest. So even though Hong Kong economically is not as important to China as it used to be because now Shanghai and so many other capitals have so many other cities have developed but still they don't want to be seen as destroying Hong Kong. It would be very bad for their international image. In the last slide of the airport it seems to me that the protesters are strategically going after economic forces and that's putting pressure also I guess. Is that part of the strategy? The strategy of the airport had mixed results. I mean that's on one hand I think it led to the cancellation of 50,000. Wow. You know I mean it was just so many passengers were affected by this. 50,000 passengers I heard were affected because they either couldn't get into Hong Kong or couldn't get out. There was also some violence where a man from the mainland who the protesters suspected was an undercover agent but he said he was just a mainland journalist was was grabbed physically and detained and the protesters have apologized for this but it definitely tarnished their image and I think that's one reason they've been so careful in the last few days who only engage in peaceful demonstrations. Now on the other hand though strategies like that do get international attention and they also get the attention of the business community which is quite powerful in Hong Kong and it is possible that the Hong Kong business community may also be in a position maybe to be a bit of a mediator to say to Kerry Lam's government and to Beijing look we need to come up with some sort of compromise otherwise the economy is going to be really hurt. All right what is a compromise? Where do you mean what are the potentials realistically are are is there a way to go forward? Well I think so what I've been arguing in my articles is that what Hong Kong was promised in the Sino-British Joint Declaration was a form of internal self-determination not independence but local democracy and the civil liberties that they enjoyed as a British colony and if Beijing would really keep those promises I don't think you would have an independence movement in Hong Kong and I think things would calm down now of course Beijing is not going to make that transition immediately but even if they would start to make progress in that direction again then I think there would be room for compromise. Very difficult though especially under Xi Jinping because if anything China itself has gone backwards in terms of human rights under Xi Jinping and so it's very hard to imagine that Xi Jinping would allow this sort of compromise to happen but maybe now that he can see as many as 2 million people are willing to go to the streets again and again maybe he will decide that it's worthwhile to explore possible I honestly don't know in the meantime I know that a lot of people are now applying to emigrate Taiwan which is kind of like going from the frying pan to the fire because Taiwan could be next. Ultimately yes potentially so some people are leaving Hong Kong there was a lot of that going on in the transition period between 1985 and 1997 and it is certainly resumed in the last few years so we'll see. Is the United States or the United Kingdom either one doing anything with regards to the United Kingdom the British government every six months they have a special parliamentary report on one country to system they are monitoring it there's also an organization that in London called Hong Kong Watch which is a non-governmental organization so they're trying to do something but it's difficult because they're so absorbed now with Brexit that and their position is greatly weakened. The United States it's been a little back and forth I mean the first comments by Donald Trump were not very encouraging because he essentially said oh Hong Kong is for Beijing to deal with and we're a little surprised by that the more recent comments coming from the US administration have I think been more encouraging in the sense that he actually said very important that we not have another TMN square and indicated that he would be less likely to negotiate some kind of trade deal if there was violence against protesters in Hong Kong. On the other hand with Donald Trump you never know he might well trade Hong Kong away for some good trade deal. We have a minute left where do you see this going where do you with your experience and background in Hong Kong see the future where are we going? I think we're on uncharted ground we're on new ground here when we had the big protests in 2003 people got what they want and they went home. 2014 demonstrated that it's much harder to get democratic reforms than it is to stop a bill right so now we've got two wrapped up in one they have managed to stop the bill but now they're insisting on broader more systemic reform. I think we will not know what's going to happen until schools open again because some students are saying they're not going to go back and that's going to be a very interesting turning point. My hope is that Kerry Lam will be wise enough to start meeting directly with the protesters representatives at least and also that she might consider bringing the legislative council into it rather than waiting until they finish their summer recess ask the legislative council to come back now because at least they are partly elected and I think if she were to say I'll turn the decision on the bill over to the legislature and I know they would not resume it and I'll turn democratic reform in an independent investigation to the legislature I think that might be a step in the right direction. Carol I want to invite you back when we know more and because I can see the future is I would be very happy to come back thank you very much thank you very much Carol Peterson I guess we'll have to wait and see if we can put the fire out in Hong Kong or if it is on fire thank you very much thank you Aloha