 And welcome back to Think Tech. Welcome back to Global Connections. We are honored to have today a Michael Curtis Davis. And he can talk about his new book, Freedom Undone. Wow, thank you for joining us today, Michael. All right, that's my pleasure. I'm always glad when I'm back in Hawaii. And we are too, but we're always troubled by your lens toward Hong Kong. So let's talk about the current status of Hong Kong so we can frame up the book. Oh, you know, the new security law has been draconian. A lot of people, including very important prestigious people in the society, the open society that used to be in Hong Kong have been jailed or rooted out, routed out of Hong Kong. And now we have a shell of its former self, right? What's it like there now? Well, it's basically Freedom Undone, that's the title. I think what they're going after, they're trying, it's an interesting project in that Hong Kong is an example of what has now become common in the world where authoritarian regimes promote an illiberal agenda where they can pretend they're still following all the laws and stuff and they claim to have the rule of law, but they undermine and hollow out those liberal institutions that provide the safeguards and accountability. That's Hong Kong today. So people are arrested. Most of my friends in Hong Kong are in jail or they fled in an exile. And that's kind of the new norm. You don't speak up. I have one academic friend who's trying to navigate a very thin line hoping that that academic, I don't wanna say anything about the person, can publish in English overseas and not suffer any response. So that's very cautious academic community in the city now, which is very important because in Hong Kong, like in many Asian societies, university faculty often have a very prominent role in public debates. They're consulted by the media all the time. I have been myself for many, many years and they helped to shape the public debate. So when the academic community has gone silent out of fear, then a lot of the kinds of issues that could be brought up. So accountability by legal institutions is one side, but the lack of accountability by the public is another achieved by silencing the press and arresting some prominent people in the press. And by creating an election model called patriotic elections, excuse me. There's also patriotic education. And euphemisms galore. Now you're an academic. You were at Hong Kong University for many years. You've taught many students there and you're still an academic with Jindal Global University or you appear there as a fellow and also in Woodrow Wilson Center, you appear there as a fellow. So the lens through which you look at Hong Kong is what an academic lens described to us how that lens works in writing your book. Well, what I try to do in this book is I don't want to just sell the book in the academic market, the university libraries and so on, because I'm writing on an urgent issue that the world needs to understand. It has implications for Hong Kong people, many of them in exile, because those are the ones that are going to be allowed to read it, but it has implications for the rest of us because this illiberal trend is finding its voice in all sorts of ways, either imposed by dictatorial leaders or promoted by authoritarian regimes like China and Russia. So I kind of write the book from the lens that this is a model that China, its vision of how to run what looks like an open society, but is not. So that's one part of it. The other part of it is that I live there and I taught students, they're in the government, they're in the opposition, they're in jail, they're all over Hong Kong. By now I guess thousands of them and I live in the society. And so I wanted to tell this story so that ordinary readers could read this book and not just the academic consumers. And I bring in some of my own personal story. I don't load it up with that, but where I had a front row seat on something I'm discussing and I literally discussed what happened from 1997 forward in the lens of this sort of constitutional illiberalism. And when I'm on a front row seat, like I was one of the founders, the organizers of the article 23 concern group that led protest in 2003, excuse me. So these kinds of things, I bring that part in because I want the book to be readable by people across society and not just an academic tone. So hopefully I succeed. I chose this particular publisher for that reason. They call it shorts, although my book is nearly 300 pages, but their aim is to reach outside the academy and I choose them for that reason. I'm not building a resume anymore. I want to reach a wider readership. Well, something you mentioned really, really touches me and that is this is a kind of examination into what China has done in Hong Kong as a scary learning experience, if you will, for us to look at other autocracies around the world and see the comparisons. And it is very scary what happened. I was telling you about this YouTube video I caught done by the economist, which has actually millions of views. And it told me that things I didn't know. For example, not too long after the takeover, China started to infiltrate the individuals, the leaders and the institutions in Hong Kong in order to ramp up to a time when it would take over earlier than what 2047. And this is a very scary story and you mentioned you covered that in the book. And I think that is a lesson we all need to know about. It's those euphemistic names, the lies, the exaggerations and the compromises and corruptions of democratic leaders all with a view toward spreading the autocracy into a given target state like Hong Kong. Can you talk about that? Yeah, I mean, we call what actually the Chinese way of approaching things in general falls under, especially overseas, something called United Front. And the United Front tries to develop friends and identify those and target enemies. And if someone is sort of in the middle somewhere trying to be moderate, they may be approached and try and be cultivated and somehow rewarded. And I think that a lot of that was done with the business community in Hong Kong. Instinctively, businessmen should be against communism because it doesn't treat them very well. But China sort of created in Hong Kong, and generally in China itself, of course, China is no longer a communist state. It has a communist party ruling it, but it's very much committed to lots of market strategies. And so it uses these strategies and it rewards those, it favors. The problem with it is this becomes a kind of form of corruption because it means that if you go along to get along, then you win. You get contracts, you get appointments. So a lot of Hong Kongers would be appointed. This started way before the handover, by the way. Way back in the late 80s and into the 90s, China was cultivating, especially the business community in Hong Kong. And then there were parties set up. There was a DAB party, which was a pro-Beijing party, a kind of more grassroots, leftist orientation, pro-communist. And then there were the business elites. One of the most prominent parties, there was the Liberal Party. And there was never full elections. So all you're voting for is maybe half of the legislative council and the district council. The chief executive, they didn't deliver the promised universal suffrage for choosing the chief executive, but tried to deliver a model in claiming they were upholding their promise, which isn't a basic law of universal suffrage. A model where they would choose the candidates and then everybody could vote on their candidates. And so it was interesting when more recently they imposed this new electoral model even for the legislature, which basically are patriots-only election, which was imposed in 2021. Some of the candidates that were running didn't have an opposition. So Beijing reportedly trying to encourage them to find somebody to oppose them. So this kind of version of elections, even for now, only 20% of the legislature is directly elected, used to be 50%. And now most of the seats are filled by people appointed by Beijing in one form or another. So this is what they do. You recruit and then you appoint, if it's a business, you give business advantages and so on. And it's not the old style corruption that Hong Kong used to have way back when, where people pay petty bribes, it's a kind of corrupting of the whole system. And then you control all outcomes. And so anything that would threaten those outcomes is a problem. That's why I pointed out that the basic law had two basic laws, even before all this crackdown occurred. One was that Beijing had the ultimate power of interpretation. And the other was that Beijing was dragging its feet on delivering the promised universal suffrage. And this examination is so important. You know, the euphemisms, this kind of internal corruption. And you know what? It reminds me of what Vladimir Putin is doing in the Balkans and all of Eastern Europe, West of Ukraine. And he's trying to corrupt from the inside. And you know, it works because people buy into it. It's very clever. And so your book becomes totally relevant in examining this whole process of the autocrat and reaching out to take over neighboring countries without firing a shot. And that's what we have here. And I remember just a short story, Michael, I remember being in Hong Kong at a function where there were a lot of people who were the leaders of the city. This would be way before the umbrella movement. And I said, what do you think of the Chinese? Some business guys sitting next to me, you know, are they troubling you when they come in? And he says, no, no, no, no, no, we're very friendly with them. They make it easy for us. And I take it now looking back down the road that he and his organization had been corrupted already. And they didn't sweat the umbrella movement because they were in China's pocket already. So step by step, you take over all of the elements of that free society and make it unfree. Right. And it's interesting because the first generations of these businessmen were Hong Kong elites who were given sweetheart deals. And what's happening now, though, because Beijing has a lot of, you know, face to say, in keeping Hong Kong's economy going is more and more mainland business elites are now in Hong Kong. And they've even formed a political party. And so what will happen is that this older generation will no longer be useful. These guys like the guy you were probably talking to will no longer be useful. They won't be needed anymore. They were needed when Hong Kong was one of the freest societies in the world. But now where Beijing controls the shots and controls what business elites do in Hong Kong because it has its own new generation of them, then those other guys either have to find ways to move their investment somewhere else and leave town or at least hedge their bets in some ways if they want to continue to enjoy the large S. What I don't understand, Michael, is why China, the management of China, the leadership of China is like this. Why are they so relentlessly aggressive? Why are they building military facilities and stuff China's seeing? Why are they trying to corrupt Hong Kong and so many other places? Why do they have a police station in Brooklyn? Remember that story? Why are they so aggressive? Why is it sort of manifest destiny? Kind of saying, what makes them do this? Why don't they just relax a little bit? Well, I think what you're seeing, and this I emphasize a lot in the book, that China, the Communist Party, not China as per se, but the Communist Party of China views continuance of Communist Party rule as imperative that this has to be maintained, but it's tricky because when you have a society with more and more free market strategies to compete in the world, which China has had over the last year since Deng Xiaoping, then it's tricky to keep the Communist Party in power because academics will tell us, political economists will tell us that eventually the free market ideas cause a kind of mass movement that pushes aside authoritarian leaders. So how do you do that? Well, the Communist Party leaders view liberal ideas as an existential threat. And I go into this, that's at the heart of the book. They view that as an existential threat. And so they have to suppress it wherever it arises. These are the inclinations that would overthrow a Communist Party would say, we no longer need these kind of leaders, we want more open society, which is natural sort of human thing to do. So you nip these things off at the butt. And that's kind of what's happening. Now Hong Kong in this analysis, Hong Kong became a major threat because it was literally the home of liberal ideas and institutions, even though it wasn't fully democratic, the combination of the guarantees of autonomy and which was very limited, but nonetheless there and the history of the rule of law in Hong Kong meant that it was very much a liberal constitutional order. It is not any longer. Well, I suggest to you that to the extent that it was a major threat to Beijing. And despite the fact that they've done a lot to squash that, the memory of it, the narrative of it, the story of it is still a major threat. And for example, other countries are scared or intimidated and they connect up what happened in Hong Kong with what might happen with them, that kind of infiltration, that kind of corruption. And I think the Philippines may be a good example of that. We have a correspondent in the Philippines who works in and with the Marcos government now. And they are very concerned with what China is doing in the Philippines. Your thoughts? Yeah, well, I think at the end of the day, this is precisely what Beijing wants to nip in the bud in terms of this man's concern and the expression of it on the one hand and on the other, Beijing wants to promote globally. It has a national security concept that it first applied nationally and more recently articulated globally that basically it wants to teach its friends and people that it can reward and gain friendship with. It wants to teach them how to do what Beijing does, the do Beijing style where the leaders can nip off any kinds of political threats. So the Philippines is sort of a classic case of long years of autocratic rule, then some democracy but not economic success that it would like and the democracy not achieving its goals as much as it would like. And then you get to Tarte tilting the thing back both towards more authoritarian rule and towards China. And now we have Marcos, which is still a work in progress. It seems to be at least different than his father and we don't know which direction he'll go but he seems to be shifting away from that tilt towards Beijing. And so then Beijing is feeling threatened because it's been trying to claim all of the South China Sea. And the tribunal that heard this matter ruled in favor of the Philippines. So now the Philippines I think wants to sort of step up its game and have a more vigorous defense of its territorial seas. And China has got the opposite view. And so part of China's global strategy is to expand its influence in the region and access to the wider oceans nearby. And at the same time exercise influence globally through its vision of how to govern. And in that context, I think Hong Kong becomes a kind of prototype of Beijing's vision. So if it can make this work satisfactorily in Hong Kong then it can sell it. If I were a Filipino reading your book I would be very concerned because there are elements that are very similar to what China has done in Hong Kong. The infiltration among leaders and institutions to corrupt them and to bring them into the Chinese web so to speak, that's happening in the Philippines too. Maybe not to the same extent that it happened in Hong Kong but if I were a Filipino reading your book I would have great concern and I would see your book as a primer on how this works and what to do about it. Right, that's exactly the spirit in which I tried to write the book. I spent over 30 years there in Hong Kong watching this stuff unfold day by day and having the privilege because of what I teach as constitutionalism and human rights to participate in those debates when Hong Kong was an open society. And so I want to share that experience in the book both on a personal level and in terms of what issues are at stake and what to watch. And clearly Beijing likes to promote this illiberal model and so this has become a global battle which I hadn't anticipated when I started down this path but it's become a much bigger matter than it was when Hong Kong had some level of autonomy and was carrying on doing business and mostly staying out of global politics. Now it's very much a sort of poster child of one kind of concern in the widening global debate between liberal and illiberal government. Which shows no sign of stopping, no sign of slowing down. You hardly know where China will stop and hold it with health road and all that. I mean, it seeks markets and areas of influence far beyond China, far beyond Asia. So let me ask you the important question of the week and that is Taiwan. Taiwan had an election a few days ago and a liberal Democrat one, Li Qingtei and he's willing to talk to China although they've been criticizing him a lot and they're not necessarily willing to talk to him but he's in favor of democracy and he's very articulate about it. And so the question is how do the people of Taiwan feel about the problems in your book, the problems with China in Hong Kong? How did that affect this election? How did it affect previous elections? How will it affect future elections in Taiwan? They would love that they, the Chinese would love to take over Taiwan. I imagine they have a big plan to do that without firing a shot by the way, same thing but clearly how far have they gotten, how far will they get? Well, this is the huge, it's like the front line now Hong Kong was now this is it on Beijing's sort of agenda to capture and hold all the territory that it's trying to claim and Taiwan of course is at the top of the list. Locally, I've just spent the last two weeks there. Locally, the people I talked to I think in a way they try to not even think about Beijing's agenda. A lot of the election debate was just about economic issues and lifestyle issues that people face but sort of lurking behind it and certainly to the advantage of the election as a winner was this idea that there is a China threat and they're very much aware across the society of what happened in Hong Kong. We were told by people who study this more carefully that the last election with the we're saying one, one hurt election was especially helped by the ongoing crisis in Hong Kong at the time. And this election, I think Hong Kong was mentioned last but people don't forget. They know what kind of model Beijing is promoting and they don't want it. They're sort of hoping between people supporting the KMT or the DPP, they're hoping just to maintain the status quo that they don't think they can take a move in either direction safely. So that's kind of what they're, I think the majority view is and that caused a kind of split not down the middle but close to it between the two parties. The third party got some of the votes, 26% I think on president. So that's where it's at. And I think it's as, I've been dealing with Taiwan. I wrote an article about Taiwan so many years ago called the concept of statehood and the status of Taiwan. And ever since then it's these basic issues have stayed more or less the same. There's not a lot of shift on that. And the two parties just offer different visions of how to get along with Beijing and the people have to interpret this in terms of threat. If I lived in Taiwan I'd be concerned about the lack of countries with which Taiwan had diplomatic relations. And what I understand is in the run up to this election a few days ago, China was doing a lot of criticism of Li Qingtei and everything he stood for, public criticism and all this press. And furthermore, they managed to make a deal with Nauru which was one of the dozen countries that had diplomatic relations with Taiwan to wean them away from Taiwan. And the latest news is that they promised to pay Nauru enormous sums of money if it would cut diplomatic ties. So you have this operating a number of fronts. They don't have to do that for Hong Kong. They already have Hong Kong. But in Taiwan they're doing not only the threat of kinetic war, not only this infiltration but also the disruption of Taiwan's relations with other countries. Yeah, in the book I like to emphasize a lot of the book talks about just how systematic they are. It's almost genius, the way they cultivate people and the way they manipulate and channel and impose ideas and laws and so on. It's not just a kind of shoot from the hip stuff. They didn't need to send the PLA into Hong Kong. They send something more dramatic. And so this is kind of the vision. Now Nauru is an interesting case that you know, it's only a small island with a few thousand people. Actually as a young lawyer in Hawaii, one of the first cases I handled involved Nauru where one of the leaders was the suing a newspaper who accused him of separatist movements. So this is the way back. And so I know very much about Nauru and it's, you know, it sells mostly iguana. That's kind of the thing that it markets. So Beijing, you know, will go get any ally it can. It's not a big player, but it's just basically cutting down the score that Taiwan has in terms of I think now down to 12 countries, very small ones that have relations with Taiwan in a formal way and not with Beijing. Where does it go from here, Michael? I mean, I think your book is not only important in terms of giving us a handle on what China has been doing, what it is doing vis-à-vis Hong Kong, but also a look forward. What will it do? Will it continue these same machinations? Will it continue these same corruptions, threats, what have you, attempts to shift the leadership, so to speak, both in political and commercial terms? Will that stay the same? Will that playbook continue? Or will we see some other clever tricks to undo any democratic notions in Hong Kong? I think they'll stick more or less with this formula because it's well-tried and tested. As long as the Communist Party is ruling with this cast of leaders, then their imperative, as I mentioned earlier, is to keep the party in power. And their biggest threat is our liberal ideas and values being promoted by activists around the world. And so I think that that is just part of their agenda. They will temper it sometimes when they're suffering, their economy's suffering now. So they reached out to the U.S. and they're trying to not upset the apple cart on trade with the U.S. and Europe, which they depend a lot on. So that's kind of where they're at in this kind of balancing act. But I think these strategies are well-tested and used at home, and that's more or less what they promote abroad. What I think is more interesting today that's happened is in the old days, it was just about at home. The biggest national security threat for Beijing for most of its existence under Communist leadership was its own people. And this idea that if they acquired liberal values like 1989 threatened to express that this was doomed for the Communist Party, the rule. I think what's happening now is they're expanding this idea. They describe their own self as having a whole process, people's democracy. So they think they're promoting democracy wherever they go, and they've gone global. They've come up with national security concepts for national level, for Hong Kong, and for global application. So this is kind of expansion, not a contraction of all of this. Only, and you could see impossibly in sight is if another sort of dumb shout being like figure came along that questioned it that if Xi Jinping's policies fail in some dramatic way and he starts getting pushed back at home, then we can only guess what could happen. Well, they used to say as General Motors goes, so goes the country. And I hesitate to say that as the China experiment in squashing Hong Kong goes, so goes autocracy around the world. To the extent that they have succeeded and that they will continue to succeed and that their branding of Hong Kong will continue, that sends a message. It sends a message to Vladimir Putin, to the guy in Hungary, to Erdogan in Turkey, and other autocrats and would-be autocrats will take heart by the fact that, yes, you can pretend to be a people's democracy and you can squash your neighbors into submission and it works and it stays and nobody can escape you. This is a very important message to some people and I'm worried that they are enhancing the possibility of autocracy in a number of places by what happened in Hong Kong. Yeah, I would add that they also enhance it not just in a number of places, but in our own country and Western Europe and elsewhere, where now in all of these polities, in the UK it's quite, you know, the Bricson and all of that was part of this, is certain illiberal trends. In Israel, we see them trying to disempower the courts, we see that in certain countries in the European Union, we see in the United States, a kind of a lot of illiberal ideas being promoted by political leaders, various factions in the Congress and so on, where the genuine open democracy is viewed as a threat to their position and they're happy to try to limit voters access and so on. So the illiberal trend, you know, Beijing's version of it is part of it, and but it is a much wider application that we need to keep an eye on. Yeah, you say illiberal trend, I mean, I think what is inherent in that is a new brand of quote democracy as a euphemism. You know, a lot of people who are actually very illiberal call themselves purveyors of democracy, but in fact, China says that its system is better than American democracy. Right, and we are deteriorating, we are declining while they are ascending and so that message is all around the world. We used to try to sell democracy. Now they're selling their brand of democracy, even though it is nowhere close to democracy. Right, we see what's happening in the US Congress, where it's virtually incapable of making policy decisions anymore. We see elections where leaders are more about self-promoting than a policy formulas. And so all of this polarization that we're seeing, it's a difficult thing to cure, but it's all sort of in this same trend, and it's the same kind of threat to democracy ultimately, because what I describe in Hong Kong is once these liberal guarantees are taken away, freedoms go out the door. The people's power, accountability of the leaders to the people goes out the door. The book goes through this in greatly, not just that it's a kind of philosophical debate, but it's a very practical debate. And I try to present it in that way. Well, Hong Kong is a laboratory for the whole world. Hong Kong is a lesson and experience that we all have to know about. In my view, the book goes way beyond Hong Kong and it touches subjects we ought to be concerned about everywhere, every moment. You wanna make any final remarks here, Michael? Well, I think we've covered it pretty well. So my idea in doing that was exactly what you just said, is to highlight this thing that happened. I had a chance to see it up close and unfolding for many years. And I felt at this stage in my academic life that this was something I should try to bring out because maybe a few people have had the same opportunity to address it in this way. So I hope it's useful for people. And I'm gonna be making tours. I'm going to London in a couple of weeks to do book tour there. And it just came from Taiwan. It's not anti-China. It's raising concern about what's happening. I think it's ought to be a concern for Chinese people as well. And so that's the spirit of it. Obviously, I spent my whole life in and around China. I have great love for the Chinese people. And I want to share my observations in that light. Thank you. It's a contribution to the global community. Where's the book available, Michael? It's good now. You guys are the pre-talks and the pre-launch is supposed to be formally launched on February 7th. And it's supposed to go up on Columbia University Press website real soon. I'm asking them to let me know as soon as it does. They've even made a video promoting the book already, which I'll make available on social media. And this is kind of, when I'm in England, I've been told there will be copies of the book. So I start there on February 12th. There will be copies of the book available to them on display. So very soon. Okay, don't forget. We want to discuss your next book with you also. And Columbia University Press. Get to the question of how to order it. Just Google Freedom Undone. I don't think anyone else has had this title before. Google that. And if it doesn't show up this week, it should next or soon right after. Michael Curtis Davis of Jindal Global University and Woodrow Wilson Center. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you. Aloha.