 We're back. We're live. I'm Jay Fidel and this is Global Connections and we have a global scholar, a global fellow from the Woodrow Wilson Institute, which is in Washington. And that's Michael Davis. Michael, say what is your exact title and don't spend too much time on it. It's just that we're choosing one of them and that's a global fellow in Washington, D.C. Okay, but you're not in Washington. You're in Indiana. And moving around the world, the country, you're the only person I know who is so fleet of foot these days. Last time we talked to you, you were in India and they were about to lock it down and now you're in Indiana. From India to Indiana. Oh, that's right. Just add the ANA on there. And I just got out just before the lockdown. So it was a touch and go through Europe, which was also in a state of lockdown. And then I was to go back to New York City because I'm also a senior scholar at the Columbia University, but I didn't go because of the virus there. So now I'm in Indiana. Traveling is a whole new world now. You have to be intrepid at least. So the reason we're talking is I wanted to catch up on the events over only this last weekend in Hong Kong and you lived and worked and taught in Hong Kong for many years and you are a Hong Kong scholar as well. And I really want to find out what's going on. But the long and short headline of it is that somewhere along the line, the Hong Kong government arrested 15 democracy leaders and charged them with an awful congregation involved in the protest movement. And they were released, but then they will have to stand trial. And there's a great controversy in Hong Kong about all of that. What's going on? Oh, it's much more complicated than just the arrest. And frankly, it has Beijing's fingerprints all over it. The police pretending that they're just, well, these guys were present at a protest. Well, you know, there were millions of people present at these protests, at least thousands, depending on which protest they're targeting. And they target these individuals. And people wonder why one of the people arrested, for example, is Martin Lee. Martin Lee is in Hong Kong, the sort of Mandela Hong Kong. He's the father of the democracy movement in Hong Kong. He's 81 years old. Hasn't been active in politics for years. He's a lawyer, a barrister, and a senior barrister. And he has represented a lot of the people who have been arrested. There's been 7,600 arrests in the last year in Hong Kong with protesters. And Martin is one of the lawyers that represents that there are many lawyers and the whole network of lawyers representing these people. And so there's protests during much of last year from the middle of June, actually even earlier, all the way to the end of the year and early into this year, of course, in police Beijing. And Beijing took a dim view of it and appointed new people to head what's called the liaison office in Hong Kong. And also to head an office in Beijing that's over the liaison office called the Hong Kong and Macau office. So these two new guys were brought in, they're hardliners, and they're brought in basically to make Hong Kong, you know, towards the Beijing line. And we've been sort of waiting for them to move. And they moved last week, declaring that they have the right to as in these offices. There's an article 22 in the Basic Law of Hong Kong, which says the mainland departments are not to interfere in Hong Kong. But these are two mainland offices that were set up in Hong Kong or over Hong Kong. And they're interfering and they're claiming they have a right to do so. So while as the arrest was approaching, these offices were issuing statements condemning the pan-democratic legislators in Hong Kong for filibustering in a committee there on saying that they should be dismissed from the legislature and so on and claiming they have the right to comment on Hong Kong affairs anyway they want, that they are not bound by this article that forbids Beijing's interference in Hong Kong's autonomy. So this is the complicated thing behind it. And then at the same time, suddenly there's these arrests. Now why these arrests? You know, we're in the midst of a global pandemic. It hardly sounds like, you know, the most generous thing to do in treating the society. And I kind of had a footnote here. I was involved with the Article 23 protest 15 years ago and that was during the SARS epidemic. So it seems that Beijing doesn't have much sympathy for political activists even in the faces whenever one's wearing face masks because they're trying to avoid infection. So then, you know, they arrested these people and people were wondering why these guys, most of the people who were arrested were in their 60s, 70s, well in 80s. And they were like senior people in the Hong Kong Pandemocratic Camp, no longer in the Legislative Council, most of them. Most of them retired from that form of politics for quite some time. And so my guess is, and I believe this is the case, I believe it's not just the police getting photos of people in the protest and then going out and saying, well, you're here illegally, and we're going to arrest you. I think, I see Beijing's fingerprints on the choice of these people. What I think happened is these new guys, these hardliners sent down to discipline Hong Kong, they know who these guys are because these guys have been on their list for years as opposition figures. They, after 1989 protests, they created the Hong Kong Alliance in support of the patriotic democratic movement in China, which is literally the name of that alliance, which orchestrated a candlelight vigil every year on June 4th in commemoration of a 10-month square incident. And so this has been a sore spot for Beijing. So my feeling is Beijing is telling the police what to do. Now, no one would admit this, but my guess is, why would they pick these people? These aren't the people who led the protest last year and early this year at all. The people involved in that are a lot of younger activists and in a kind of leaderless movement where no one quite knows who they should arrest. That's why it was leaderless. But suddenly, going after these old, old timers, I mean, Mark Lee has been to the White House many times. He's a very prominent lawyer, a prominent barrister. And quite frankly, I don't even think the Hong Kong political elites, Kerry Lam and others, who run the Hong Kong government on behalf of Beijing, would on their own decide to arrest Mark Lee because he's such a popular figure. So the choice to do that seems to me had to come from somewhere. And it's really an odd choice because Mark Lee was not leading this protest. Why this choice? Is it only because they can't find anyone else? It seems like they're, you know, they're trying to find the most well-known names, you know, the ones who are most respected and therefore, you know, cut off the head of the movement that way. It sounds like there's a real reason for this. It's not accidental. Well, I think the reason is that's who they know. Quite frankly, these people have been vilified for years and accused because many of them have gone to Washington and London and other places to complain about Beijing's interference with Hong Kong's autonomy and interventions in Hong Kong. And so they, these people are on Beijing's list as, you know, people to go after. Now, a couple of other youngsters who did go to Washington as well, I was in Washington when they went there. The young Joshua Wong and Nathan Law and others who were involved in the umbrella movement, they've already been arrested and charged and spent time in jail. So suddenly to go after these list of very prominent figures in the pan-democratic camp, to me it is probably because that's just the people they know and they want to send a signal to those people. And that's what they're trying to do. But I think what's really on the horizon, what's really at stake is an election in September of this year for the Legislative Council. Now, half the Legislative Council are chosen by functional constituencies. One of the reasons for the democracy movement is to have real democracy and not just have half the legislature elected and the chief executive not elected. So all of that was what the protest was about. But anyhow, this election, the Democrats won a district council election where at least about 90% of the district councilors are directly elected and they won it very substantially. The last time I talked to you, we talked about that. And they won that election and now they're targeting to win the Legislative Council election because that'll give them power to block the Beijing Selected Chief Executives actions. And to do that, they have to really win, you know, they've been winning about 60% of the vote for years, but they only get about a third of the seats from that because of the way Beijing has stacked the deck. So to win it, they want to win even more of the directly elected seats and they want to make inroads into the functional seats, which involves the pro Beijing camp. So they're trying to get to really win the election and become the majority in the Legislative Council. So this is what's at stake. And Beijing thinks it can take some of these leaders off the table and discredit them as their behavior in certain ways. They think Beijing thinks this will be in its favor, but I think they're badly mistaken. Well, two things come to mind. You know, one is that this is one way to aggravate the situation among all the people who were in the protest movements. This is certainly going to get them excited and maybe it'll, maybe it'll enhance the Democratic vote in September. Don't you think that would be one logical conclusion? Exactly. That's what I think is going to happen. I think Beijing has done similar tricks in Taiwan over the years and almost every time Beijing tries to interfere and get the Nationalist Party candidates elected, it winds up getting the Democratic Progressive Party's candidate elected, candidates get the parliamentary system to get them elected. And so this is always works against Beijing when it tries to do this because everybody opposes Beijing. So I think Beijing has misjudged the situation and all this hard line behavior is going to go against them. Now, does that mean they won't control Hong Kong? Of course, not. They still have too many levers of power in Hong Kong. And I think what's going to happen is if the virus situation improves, we're going to see more and more protests on the street. Now, I've just written a report I told you about the last time I talked to you. It's coming out this Thursday. It's going to actually be launched this Thursday assessing the protest movement and how all of this is playing out. And my judgment is from talking, I interviewed about 50 people on both sides of the protest. And my judgment is the protest will come back until Beijing understands the situation in Hong Kong and is better advised on how to deal with it. Hong Kong people are going to keep coming back because what they see, what they fear is they're going to just be rolled into China. And then the free open society, one of the freest societies in the world, the various people that do these rankings have ranked for many years, ranked Hong Kong as one of the freest, the freest society in the world. So we're taking a kind of city like New York and turning it over to a communist regime. You're going to expect people to resist. No, but it's part of a long-term plan, isn't it? I mean, in what is it, 2047, the turnover is complete and the autonomy is over, am I right? And so they're taking steps to get there and to squash the protests systematically between now and then. It's not that far away. Well, years ago when this handover was still in the future, I thought one, in fact, the guy who wrote the book, Taipan, what's his name? It skips my mind at the moment, said that China doesn't mind having democracy as long as it knows the outcome ahead of time. And so I think this is sort of the spirit in which they approach Hong Kong, that it should be a manipulable democracy. And then the 50 years of Deng Xiaoping himself said that it need not end in 50 years, that it could be renewed. So Beijing wants to put it in a position to get it renewed because Hong Kong is a huge cash cow. It makes huge amounts of money. Over half of the outside investment in Hong Kong, the companies listed on the stock exchange and so on, are mainland companies. So the mainland, a lot of investors around the world don't really want to invest in the China-I-Stock exchange. So mainland companies that want to get investment go to Hong Kong. So I think in 2047, it's going to be quite difficult, China, to just roll up the legal common law system in Hong Kong and turn it into the same legal system as the rest of China. So China has a huge investment in having just two systems continued. But even today, I was reading in the South China Morning Post, one of the Beijing foreign office guys in Hong Kong was telling us how all of us don't understand one country, two systems, that it depends on one system. And that's the mainland system and that everything is subordinate to that. And he was arguing that the foreign people also, like myself, reasonably don't understand the basic law, that it's, you know, it is what we say it is, you know, kind of thing. And many of my colleagues and myself have written for years, I've written countless upheads and articles and now a report that's coming out in two days' time to offer what I think is a sensible interpretation of the Hong Kong basic law. What it in effect has to mean, if it really wants to maintain Hong Kong's free society and rule of law, that the interpretation that Beijing bureaucrats want to put on it is simply not sustainable. It would kill Hong Kong. And so the Hong Kong government is under Beijing's thumb. So it's really civil society in Hong Kong that's willing to stand up and defend Hong Kong from this offense, this undermining of the very foundations of this society. Well, you know, in the dark side of taking hard positions against Hong Kong is the same as it was in 1997, that the innovative people, the financial wizards in Hong Kong would leave, they would go elsewhere in the world. And Hong Kong would lose its, you know, lose its mojo, lose its ability to serve as a channel for capital into China. And that still exists. And that would exist in 2047. So I'm wondering, I'm wondering whether you think that this is a, you know, this is sort of a temporary thing. And that maybe it lives only with Xi Jinping. And when he's out of office, which may take a while, but when he's out of office sometime prior to 2047, things will be kinder and gentler. Is that possible? It's hard to say because as you know, he revised the Constitution to make himself potentially the president for life and the head of the Communist Party as well. And so he's going to be around for a long time and the longer he's around more, he can stack the deck with people from his, you know, to share his beliefs. There's a kind of belief in the, in, at his, he has and that his supporters have that China's success depends on the Communist Party. So that if you have to be ruthless to keep the Communist Party in power, that that's a patriotic thing to do. Now, many of us may judge that situation quite differently and we could point out that when the Communist Party was unconstrained during the, you know, the Great Leap Forward in the 50s and then through the Cultural Revolution, you know, statistics on the Communist Party's achievement was that about 47 million people died prematurely under Communist rule. And the figures vary from 35 to 47 million. I mean, that's, you know, if that were of another ethnic group, it would be the largest genocide in the history of mankind. The only question is whether that's genocide when it's your own, you know, ethnic group that's being killed. So this extremism of the party, when it was not liberalizing, it was left a horrible track record. And so now China's had all this success. Is it because of the Communist Party or is it because the Communist Party sort of reformed itself into a kind of liberal model, at least when it comes to the economy? And of course, that's the case. China's rapid growth of China's one of the poorest countries on earth when Deng Xiaoping launched the, you know, open policy and the reform. And so it's the open policy and reform. It's the free market. It's these things that have been the measure of success for the Communist Party in China. And it right now seems to be turning back from that. And its economy for the first time in 30 years was, you know, lost over the last quarter. Of course, the Coronavirus had a lot to do with that, but it had been heading south now for a couple of years. So as Xi Jinping tightens the reins on China, and what he's done is there was a movement in the early period towards private enterprise. And he's now tried to move that all back into state-owned enterprises. And so state-owned enterprises are very, very easily subject to corruption because officials control them. And so the kind of role that we've seen from the Communist Party, I mean, they think it's indispensable. I think we could question that, that China really is at a stage now where reform would be really essential if it wants to move forward from this sort of middle level, a level of development to, you know, a fully developed economy. Yeah, but that's not happening. And I think the word that I catch on what you said was that there are being Xi Jinping and the people around him are being ruthless. They're being ruthless about Coronavirus. Here we have a deadly virus. They've had millions of people involved and infected. And the whole country is teeter-tottering on it. And now there's a reinfection in the north, am I right? Meanwhile, he is doing terrible things with the Uyghurs. And he's diminishing civil rights. He's human rights. He's using surveillance and technology to track people whether he needs to or not. His response to the pandemic and Wuhan has been over way beyond what he really needed to do. And he's hurt a lot of people. Then we find last weekend that he's doing this thing in Hong Kong when Hong Kong also has a Coronavirus issue. I mean, he's taking advantage. It's kind of a shot and froid thing. He's taking advantage of the misfortune of others. He's moving in. So you say ruthless. It all sounds very ruthless to me. So what motivates that? I mean, there's a certain ethic involved that's hard to wrap around. Right. Of course, it's this belief that China's success depends on Communist Party and its rule, which I tried to call it the question a moment ago. And I think when it comes to the virus, the biggest weakness, shall we say, of Communist rule in China was made evident as it was with SARS. And that is that the system is top down and people near the bottom who want to have a bright future in the party in the party and in government pretty much misrepresent what's going on and try to hide any mistakes that are made so that they are not called out on it. And that's what's happened with these viruses. That's what happened with contamination of baby formula milk and other things in China as the system is inherently prone to hide its problems. Amartya Sena, I think was the great thinker on this years ago when he said there was never a famine in a democracy. And he was arguing essentially that the reason isn't that democracy is so great. I mean, sometimes we're pretty bad, but the one thing we have is open debate. And so when people are starving, some people used to say, well, we don't need free speech when we're hungry. We need to eat. Well, you need to be able to tell people you're hungry. And that's free speech is very important to making sure people eat. And it the same applies to bringing attention to things like pandemic viruses and stuff. And what happened in this case is in the early phase, they were even punishing people for exposing the virus. And Hong Kong got a bit caught in this as well, because our chief executive initially didn't want to offend China by blocking people from the mainland coming in. And so she was kind of selectively blocking people, but not doing it very well until some of the frontline workers went on strike to demand that things steps be taken. And when they were taken, Hong Kong is one of the bright spots now in the global story about the pandemic, that the various low levels, there's no lockdown in Hong Kong. It's just tracing of the virus and so on. So when Hong Kong is not under the thumb of Beijing, Hong Kong operates pretty well. Well, but the reality is, if they go out in the street, if they protest, I'm sure the people of Hong Kong realize there's a certain risk in that, a risk of reinfection. Masks are no massive. You have all those people in the street, as there were in previous protests, there's going to be a contagion going on. How do you think they're going to react to that? Yeah, well, there's a law now on declaration. I actually have to check and see really the past in ordinance or it was a some kind of official declaration, but anyhow, they're barring people from gathering in groups. So that any protests that you would not be able to get a permit for a protest now, what permits in Hong Kong are in the form of no objection to the requested protest, you won't be able to get that now. And so they have the protests that we saw up until early this year have been more or less suspended. There was one episode in late February where some of the frontline activists went to the street and 115 of them were promptly arrested. But for the most part, ordinary folks, the millions that came to the street to support the demands of the protesters are not going to go to the street. That Hong Kong society is the best thing about Hong Kong. Yeah, well, but if they do go to the street without a permit, there'll be more arrests and there'll be more people charged with violating the gathering rules and including the political gathering rules. And then we'll have a lot of trials and I worry about the 15, they get caught up in this, they'll be tried, they might be sent to jail. What's going to happen with the 15 who are arrested and the others who might be arrested between now and September elections? Well, most of them, the 15 were charged with unlawful assembly. And since most of them have no record of previous arrests, I suspect that in a short jail term that might be imposed for unlawful assembly, I'm not sure of the number of months that's the maximum sentence, but that's the lesser charge. Now, we don't know if they'll come up with more charges because with the umbrella movement leaders of 2014 and 15, they charged them with incitement, a kind of incitement charge, which was a common law crime to nuisance. And there's no statute on the book for this. And unlike the US, under the British common law system, there still can be some common law crimes, which are crimes based on case law, as we mean when we say common law crimes. And so they were charged with these nuisance crimes and wound up with 16 months of jail. One of them's appealing and the other completed his sentence. So, and one was an elder who was not made to go to jail. So this is, there is a potential for greater charges, but I think it's pretty hard because most of the people in this case have been people who merely showed up at the protest because the young people were organizing and not these older people. So I really think it's just Beijing's attempt to send a message and it's sending it via the people who are most prominent that it knows of. And that's kind of why I suspect the police are taking direction from Beijing. And I don't know how that would be given, but it must be. There was a lot of suspicion during these recent protests, given the heavy handed approach of the police. And many of them having now been trained on the mainland that there is a sort of sense that the police are taking their guidance from mainland public security. There's some allegations that the Hong Kong government doesn't even control the police. So we'll see where all this goes. But that's the kind of charges that they've leveled, which is unlawful assembly. Well, we will see. And I hope we can come back and talk to you some more about it, Michael, because this isn't over. In many ways, it's just beginning. And as the global pandemic is just beginning and although for a moment Hong Kong may be okay and with a flattened curve, who knows how that will change and who knows how the moves in the cat and mouse game by Beijing will change. So I'm so glad we have the opportunity to talk to you. And I look forward to doing it again soon. Thank you, Michael. Thank you for sharing it. Hopefully in Hawaii one of these days. That would be fine. We can do that here too, you know. But remember, for the moment we have a lockdown. I know. That's my home, Hawaii, as you know. So I didn't go back because of all the difficult travel restrictions. But now one point will get me back in your studio. You'll be back in your own studio. Thank you. Michael Davis, thank you so much. Aloha. Stay safe.