 on global connections with Michael Davis, who's an expert in Hong Kong. He taught at what Hong Kong University for many years and is very familiar with the dynamic of that city. In fact, he consults and writes about it even today. He's stationed in Washington, living in New York. Can I get that right, Michael? Yeah. And so today we're going to talk about Hong Kong. We're going to talk about what's happened since it was all over the front page. You know, banner headlines every day. It seems to have gotten quiet. Has it really gotten quiet, Michael? No, it hasn't. And the situation hasn't really been resolved. I just came back. I'm doing a report on Hong Kong for the National Democratic Institute. And I spent two weeks in December interviewing people across the spectrum in Hong Kong to come up with the report. And, you know, it was an interesting to talk to them because, quite frankly, they seem more optimistic than the rest of us are. So that's kind of encouraging. Or I'm not quite sure whether to be encouraged by it. Maybe they're not being realistic. Who knows? But at the end of the day, they're determined. That's clearly the case. Well, the determination, maybe weakening, don't you think? They spilled a lot of blood, if you will. They spent a lot of time in the streets. They haven't been able to attend their jobs or their school for quite some time. And I imagine the protesters have gotten tired. And as they have gotten tired, so has the press gotten tired. And as the press fades on it, so does world opinion, don't you think? Well, there's certainly, you know, at this moment, less attention to it because a number of other problems have arisen in the world in Iran and other places. So there's always a competition for global attention. But I think Hong Kong has captured a lot of people's imagination. I've been to events even here locally. I attended an event yesterday where just local people in Connecticut were all very much on top of what's going on in Hong Kong. So and I did find when I talked to people there that most of them, the people on the, what we call the pan-democratic side, were very interested in having international support because they see that as very critical to maybe nudging Beijing in the right direction. And that's no small order to do that. Beijing, of course, gets its back up and doesn't really like to give in to popular protests. But it is striking that they also haven't sent in the army or anything. They've certainly used the tools they have in Hong Kong to repress people. And we see the reports of police abuse all the time. But at the same time, there's, you know, some caution. And I would add a footnote here that there was an election in Taiwan over the past couple of days. And that result went against Beijing. So it kind of sent a further message. So we had an election in November in Hong Kong where the pan-democrats won a stunning victory. And then election in Taiwan where a politician who had not been a year ago, that popular, pulled off a big election. So I think there's a message to Beijing and all of this. We just don't know whether they'll receive the message. Well, you know, there certainly that the reelection of Tsai Ing-wen, is it, in Taiwan? That's a startling expression of how the Taiwanese feel about the unification of China under what? One country, one country, instead of one country through systems. The same issue really, isn't it? The same issue in Hong Kong, maybe in slightly different oblique, but the same issue in Hong Kong and in Taiwan. You know, come under the mothership, be part of China. We're going to foist our entire system on you. Or, you know, if you, if we can, or rather if we're willing, we'll give you some autonomy. That autonomy is not what Xi Jinping wants. He wants to take it all. He wants China to rule both Taiwan and Hong Kong. And you know what? If he waits this turn, if he waits until what, 2047 in the case of Hong Kong, he'll have what he wants, won't he? Ultimately, he'll have what he wants. Well, you know, the thing about it is, is the price of getting what he wants may be very high. And I think this is why there's a little, perhaps a slightly higher level of optimism among activists in Hong Kong than there is among the global observers. And that they realize that so much of China's wealth passes through Hong Kong. People like to make the point that Hong Kong used to be a quarter of China's economy in size. And now it's 3%. But trust me, the 3% that Hong Kong is right now is the critical 3%. Two thirds of China's international investments pass through Hong Kong, because people want to have a reliable legal system to carry on their investments. Two thirds of the companies listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange are mainland companies or affiliated with mainland companies. So not only is the world going into China through Hong Kong, but China is going out to the world through Hong Kong. And so this is the problem for the rulers in Beijing, that so much wealth is there. And of course, Chinese wealth sometimes politicians in China have their own personal wealth. So on one level, China, you know, one of the reasons this thing got started was an extradition bill that was going to allow them to get people sent back and be arrested. But one of the reasons they wanted that was to reach corrupt money that had found its home in Hong Kong. But at the same time, I mean, a lot of Chinese leaders, you know, care about the money their family members have in Hong Kong. So it's a dilemma for them. Well, that bill is over, isn't it? That was finally in fully withdrawn, wasn't it? It was indeed. And that's an example of, you know, the protests in Hong Kong don't always fail. I myself was involved in the Article 23 concern group. I think we talked about this more than a decade ago, probably on ThinkTech, that, you know, we pushed through pushed hard against the government's attempt to enact all these national security laws and everything, secrecy laws and stuff, basically authoritarian kinds of things. And one in that case, too, that the bill was withdrawn exactly like this extradition bill. So, you know, flash forward 15 years and 16 years, I guess it is. And there again, there's a case where where public protests paid off. Now, it's never paid off when it comes to democratic reform. When we did that in 2004, we changed our, after winning on the Article 23, we took up democratic reform and got nowhere. Again, had a, you know, half a million protesters on the street. So that didn't work. And then in 2014, much more recently, when we had the so-called umbrella movement in Hong Kong, which I know you and I talked about. Again, wishing for democratic reform doesn't work. So the message seems to be when Beijing's calling the shots, which they do when it comes to democratic reform, the protests have not been as successful. Now, of course, the current protest raises the question I know you're going to ask, and that's a question of violence and so on. Does violence pay? And there's a kind of feeling, and I talked to people in Hong Kong about this, that, you know, well, violence might have paid because first there was a million protesters in early June on the streets and the bill wasn't withdrawn. Then there was two million protesters the next week on June the 16th, and the bill was not withdrawn. But when people broke into the legislative council and broke a few chairs and made a big scene vandalizing the legislative council, soon after that the bill was first suspended. And, well, that wasn't enough, some more aggressive behavior on the street. So one of the signs that was pasted on the wall of the legislative council is that you guys taught us that non-violence doesn't pay, that we need to use violence in order to get what we want. So there could be violence on either side too. I remember seeing some footage of Hong Kong police shooting somebody, point blank range, didn't kill them, but it was all on a cell phone and it went viral around the world and that kind of violence gets people's attention and that leads to change. Don't you think? Either side, whoever is violent. Of course, this is why one of the surprising things of this particular movement is going on right now is the level of public support that has been sustained through this. In these earlier protests, you could count on public support for a while, but after a while people got protest fatigue and it went in. But in this case, the level of public support has been sustained all the way up to the present. And one of the big reasons for that has been the level of police violence. And so the police have been using it, not just that incident you talked about, but they were occasions where they were trying to clear areas near shopping malls and shoving people down escalators. There's so many cases. I interviewed a lot of the leading lawyers that are doing organizing volunteer defense work for now 7,000 people that have been arrested. And one of the things that one of the leading lawyers, there's three major groups that have hotlines to provide legal defense work. One of the things he pointed out is 70, 80% of the people, their clients that they come to see have physical injuries. So the police have been, you know, at least allegedly, it seems that there's a lot of brutality. Now, these things can occur in two ways. One is during arrest and one is after. And so this has been, I think, a major factor in keeping public support high. There's a sense, I think, in Hong Kong and people use these terms, they say this is the last stand, that if we don't push back against this constantly increasing Beijing interference in Hong Kong, then the Hong Kong we know is gone. Are they right? I'd probably right. This is unfortunately the case. I mean, the work I've been doing over the many years on this particular area of Hong Kong has shown me that what goes on over time is more and more Beijing control, more and more Beijing interference, which is very much contrary to the promises that were made in the sign of British Treaty of 1984, and then the subsequent basic law that was enacted under it, which presented a kind of liberal open society. I think what we have is a problem with a communist hardline regime really not knowing what's the critical ingredients of an open society. And Hong Kong has been one of the most open societies in the world. Freedom Forum for years ranked Hong Kong's economy as the freest in the world. So this is a great weekend for all of Asia. But, you know, I don't understand, maybe you can help me with this. The Hong Kong police, they're Hong Kong Hong Kongies, they're the neighbors and friends of the people that they're beating up. How is that possible? It just seems wrong and not intuitive somehow to have a policeman beating up on his neighbor and friend. They're all in the same pot, aren't they? Yeah, well, this is the thing that has perplexed a lot of people and there's been a lot of questions about it. There are some, there are a number of things that people come up with to explain it. One is that the police have been very much aligned and over the recent years a lot of interaction has occurred between the Public Security Bureau and the mainland and the Hong Kong police. So a lot of the leadership of the police, you know, who get appointments and so on, I think feel a close relationship with the mainland Public Security Bureau. So the sensitivity level at the top has not been high among the police. There's also been allegations that there's some infiltration of the police by mainlanders being hired into the police department and because the people on the street and of course rumors get going on the street really fast all the time. But one of the things that one hears is that people could complain that some of the police officers there are speaking Mandarin, which means that they're not of local origin. Yeah, there's a number of these things that have come up that people, you know, become part of the rumor mill. And then there are some things that are have been widely reported. For example, Hong Kong police have received terrorism training in of all places in Xinjiang, which is where the Uyghur problem is at and where the mainland policies have been extremely heavy handed, you know, with a million people reportedly in camps and so on. This has been the attention of being the attention of the United Nations and so on. So there are some efforts to explain this and then some of it I think is just, you know, the police are so severely under attack that there's a kind of defensiveness that emerges, I think, in the police. I can imagine the average Hong Kongese at the right term being concerned about what happens in was it Xinjiang, where the Uyghurs are? I mean, Xinjiang, yeah, where the Uyghurs are because because that's, you know, openly oppressive. It's really cruel. It involves, you know, euphemisms like retraining when it's really torture. And it's something that China has become synonymous with because of the Uyghur issue. So if you say, well, ultimately PRC will take over Hong Kong, pretty scary business, that if you offend China, if you're going upstream on their policies, you could be treated like a Uyghur. I would be concerned about that. And it would motivate me to do more protests to hold the line and not letting China take over Hong Kong and undermine my democracy. Well, see, this is the thing. And of course, democracy is only a half baked one at the moment, half of the legislative council. Nearly all of the district council was directly elected. So that they, the Democrats, the activists in Hong Kong turned that into a the November election there into a kind of referendum on the protest. And of course, they won that. But I think you're also highlighting something that explains maybe why Hong Kong is so near and dear to the hearts of people around the world is that we're in age now where a kind of pushback against democratic reform around the world has occurred. Authoritarian regimes have emerged and so on. And in many ways, Hong Kong is viewed as sort of the, you know, the bad in this, whatever it is, the facts are doing the test. Yeah, I live in the stream. Yeah, kind of on the leading edge of all of this global debate over democracy and human rights. And interestingly enough, just this week, the head of Human Rights Watch was turned away from Hong Kong. He came in. He's been to Hong Kong many times before, Mr Roth, and he flew into Hong Kong and was taken back through security and put on a plane out of Hong Kong. And now human rights. Yeah, you know, Rights Watch has an office in Hong Kong, but he was taken away. When I went there, I was part of a, I led a research team that was included Georgetown University and the National Democratic Institute. The National Democratic Institute is kind of a part of a three triumphant, if you will, of US promoted democracy organizations at the top being the National Endowment for Democracy. And then there's the National Democratic Institute and so on. As, because I was, they were sponsoring, in part, this report we're doing, I found myself that I had the entire front page of the leading Communist Party newspaper in Hong Kong, which is called the Dagong Bao. So, in fact, there was nothing else on the front page except our visit. I suppose congratulations are in order. Yeah, that's right. So it was interesting that they were saying that we were having secret meetings with the democracy leaders, except our secret meeting was in the restaurant of the Mandarin Hotel. I don't know how it can be secret, the leading hotel in Hong Kong. So what about Carrie Lam? She's still there. And she's, I think we all agree, she's an agent of Beijing here. But then something else happened within the last week or so, maybe two weeks, where Beijing appointed some substitute official to come down from China and replace someone else and tighten the noose essentially, tighten the control. You're familiar with that? Can you talk about that? In fact, tomorrow, if you read the Nikkei Asian review, you'll see my op-ed on that particular appointment. So this is really interesting because this official is a very senior one in China's Communist Party. So he is going to head the liaison office in Hong Kong. Now, some people in a very snarky way refer to the liaison office as the second government in Hong Kong. Now, it's supposed to be, as the term liaison suggests, just a kind of, it is not provided for in any basic law or joint declaration. It's just an office the Chinese government created in Hong Kong so that they could have someone staff their monitoring developments in Hong Kong and communicating back to Beijing what's going on. And the basic law, in fact, expressly provides that no office of the central government, other than the central government itself, is allowed to interfere in Hong Kong in any way. But however that may be, this liaison office is there. It was created actually before the handover, China was represented in Hong Kong by something called the New China News Agency, or Xinhua. And Xinhua is the global news network of the Chinese government. It still exists. It's all over the world. And that they, in effect, functioned as a Beijing embassy, if you will, when British rule was going on. So the liaison office is the replacement for Xinhua in that role. And they're supposed to stay out of Hong Kong's business, but they're always in Hong Kong's business. And the guy that was in charge of it before, and a fellow named Wang Jinmin, I've gone into a lot of trouble because somehow he was telling Beijing that they were going to win that election to the district council. Bad call. Yeah. So what happens, and this is where Kerry Lam gets involved, the Hong Kong government gets involved as well, and all these pro-Beijing Hong Kongers all sort of tainted by this, that they always report to Beijing what Beijing wants to hear. Of course, this, as you know, probably already is the kind of disease of the mainland government system that officials all over the country report what people want to hear. That's why they had the great leap forward way back decades ago, which was a total disaster in which 47 million people died unnatural deaths because they were burning up, you know, melting down their farm implements and everything else to create steel. So this, and the SARS epidemic was another symptom of this reporting, not reporting in that case, what was going on. So this is a problem and it intruded on Hong Kong. So they send down this big guy. He's supposedly under the Hong Kong and Macau affairs office in Beijing, except he's more senior than the top guy in the Hong Kong and Macau affairs office. So he's obviously a fixer. He's a guy in there. Recently, the Communist Party's fourth plenum issued a statement that Hong Kong, they needed to improve Hong Kong security and they needed to reeducate the youth in Hong Kong and reeducate officials in Hong Kong and all of this. So we imagine this guy's being sent down there, sent down to Hong Kong to do all of this, which is exactly why they always get into trouble. These kinds of efforts, if you do this in a totally controlled society like North Korea, you'll get away with it because anybody who gets in your way will go to jail. But if you do this in an open society, what do you get? You get pushed back. And this is the problem with the whole policy on Hong Kong and we're not seeing the improvement yet. You know what I worry about in the largest sense and I hope that you and I can have many conversations going forward about this. I think we will. And that is, you know, this is relentless push by Xi Jinping and Beijing and the Politburo to unify China and grab all these properties and territories back within unified control. And although, you know, there's a sine curve of up and down here in Hong Kong, relentlessly they're going to put officials like this guy in and they're going to tighten the controls as much as they can. They're going to avoid bringing the tanks in but everything else they'll bring in and they'll and then the generations will change. These kids, these students, the people in the streets, they'll be a different generation in five years. They may behave differently. Who knows? At the same time, you know, you have Taiwan and so China is determined to rope these places in. And in a decade or two or three, don't you think, Michael, that there's really no alternative but that China will relentlessly do just that? I think that's their goal and Xi Jinping, I think more than any of the previous leaders is more determined to make this happen sooner rather than later, especially the Taiwan thing which is a very sore spot in the Communist Party view of the world. But you know, I suppose people on the other side, if they have some level of optimism, there's a view that this kind of governance is against the trend of history, this kind of hardline behavior. And that's why what's going on in Hong Kong is of such global interest because this, you know, is history going to push us back in the direction of monarchs or if not monarchs, dictators? What is the trend? Where are we headed in the world? And in this sense that Hong Kong's in the leading edge. And then the question becomes, is what China's doing in the way it's doing, it's sustainable? One would think so given the wealth that they've accumulated and they seem to, as observed by the rest of us, China seems so successful, bringing, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions out of poverty and so on. But you know, if you deconstruct that and look at it more carefully, you'll find there's problems where the one is it wasn't really Beijing's communism that brought him out of poverty, it was the rest of the world, you know, inducing them to have a free market economy that achieved that purpose. And Beijing, in the Beijing instinct in fact in recent years has been to try to increase state control and in some ways to undermine the free market economy. And we've seen the level of economic growth decline under that policy. So that's one thought of the story. The other side of the story is, well, maybe everybody else thinks Beijing is doing so well, but obviously Xi Jinping doesn't think so. He's very insecure. He's, you know, all of these efforts to control and contain are not a sign of success, but a sign of worry. That, you know, it's that the situation is such that the party could be pushed aside. And so I want to continue this conversation. The next time we speak, I would like to discuss what the United States is doing, what it can do and the effect of its actions on all of these processes we've been talking about. Very important questions. Thank you so much, Michael Davis, Hong Kong expert, author, think tank person, watches it so carefully. You watch it, we watch you. Thank you so much, Michael. Talk again.