 Connecting globally. This is think tech global connections. We have Michael Davis on the line from India and we are happy to talk to him both about India and also about Hong Kong, which is his specialty in Washington where he serves as a member of the what is it Woodrow Wilson Institute. I get that right. I wonder Wilson International Center. I'm a fellow there. And I'm actually a senior scholar at Columbia University as well, senior research scholar. And you spent a lot of time in Hawaii, but also a lot more time, at least in your career life in Hong Kong. And we've talked many times about what has been going on in Hong Kong. And it's so interesting. This is the principal purpose of our show. It's so interesting to see that Hong Kong has gone from one crisis to another. And the second crisis completely swamps the first one. It is indeed. It's something that we've been trying to decipher and make sense of it. Yeah, well, let's talk about India first though, Michael, what are you doing there? Where are you? And what are you finding? And let me ask also about Trump's visit while I'm asking. Yeah, well, I'm here because we build a university here. I think you and I've talked about this before called Jindal Global University. And I'm one of the founding board members and so on and been involved with it. It's 10 years old now. And I try to come once a year. This time I'm here for two months. I teach a course on international human rights. Now, India has been facing a lot of its own challenges in that regard. There's Modi, the current government of the BJP has put through a bill that tries to favor Hindus actually. And the bill is called the Citizenship Amendment Act. And what it tries to do is say that people who come from adjoining states fleeing some kind of repression, they can acquire citizenship in India, unless they're Muslims. And this is kind of deeply rooted in a story that's longer than we can talk about today. But in the state of Assam, when Bangladesh transformed in the 70s, the losers in a war that created the country of Bangladesh had fled into the state of Assam. And they lived there for many years without any proper documents. And the local Hindus were not too happy about their presence. They were Muslims. And so they were trying for years to find ways to push them out and deny them citizenship. And now with the BJP, a very Hindu-oriented party in power, they're trying to do just that. And they're trying to do it nationwide, and many other policies they advanced. And some of the critics accused them of trying to be like Israel to create a Hindu state in India. And because the very foundations of the Indian Constitution speak of equality of peoples in a secular state, it not only disturbs a lot of Muslims, of course, who are the targets of this, but also many of the majority, the Hindus, who value India's status as a secular state, are up in arms. And there have been massive protests in the state of Kerala, where I'll go to later today, the protests, they even formed a human chain across the entire state. So it is very a disturbed situation. In the middle of all this, along came Donald Trump about a week ago. And Modi, of course, wanted Donald Trump to be happy, I guess, to have his ego fed. So he arranged a big cricket stadium full of people, about 100,000 people, to receive Trump. This was some kind of a copy of the way Trump had taken Modi to Texas to a demonstration. So these guys are in a sort of neutral, back slapping society, trying to advance each other's egos, and they have some somewhat similar personalities that they're populist, and they play to the sort of religious right in their own countries. It doesn't sound all that good to me, but I wanted to tell you about our regular correspondent in Varanasi, he's a student there, and I asked him a couple of times, what do you think about Trump? And he said, my surprise, he said he likes Trump because Trump is powerful, strong, he's strong, that's the word. And so what I get here is, here's India, a democracy. It's been a democracy for a long time. In populations, the world's largest, quote, democracy end quote. And yet now we have a divisiveness going on among the religions. I wasn't aware that there was such a divisiveness to this extent before, where the government gets involved and tries to separate people, whether a protest and actually what 10 or more people were killed already at these protests. This is not the sound of a democracy as we would wish it to be. What is happening? Which direction is India going? Well, you know, it's a kind of politics of division. You know, it's one thing that teaches human rights here in India. I find the parallels with the United States are always stunning. And so in some ways what Modi is doing here in India has a similar kind of characteristic to Trump's wall and all this stuff about immigrants and so on. So the ideas that even fight over the constitution roots are, I think, things that are going on in the US as well. So this is the kind of what's happening. And you're right to draw attention. There were riots where Hindus were beating up Muslims in the district of Delhi, which is nearby to where I'm at right now. And I think the last I heard about mine had people had died. So it's a serious situation. Yeah, it's really too bad. And I have to say it changes my view of the place because I've always had this sort of soft spot for India. I've seen it, you know, make great progressive strides over our lifetimes, educational strides. I would keep that soft spot for, I have a soft spot for India. That's why I'm here. And the people are just amazing. The students here, unlike students where I taught in Hong Kong, East Asia, the students had to be quieter. I always say the struggle in Hong Kong is to get the students to speak up, struggle in India is to shut them up. That gives me a lot of hope for Indian democracy that these students are pushovers. Of course, the Hong Kong students turned out not to be pushovers either as we have seen for the last nine months. There is hope and keep that soft spot. Thank you. I will. Michael, we talked before the show about the nice places you want to visit in the world. And here we are besieged, literally besieged by coronavirus. And so you look at India, for example, and India really doesn't have a lot of cases if it has any cases. It's on one hand, I think, as far as I've heard. And so you say, well, gee, India presents as a pretty positive place to visit these days. And it's almost as if the coronavirus, which could become endemic, meaning permanent, a permanent condition of the species, the coronavirus and viruses like that sort of change the appeal of various places in the world. If you find a place that maybe you didn't like so much before, but now you find it doesn't have any virus, you say, hmm, that's a better place. I'd like to visit that place instead of the place that has a lot of virus. So the whole thing is being rebalanced. As you might imagine, as being here right now and facing the prospect at the end of March returning to the U.S., I was, of course, hoping that there'd be no outbreak here, such that I would have trouble returning. And so far, so good. I tend to teach in Hong Kong in the fall. I'm not sure if that's going to be equally so far. In Hong Kong, it's only CDC number one rating, not number three. So that's a good news. But in India, I think it's always worth noting, at least these viruses, as we know, stars and others have evolved in China. It's often thought to be because of these wild animals that are sold in markets and stuff in China, where, you know, meat, exotic meats are valued. India, where one third of the population is vegetarian, has not historically had that kind of problem. And so it's less likely that an indigenous virus of this nature would arise. And then India's trade with China much less. And so the Chinese aren't going in large numbers to India. So your comments suggest maybe, maybe they will. Become more attractive. Well, let's turn to Hong Kong, Michael. Let's turn to Hong Kong because that's, you know, that's an area where you have followed it closely for years and years. And, you know, we started a while ago talking about the umbrella movement and Carrie Lam and the attempts by Beijing to influence the legislation and lives of the people in Hong Kong. And gee whiz, I mean, there were people being shot on the street. It was really troubling to see how what we'd all considered a very civilized place, a chip off the old UK block, was, you know, falling into this most depraved situation over the effects of the PRC's efforts to contain it. But now all that seems passed. It all seems relegated to a lesser place on the priority list. Can you tell us, you know, what are the issues today in Hong Kong? What's the priorities? Yeah, well, you know, it's not passed. I wish, you know, the problem had been solved politically and we could say it was passed. But what it's subsided a bit. And yet, just this past weekend, there was an outbreak. Sort of it seems now that the masses aren't turning out because people are concerned not to be collected in large crowds. But some of the front, whatever it called, front liners, people in the front rows of the protest did turn out the past weekend. I think 115 of them were arrested, accused of, you know, throwing Molotov cocktails and rocks. And this kind of reminds you a bit of the West Bank. And so there was an outbreak. And then another tragic thing over the past week was that the government suddenly decided to want to arrest three very prominent Hong Kong political elites who are leaders in the society on the pan-democratic side. And that was Jimmy Lai, who's the publisher of the most popular Chinese language newspaper, The Apple Daily. He is, of course, very famous for supporting democracy. And during the Occupy Movement five years ago was, in fact, one of the people who camped out in the street. But he's a very wealthy man, and he has donated lots of money also to the Democratic Party in Hong Kong. He's very close to the founding leader of the Democratic Party, Martin Lee. So he was arrested and charged with unlawful assembly and also apparently assaulting a reporter from another paper that was harassing him. And then two other guys. One is the former chairman of the Democratic Party, which is the leading Democratic Party in Hong Kong, Yonsang. And then a leader that I, you know, I did research, I'm writing a report on Hong Kong. And I had dinner with just very recently a late Chuck Yang, who's the head of one of the Hong Kong labor unions and also a prominent Democrat. So they, they suddenly arrested them for what they did to participate in their quote unquote unlawful assembly in August. So why they would take this step, I mean, this is what sometimes is so disturbing. It seems like the Hong Kong government is completely insensitive to situations that arise in the society. Years ago, I think it was 15 years ago when I was one of those involved in the Article 23 protest and one of the leaders of it. In fact, I was debating the Secretary for Constitutional Affairs at that time and the foreign correspondent stuff. And I was wearing a face mask and I asked him, are you really going to push through these laws, you know, on national security in the face of this virus. And now they're, again, they're back to the same business. They're arresting people over their democracy protest in the face of a, you know, a real crisis involving the virus. I want to get you to take on why, I want to get you to take on why that's happened and what the mood is these days and how the coronavirus and all the trouble in mainland China is going to affect that is affecting it today. But first, let's take a short break, Michael, as Michael Davis, he's in India talking about Hong Kong on a trip from Washington and get all that would be right back after the short break. Michael Davis here on Global Connections, so much to talk about. And we're focusing on Hong Kong for the moment. So tell me why the Hong Kong governments affected as it is by the powers in Beijing is renewing all arrests on the basis of unlawful assembly. What's going on? You know, it's, I don't know, they are just hamfisted in how they handle politics. I mean, the whole protest shows that I mean, Beijing is thought to be calling shots. Beijing appointed a new guy in charge of what's called the local liaison office in Hong Kong. Actually, excuse me, they put a new guy in charge of the Hong Kong Macau affairs office and the liaison office of the office in Beijing and the office in Hong Kong. And the guy in Beijing is thought to be a hardliner, especially selected to try to, you know, take care of the Hong Kong protest and get things under control. And so the only guess that I have is that he's trying to show that he's taking care of it. He's getting people that are thought to be troublemakers, you know, and arresting them. So that seems to be the case. You know, we, many of us have written and talked and done all the conjoling we can to say, you know, a lot of the problems in Hong Kong would go away if you guys would just go away and leave people alone. But that seems to be out of their playbook. Now, one thing is clear is it's not over. The unrest in Hong Kong is not over. And I'll bet you five that the Hong Kong economy and its investment in the mainland and elsewhere has to be affected by all this consternation. Yeah, it is. And I agree. You know, we're doing there. I'm part of a group doing a report that was funded by the National Democratic Institute in Washington, another affiliation of mine, and Georgetown University, so we had a team to show up in Hong Kong in December. And our sense of it was, if things slowed down at this time, one time or another, that, you know, Beijing even succeeds in repressing the protest, unless they address the underlying problems, these protests and this public concern will keep coming back. It's not going to go away. Well, there must be a relationship, Michael, a huge relationship between call it unrest, call it troubled times in Hong Kong, and the coronavirus, because Beijing must be desperate about it. And if it's trying to exercise control in mainland China, maybe some of that, you know, need for control leaks over into its relationship with Connie Lam and in Hong Kong. But it seems to me anyway that the shadow of coronavirus must play, you know, a huge role in the public sentiment these days in Hong Kong. I can't show it to you now, but we had a we had a movie of people waiting online to buy masks and the photographer could not find the end of the line. It was a panic line. And people in Hong Kong must be very concerned about that. And they must feel they must have feelings about whether China is doing a good job, whether Xi Jinping is repressing, whether, you know, China is really stable anymore, whether these oppressive moves that we've heard about and seen on the Internet are outlandish, whether the attempts to control the disease in mainland China are working. And for that matter, whether attempts to contain the disease in Hong Kong are working. Well, you know, that's exactly the last point I think is the crucial one. I think Hong Kong people long ago had lost confidence, Beijing is way of running mainland China is going to be acceptable. But they, they when this virus started arising, Hong Kong people were very much concerned and now the current government's handling of the coronavirus is added to the list of Hong Kong objections to the way things are done. And so they, they're, you know, I would say this would further infuriate when the protests over democracy resume, because now there's just another on the long list of objections to how things are done, how Beijing overrides and controls Hong Kong government or how the Hong Kong government is overly cautious about how it deals with mainland China. So it was a bit slow on the uptake about blocking people from coming in. And you have to remember Hong Kong was the epicenter of the virus. 300 people died in Hong Kong out of the 800 or so worldwide. So Hong Kong is very sensitive to this and that Kerry Lam wasn't proactive and immediate in dealing with it. What was the problem? And I think it is some part of the pile on it. You will have how things may go down the road when when the immediate crisis of the coronavirus is diminished. Yeah, well, so, you know, seems to me that when you have a crisis of this nature and you have questions about whether the government is doing or can do the right thing and can contain the virus, not only in Hong Kong, but on mainland China. I mean, people must be very concerned. I'm sure some people think, you know, that their world is in jeopardy. And that leads to questioning the relationship of the citizen and the citizen's government. And certainly it leads to questioning the relationship of Hong Kong and Beijing and leads to the relationship of, well, looking at the relationship of the people in China and their government, you know, whether they still have confidence in their government or whether, and this is a big question, whether there will be changes, changes in regime, changes in geopolitics, changes in large changes in public opinion, as affects the way the governments work in both of those places. Do you see that happening? Yeah, the impression I have on the Beijing side of this is that the government in some cases has proven more sensitive about its political capital than the virus. And so they first tried not to expose it, which is what they did with SARS as well. So the result is that they didn't jump in and start dealing with the problem in a timely manner. And now I've heard that they're even producing a book on how well Xi Jinping is having the crisis. So they're in a PR mode at the moment and tried to push through a new, their version of how great it has been and how he's handled this crisis, where there's little chance that there will be some kind of assessment at the end of all of this of how well they did. The World Health Organization leader was in town there. And of course, they always say something nice to the country they're visiting. And that's the part that will get showcased in the local media in China and not the kinds of concerns and criticisms about how they stepped up and handled this or not in the early phases and the tactics they're using, whether they're effective or not. It would be very important for the rest of the world, if we're stuck with this virus forever, to have a really close up look at how Beijing has handled it so that people in other countries would know what tactics work and what don't, what is effective and what is not. Yeah, we've, you and I have shared the column, most recent column by Frank Cheng, covering this subject. It's very interesting that along the line of priorities Xi Jinping has focused on his diplomatic relations, his image in the world, his political success, or protection to a higher degree, it seems, and then he has to solving the problem. I guess he really doesn't want to look bad. And what that tells me is that maybe if you strip all that off, he would look bad. It seems to me that he does look bad. When you stop the propaganda, you know, he hasn't done very well on this. And he's certainly repressed a lot of people. Exactly. And to what extent, I mean, it's like that, that ship in, sorry, my, my Alexa is going wild here. It's like that ship in China. I mean, excuse me, in Japan, where they thought that they were protecting people by keeping them on board. But in fact, it seems that they made the things worse for like a Petri dish of the problem. So I don't know to what extent extreme measures to Beijing government were effective, or whether they may have caused the problem to get worse. Well, we are certainly going to learn a lot. As you say, we're going to learn a lot from China when we find out what happened. We're going to learn a lot from the experience in the US and we find out what happened or didn't happen. I think Trump has made the same flip in priorities. I mean, he's more important. It's more important to him to look good than to actually do anything. I think the World Health Organization doesn't come out very well on this, including its compliments to Xi Jinping. But also it's, you know, inability to raise the money, raise the organization level among all these countries. So right now it seems to be like pandemonium. Right now it seems to be disorganization on a global scale. And where do we look? What is going to happen on this? You know, you're in touch with a lot of the elements here, especially the Chinese part of it. This isn't going to go away right away. We are going to see big changes emerge out of a long-term stress test, which is what this is, you know, for the species. Well, you would think the US would play a leadership role because the CDC and the US bodies that handle these kinds of things are generally among the best in the world. And people look to them. They don't look typically to China to solve these problems and provide leadership on a global scale. And the Trump administration just hasn't been up to it. Apparently the team in the White House is supposed to handle it. It was dismissed a long time ago. So it's been a problem. He showed up in India to meet 100,000 people. And apparently that was a more urgent concern than dealing with this. Now, I was thought to say the India visit wasn't important. I think everyone understands that US relationship with India is very important. But, you know, the coronavirus is more urgent at the moment. I'm always interested to hear what the doctors have to say. I mean, the ones who are not necessarily speaking to accommodate the administration. And I've seen a number of, you know, missives, emails and papers and what have you from doctors who have worked with virus and worked with epidemics over their, you know, professional careers. And then they're not optimistic at all. And they're worried about a huge effect much bigger than SARS or MERS or Ebola. And so I guess, you know, really ultimately the question is how global is this going to be? We know it's going to continue, but how global is it going to be? And maybe it's interesting. Whatever is happening in India, that's a lesson there somewhere. Whatever is happening outside of China and Hong Kong and Korea have a big problem. That's a lesson there. Going forward, gee, I don't know where to live anymore. I think Hawaii will work, although I worry, is there really any places in Hawaii I can ask you a question now, because I'm not aware of whether there has been. But I worry when that arises, you know, the island is sort of isolated in some sense. Well, it's isolated. Do we have plenty of traffic with Asia? We have plenty of, you know, people coming on tourism, on business, what have you from Asia? And I mean, if you just look at the likelihood, the logic of it, it's logical to assume that a lot of people who have come here and who have, you know, laid down, shed the virus here. And the question is why don't we have any cases? The last expression by the governor a couple of days ago was they tested one person for the, I don't know where they got the test kit actually, they tested one person and found that this person had the common cold. Why does that not give me any confidence? The fact is that CDC blew it on the first round of test kits and now we're waiting for the second round. And if you, you know, look over the whole country, you won't find a lot of test kits. And if you look at Hawaii, you won't find a lot of test kits. And so if we had a lot of test kits, don't you think from a logical point of view, we'd have much more virus than we now know about. Yeah. So wait, we have to recircle on this because if we talk again in a few days or a week, Michael, my answer will be different. Well, you know, if you find you need masks, I suggest India. There are lots of masks available here. So in your travels and you travel everywhere, what kind of, what kind of protection are you availing yourself? What, how have you changed your, you know, your health and hygiene habits to deal with the risk? I think the biggest thing and they advise this is wash your hands regularly. Apparently we all even my thinking of myself as I reach and touch my face during the show that we do that apparently a couple of times every minute that humans just do that. So having clean hands, therefore becomes a critical ingredient. And that's what they're advising even here. So far it's not been a problem here, but I think that's all we can do. In all airplanes, I haven't been running into it, but then I don't know. I'm going on an airplane later today, we'll see. Will you be wearing a mask? I'm on. I'll probably take it in my backpack because you know, there's no one wearing it, you kind of draw attention to itself. But if somebody starts sneezing and coughing beside me, then I'll look it up. Well, Michael, it's great to follow your adventures. You know, it's great to be able to talk to you. And I know that these these trends and phenomena that we've talked about are going to continue and and I would look forward. I'm looking forward to the next time we regroup and compare notes again. In the meantime, I just want to say one thing, Michael. Michael Davis, it's been nice knowing you. Very nice knowing you, Gary. And I look forward to actually doing this interview with my aloha shirt on in Hawaii. That's for another episode. Be well. Stay well. Take care.