American Thought Leaders - 45 Hongkongers, 250 Years: The Grim Realities of Hong Kong’s Political Trials–Mark Clifford

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2Forty-five key figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement were recently sentenced to up to 10 years each. More than 1,900 political prisoners have been convicted and imprisoned in Hong Kong in the last five years. Thousands more are simply being held without bail for years on end. About 40 percent of Hong Kong’s entire prison population is being held without a conviction.“They haven’t even taken the trouble to convict these people in a kangaroo court,” says Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.Clifford has lived in Asia since the late 1980s and witnessed Hong Kong’s transformation from a largely free society in 1997, to an increasingly repressive one. He previously served as editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council.He’s the author of multiple books, including “Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World” and most recently “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Hong Kong, once celebrated for its economic freedom and rule of law, has now become a key node for authoritarian regimes to evade sanctions, Clifford says. According to a report by Samuel Bickett, Hong Kong has become an indispensable location for the transfer of money, military technology, and prohibited products to Russia, Iran, and North Korea.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

45 Hong Kong Democrats were sentenced to a total of almost 250 years in prison. For what? Because they held an election primary to try to get the strongest candidates for a city council. Most of them have been held in jail even before they were convicted, and now they've gotten sentences up to 10 years each. Mark Clifford has lived in Asia since the late 1980s and served as editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council. He witnessed Hong Kong's transformation from a largely free society in 1997 to an

increasingly repressive one, especially after the 2019 imposition of its national security law. What we've seen is Hong Kong go from being a place that would welcome western business to one that's increasingly become a kind of rogue state that is home to smuggling of a lot of high-tech equipment that's most notably and worryingly going into the Russian war effort in Ukraine. Now he's president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong. He's the author of multiple books, including most recently The Troublemaker, a biography of Apple Daily's billionaire founder, Jimmy Lai. He said, I would rather be hanging dead from a lamppost in central Hong Kong

than to give the Chinese communists the satisfaction of saying that I ran away. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekiel. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of this podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse, job numbers are a lot worse than previously forecast, and many Americans are worried about a coming recession. But there is one way to protect your savings. American Hartford Gold makes it simple and easy to diversify your savings and retirement accounts with physical gold and silver. With one short phone call, they can have physical gold and silver delivered right to your door or inside your RRA or 401k. American Hartford Gold is one of the

highest rated firms in the country with an A-plus rating from the Better Business Bureau and thousands of satisfied clients. If you call them right now, they'll give you up to $2,500 of free Thank you. 855-866-5532. Again, that's 855-862-3333. Mark Clifford, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Terrific to be here and thanks for your interest. Well, it's high time. I mean, you've written enormously on issues that are very deeply important to me. So why don't I just jump in with something. Just two weeks prior to the election, President Trump indicated that he wanted to get a certain man named Jimmy Lai out of prison in Hong Kong. So here we are. What do you think the likelihood of that is? Well, I think the odds are increasingly good. President-elect Trump has promised to get Jimmy Lai out. He said it would be easy, 100 percent guaranteed that he could get him out.

And I think that's a pretty powerful statement when the president of the most powerful country in the world says he's going to work to get a political prisoner out of jail. And I think there's other areas where we're starting to see some momentum. Jimmy Lai is a British citizen. And UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told General Secretary Xi Jinping that he wanted Jimmy Lai out of prison. So I think we're seeing the kind of top-level engagement that we have to see to get Jimmy freed. But does Jimmy really want to leave Hong Kong? Because everything I've been reading in your book

and everything I've heard him talk about, I mean, he made a profound statement by not leaving, which he could have very easily to Britain or wherever he wanted to, really. But he stayed. Jimmy is willing to leave. I believe that he'd like to leave and he would leave Hong Kong and go live abroad. As I said, he's a UK citizen. But I think it's not up to him. I think he's living the credo that says, I can't decide when I'm going to be physically free. That's up to Xi Jinping and my Chinese Communist Party captors. I can live as a free man in prison, and I think that he is living as a free man in prison. And I think he'll take what comes.

If he has to die in prison, he'll die in prison. But I think he would like to spend his last years with his family in freedom. Well, and things maybe changed a little bit since the election because there was this mass sentencing. And I want to dive into that. Like what actually happened? And when these sorts of things happen, my sense is that sometimes it's to kind of hide the details a bit, right? But the details are actually quite stark and shocking. It is shocking. 45 Hong Kong Democrats were sentenced to a total of almost 250 years in prison. For what? Because they held an election primary to try to get the strongest candidates for a city council. So think of this. These are people are trying to work

within the system, work within the basic law, which is the mini-constitution laid down by China to govern Hong Kong. They were playing by the rules, but the Chinese Communist Party didn't like the fact that they were getting too much support. So they had a dawn raid four years ago. They've had a prolonged trial. Most of them have been held in jail even before they were convicted. And now they've gotten sentences up to 10 years each, as I said, a total of almost 250 years in all. I mean, it's outrageous that you would take some of the best and brightest, most passionate of your citizens who were working nonviolently legally within a system and lock them up. But the actual numbers of the people that have been basically through this Hong Kong legal system for similar type transgressions, basically, you know, political activity or advocating for freedom, frankly, is actually much larger than that, right? It's unbelievable. More

than 1,900 political prisoners have been convicted and been jailed in the last five years. It's up there with Myanmar or Belarus in terms of the growth, the numbers of political prisoners. I mean, 10 years ago, Hong Kong had no political prisoners. And, you know, you look at now, almost 2,000 people. But it goes beyond that. More than 10,000 people have political charges hanging over their heads. Over 3,000 prisoners are being held in Hong Kong before they've been convicted. They're basically political prisoners, but they haven't been convicted. They're just being held without bail for years and years on end. About 40% of the people in the Hong Kong prison system right now are being held, what they say, on remand. They're being held without bail, but without being convicted. I mean, this is the kind of behavior

you expect from a totalitarian state, not from a place that calls itself a global business center. This is actually a huge number. This is something I didn't realize. You're basically telling me that almost half of the entire Hong Kong prison population is basically innocent people. Yeah, well, it isn't until proven guilty, and they haven't been proven guilty, and they're just being held behind bars. But proven guilty of what? Yeah, even if they were proven guilty. They haven't even gone through a sham trial. I mean, almost everybody is convicted, but they haven't even taken the trouble to convict these people in a kangaroo court.

They're just holding them, and it's years on end now. Let's talk a little bit about your background. You know, I put together a few notes for myself. You know, you have been, I guess, deeply involved with Hong Kong, in Hong Kong, for a very long time. Right now, you're the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong here in D.C. You were executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council, right? You were the South China Morning Post chief editor? Editor-in-chief, yeah. You've been writing, thinking, and you got a PhD from the region and many other things. So how long have you been working there, or how long did you work there?

Why did you leave? And how has it changed? Wow, a lot of questions. I was in the region for 33 years. I'm kind of an accidental Asia person. I was a business and finance and economic journalist who was lucky enough to have a fellowship at Columbia University in New York and then be hired by the Far Eastern Economic Review and sent to Seoul, South Korea in 1987, just as

the country was about to start its process of democratization. I saw South Korea go from more or less a military dictatorship to this vibrant democracy that it is today. I saw the neighboring island of Taiwan go from martial law, again, to a robust democracy. And so I was lucky enough to witness extraordinary changes in Asia on the political side and, of course, on the economic side. So I watched China rise. I wrote a book with the head of the World Trade Organization when China got into the WTO. And so I was really optimistic about the ability of Asia and Asian countries to keep growing economically

and also to transform themselves politically and socially. And some places work better than others. South Korea and Taiwan are the shining examples, and China's unfortunately the laggard. It's been a tremendous disappointment to see China actually going backwards. It's much less free than it was even in the early 1990s when I first started going there. You know, I think we're going to have to do another episode on the pros and cons of China having been welcomed into the WTO, of course, with the huge U.S. support. It's the only reason it happened. But that's a topic for a different day. You've been described also as an accidental activist,

I think, because for most of your time there, you were actively very neutral, if I recall. But then things changed in 2019, the year I went there myself. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I was a journalist. I mean, journalists, whatever their feelings are, have to be neutral. I never marched in a demonstration in Hong Kong. Whatever my feelings were, were my feelings. And I ran the Asia Business Council. It's a group of chairmen and CEOs. I was the editor-in-chief of the two English-language newspapers in Hong Kong. But in 2019, things changed, and that's the first time.

June 9, 2019 was the first time that I ever marched in a demonstration in Hong Kong. And it was against the extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kongers to be sent to the mainland to face so-called justice in the Chinese courts. And I, like millions of other Hong Kong people, were out in the streets that summer peacefully protesting against that legislation and for more accountability, more democracy, more transparency in the Hong Kong government. It just, push came to shove. Things came to a crisis point in Hong Kong. And I decided that I needed to take very, very small actions, really. Then I came to the States in 2020. And I was on the board of directors of Next Digital, which publishes Jimmy Lai's,

the company he started, Apple Daily newspaper. And unfortunately, many of my colleagues, including Jimmy, ended up in jail, and the newspaper was shut down forcibly by the government. And one thing led to another, and a group of us decided we were outside of Hong Kong, but we needed to do what we could to keep shining a light on Hong Kong and keep protecting freedom in Hong Kong to the extent we could. We haven't been as successful as we would have liked. I mean, there's not a lot of freedom left in Hong Kong right now. we haven't been as successful as we would have liked. I mean, there's not a lot of freedom left in Hong Kong right now. So let's talk about this a little bit. In fact, we hung on at the Epoch

Times. We hung on with an office just until quite recently where we had to close it as well. I was there in 2019, and this was just before the national security law came down. And I'm going to get you also later to kind of just remind us what exactly that is, because I think if we both went to Hong Kong today, we could actually be charged for doing what we're doing right now under the national security law, if I'm not mistaken. But so I interviewed a number of people there. I mean, Cardinal Zen, who I've always had this incredible admiration for,

with a quiet man, who's also quite unrelenting in his support of the Hong Kong people. Leung Kwok Hung, I always forget his name, of course. Long Hair, colloquially known as Long Hair. Alvin Yeung and Benny Tai, who got the longest sentence in this recent sentencing that happened that we were just describing. So I wanted to comment on a few things that they told me. Benny basically told me that he saw Hong Kong as the forefront of a new Cold War, basically, this conflict between authoritarian and democratic values or freedom. Why do you call it a new Cold War?

I think it's to compare with the last Cold War between the USSR and the United States. China is one of the most powerful authoritarian regimes in the world and surely the United States and with the European countries representing or leading the world of freedom and democracy. So it's now Hong Kong is in some way caught in this new Cold War that Hong Kong, maybe unexpected that Hong Kong is itself not yet a democratic place and also a very small place, only a city with a population of seven million. But now we are kind of raised to a very high profile

that the trade war between China and US, and also it's not merely a, not just a trade war. I think the trade war is more than a trade war between China and the US. And also it's not merely a, not just a trade war. I think the trade war is more than a trade war we have seen now. And so that's why we use the term that the nuclear war that Hong Kong is now kind of caught in between. So what do you think? Well, Hong Kong is definitely on the front lines. Its role historically has always been a meeting point or almost like a chamber between East and West, where it was a great laboratory for freedom in China and was really the freest place in the Chinese world. And

I think now it's very interesting. Benny's comments, I think, are quite prescient because what we've seen is Hong Kong go from being a place that would welcome Western business, was a safe place for Western capital, to one that's increasingly become a kind of rogue state that is home to smuggling of a lot of high-tech equipment that's most notably and worryingly going into the Russian war effort in Ukraine. So Hong Kong has really gone to the dark side. But I also think it's important in this new Cold War sense, because we need to stand strong. We need to stand firm in Hong Kong to the extent we can and preserve the freedoms, not let the world forget Hong Kong. Because if they do, it simply encourages Xi Jinping

and the Chinese Communist Party to go to other places, notably next stop, Taiwan. But I think the entire East Asian region is really at risk. I'm not kind of trying to reinvent the domino theory that American planners talked about during the Vietnam War days, but I do think it's important to hold the line for democracy and freedom to the extent that we can. Clearly, there are PLA troops in Hong Kong. Hong Kong is now part of the PRC, the People's Republic of China, which, by the way, it never was before. I mean, it was part of a different China, just as Taiwan has never been part of the PRC, and I hope

it never will be. But it's kind of the canary in the coal mine. And if China is allowed to break its promises to the international community with impunity, as it is doing in Hong Kong, it's a bad sign for all of us. China promised under an international treaty lodged at the United Nations, the Sino-British Declaration, that it would allow Hong Kong's freedoms to remain for at least 50 more years after the handover in 1997.

It promised the Hong Kong people, under the basic law that China itself wrote that these freedoms would not only continue but would be extended and broadened, that we would move towards universal suffrage in Hong Kong. I mean, the Hong Kong people really just were asking to elect their mayor and their city council. These people like Benny Tai and the others that were sentenced to almost 250 years, they were simply trying to work within the basic law and to extend the freedoms and to work towards full democracy, which China itself promised.

And now China's just gone back on those promises. I think it tells us that China's claims to want a rules-based international order are hollow. They're nonsense. They can't be trusted. Long Hair, in the interview I did with him, he was expecting Hong Kong to become a kind of an Orwellian society with surveillance and propaganda. Hong Kong will become an Orwellian society gradually. So how has that manifested since then? Another prescient guy you interviewed, because I think that's exactly what's happening.

We're seeing more surveillance and we're just seeing crackdowns on the most almost innocent signs of, I don't even want to say opposition, somebody wearing a T-shirt that authorities don't like, somebody that doesn't look like they're paying enough respect and attention to the Chinese national anthem. I mean, it really is like an Orwellian kind of society. You need to clap and cheer no matter what you think. We have the Hong Kong

authorities trying to get Glory to Hong Kong, which is the sort of unofficial anthem of the protest movement, taken off even international platforms like YouTube and Apple iTunes. So I think it's just unbelievable how far Hong Kong has fallen and how fast. Maybe if you could just update me on this situation. So Cardinal Zen was not sentenced now. He was sentenced earlier, and I believe he's out on conditional release or something like this. But what is the status with him?

Because what he told me was that it was interesting. He's always so understated in some ways, right? And he said, it'll just become another Chinese city. It's a war because they are so determined. And we are worried because we are only midway to the end of the 50 years. So if now they have already taken away all the liberties, what remains at the end? We are going to become just like any city in China. And we know what happened there. He was booked, he was arrested, he was tried, and he was convicted.

But whether it was on account of his age or his international stature or the fact that the optics of jailing a Catholic, senior Catholic leader would be very, very bad. He's been allowed to stay out of prison on condition of good behavior and so I think it's unlikely that authorities will put him behind bars. Is Hong Kong becoming another Chinese city? It's pretty bad but it's pretty bad in the mainland. It's you know looking at different shades of black I guess in that sense. There are some things which are still better in Hong Kong.

The media has a little more freedom. Even court trials are still open, which they aren't in the mainland. I was interested to read a mainland commentator say how great the national security law was because people would have the right to be convicted in open court. So the supposition is

that you'll be convicted. There's about a 97% conviction rate. They made a mistake with two guys recently, and somehow they were innocent. But the expectation is that people will be convicted. But this mainland authority was acting as if it was some great benefit to Hong Kong people that they would have the right to appear in open court, which it is. I don't mean to denigrate that. It's very important that we're able to see the trial of Jimmy Lai, the trial of the Hong Kong 45 and others, which is not the case in the mainland. I wonder how long that's going to be the case in Hong Kong, though. And another gentleman that I interviewed, Alvin Yeung, his key point was one country,

two systems. We have to maintain that. We deserve universal suffrage. And this is squarely within the spirit of one country, two systems. We are not demanding something that we do not deserve in the first place. We are not asking for something that Beijing never promised. Fought hard, got five years in prison for his efforts. I should actually remind people, so Benny got 10 years, long hair, seven.

Cardinal, thankfully, is not in prison. But he was sentenced to several years. Right, right, right, exactly. I mean, what is it that really made you change your mind in 2019 and just decide that you really had to take a position? Because something really had shifted, obviously, for you to make that shift. Yeah, it's a really good question. Why did I and a couple million other Hong Kong people go out?

I think it just felt that this was the final straw and this was going to be the final battle. And I don't think many of us were under great illusions that we were going to somehow usher in an era of democracy. But as Jimmy Lai said, I'll paraphrase it, but something to the effect of, you know, we don't know if we can change anything. We don't even have to be optimistic we can change anything. But if we don't try, we're definitely not going to change anything. And so I think there was just the feeling we had to act. This idea that Hong Kongers could be shipped across the border for whatever reason to face what passes for justice in mainland China was just too much.

I mean, the business community was very, well, quietly, but very much opposed to this. If you're a Hong Kong businessman, and most of them are doing business in China, and you run afoul of somebody in a, you know, could be an interior province, they talk to the local judicial authorities and the party secretary, and next thing you know, you've got a warrant out for your arrest, and they grab you out of Hong Kong and send you to interior China where you're going to face a kangaroo court. I mean, this is like way too much. It was just a bridge too far. And I don't think the Hong Kong government was listening to its people. I don't think the Hong Kong government has any real understanding

of the Hong Kong people. It never has during my time there. The elites are so out of touch in Hong Kong. And I think they completely, completely underestimated the response this was going to get. Yet some of them, like for example, Alvin, he was the legislator, right? And so there was some kind of semblance of a democratic process. Absolutely.

I mean, the legislative council was set up, it was deliberately designed so that the pan-Democrats, the Democratic camp, broadly speaking, small-D Democrat, couldn't get a majority and couldn't have any power. But in every single territory-wide election, from the first one in 1991 under British colonial rule to the last election in 2019 after this incredible summer and autumn of protests and often even violent or vandalism against property. These elections in 2019,

in all of these elections, roughly six out of 10 people voted for the pan-democratic camp. I mean, Hong Kongers want freedom. They want democracy. And I think it's one reason I remain guardedly optimistic about Hong Kong. I think even today, most Hong Kongers, given the choice, want freedom, want democracy. They don't like living under this clown dictatorship. Well, one of the very kind of touching anecdotes in your book, The Troublemaker, we're going to talk about Jimmy Lai now, right? Is Jimmy talking to Natan Sharansky? I loved seeing that he wrote the introduction, you know, one of my favorite interviews I think I've done on this show. He says that Jimmy Lai said he's nonetheless, despite all of this, he believes in the victory of the good. So let's talk about The Troublemaker.

It's a biography of Jimmy that goes back to this boy born two years before the revolution in China into a family that, like so many millions of others, was just destroyed by the revolution. The family was split apart. They lost their property. They lost their property. They lost their money. Father went off to Hong Kong. Half siblings melted into Guangzhou in southern China. And Jimmy was left with his twin sister, a sister who was

two years older who was mentally challenged, disabled, and his mother, who was in and out of labor camps because she'd been married to a rich guy. She'd been a peasant, but somehow she was a class enemy now and had to wear the dunce's cap and apologize. Jimmy left. He never made it through primary school. The guy, he was just hustling. He was selling scrap metal. He was working the black market. He worked as a porter. If he found a field mouse, caught a mouse in the field and grilled it, he thought this was a great delicacy. I mean, he was hungry all the time.

And he got a one-way permit to go to Macau and never looked back. Came stowed away and washed up in Hong Kong. Made it to his aunt and uncle's house. They were living even worse than he was in China. They didn't even have room for him to sleep on the floor. They were in such a small shanty hut. They got him to a factory. He slept in the factory that first night, woke up the next day and there was more food than he could eat. Just the smell of the congee and the rice and the dough. Food was freedom to him. Then he became one of Hong Kong's most successful

entrepreneurs, first making sweaters, then setting up a chain of retail clothing stores. And he was a typical hard-charging Hong Kong businessman who split his time between New York and Hong Kong. And then Tiananmen Square came in 1989. He was not political, but he was enormously encouraged by Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in the 1980s.

And he decided to support. He thought political reform would follow. And he started making t-shirts with a picture of the student leaders on them, sold them in his Giordano retail stores, sent the money up to Beijing, sent tents and other material up there, and was really supporting the students, probably the most proactive of any of the Hong Kong businessmen. I mean, a lot of people were doing it quietly.

He was out front, which is his character. And then, of course, the crackdown came, the crushing of the movement. And he's just looking at this global spectacle. The whole world's watching Beijing. CNN had just started. And so Jimmy thought, I can do this. We're going to have more media. Media now has technological possibilities of the sort that CNN shows. Transparency. We're going to shine a spotlight on the Chinese Communist Party. Pretty soon, it'll just be gone. So he set up first a magazine. He knew nothing about media. He was about to set up a Chinese fast food chain, and

he decided to go into media. But he's an incredible entrepreneur, and he set up first a magazine and then a newspaper in Hong Kong. A decade later, he did the same thing in Taiwan. Within 20 years, he had one of the biggest and most powerful Chinese language media enterprises in the world. And it's interesting that you said crackdown. and part of that crackdown was a massacre. And the CCP has been working extremely hard to erase that history.

It's fascinating how important that is to them. In fact, I know many people who came from the mainland who had never heard of it, basically younger people. Before we continue, comment on this, because obviously economics was part of your background. There's this idea that you keep hearing in the Chinese state media about the CCP has raised millions out of poverty. So it's actually a big success. How do you view that? Well, I think we have to give China credit for allowing its own people to raise themselves out of poverty. Let's not forget, though, that something like 45 million people died during

the ironically named Great Leap Forward. 45 million people died. So yes, hundreds of millions got out of poverty, but was it worth sacrificing even one person, let alone 45 million? Of course, tens of millions of others died needlessly for political reasons during the Maoist period. So China has sacrificed tens of millions of its own people, wasted decades, wasted enormous human potential. You know, we can talk about whether it's forced abortions or deaths in prison or suicides or the famine. So, yeah, I don't want to sniff or denigrate the fact that China has done well economically, but we have to look at the tremendous cost, the wasted years, the wasted human potential.

They were actually taken to a very low place by the regime, right, to start off with. So that's also an element here, I think. Yeah, I think people, I mean, this is part of the Chinese Communist propaganda, is that China was in chaos, it was warlords. In fact, the Republican period before 1949, the Civil War notwithstanding, the Japanese invasion notwithstanding, was an era of enormous social and economic and even political progress in China. I mean, cities were electrified. Women went to school.

I mean, there were opportunities. And that was all shut down. That was killed after 1949. So I think that the CCP has peddled a lot of erroneous myths about some of its successes. I would also say that although they like to claim that authoritarian governments are uniquely capable of producing economic growth, most authoritarian governments don't. There's not a strong correlation between authoritarianism and economic growth. And I think we may now be seeing the kind of the end of the

road for the so-called Chinese miracle. And we're seeing economic growth slowing dramatically. This is for both kind of short-term cyclical reasons, but I also think for structural reasons that reflect the kind of weird, twisted Marxist conception of economics that Xi Jinping and the Communist Party hold, which just says, invest, invest, invest. Build things. Build railroads that nobody uses. Build a property that's empty.

I will see. We'll see what happens. But I'm not an optimist on the Chinese economy going forward. DAVID FREEMAN, JR.: It's not by accident that this is happening at the same time that the West, or in particular America, which has put so much blood and treasure, frankly, both into supporting communist China in effect,

is kind of souring on that reality. It took 40 years, but some people have argued that it's that investment that actually fueled that entire miracle. Investment and the technology transfer and the know-how that went along with it. I think it's interesting. The West and the rest of the world continue to buy increasing amounts of Chinese goods. And without access to export markets, China's economy is really going to be in deep trouble because it isn't able to generate domestic growth. That's partly because Chinese leaders don't like the idea of consumption.

They're kind of very ascetic and they're almost Leninist in their approach to economics. And they want to control state companies. So they've taken great companies like Alibaba or Tencent, I mean social media companies, and basically wrecked them. And so they've taken real growth engines and undercut them. They've undercut the private entrepreneurial sector, which was really driving the economy. And I don't see under Xi Jinping them going back to a more entrepreneurial way of running the economy, which, you know, as an American, I'm fine, you know, but I think I'm really surprised that they're doing

such a bad job of managing their economy. MARK MIRCHANDANI- Well, Mark, I'm going to have to have you back for another episode about all these things, because I can't help but notice, as we're talking here, that two of the companies they haven't undercut are Huawei and TikTok. But we can- MARK MIRCHANDANI- What a coincidence.

MARK MIRCHANDANI- Right. And perhaps because those two companies have, let's say, a national security or an industrial policy interest by the regime. Yeah. I want to go back to Jimmy. You've known him for years. Just maybe tell me a little bit about how you met him and just a bit more about his character because he's very unusual, very uncompromising. And as I mentioned earlier, he really could have left before this all came down, but he said he wouldn't. And why? Yeah, I mean, I've never met anybody like him in my life. And that was clear from the first time I met him in 1993 when I asked

if I could meet him to interview him, to profile him for the Far Eastern Economic Review. And he invited me over to his house for lunch. OK, sometimes you have a meeting with a CEO, and that's when very occasionally they might invite you to their residence. But he also cooked lunch for me. He made a nice wok of Chinese stir-fried rice with some shrimp in it.

And we had a great afternoon in his villa overlooking the Hong Kong Harbor up in the Kowloon Hills. This was definitely a different guy. And we talked a lot about the clothing company, but also about media. But from the beginning, I could just see this was a guy with ideas of his own. One of the ones that really struck me that afternoon was that he was going to start a newspaper. And wow, you know, the Chinese were coming in four years, and you're going to start a newspaper? Explain why. And he's a businessman first. And this is very interesting about media. It was always a business opportunity for him. And he said,

well, the Hong Kong people believe in democracy. We just had these elections in 91, and six out of ten people had voted for the pro-democracy camp. Surprising, even shocking, many people. So six out of ten people want democracy, and yet all the other newspapers are pulling back from that. They're really clipping their wings. And Jimmy realized he basically had a kind of protective moat around his business. This kind of thing Warren Buffett talks about when he thinks about investing in businesses. You want a business that's got some protection. A moat is how Buffett talks about it. And Jimmy had a moat around his

business. His business was selling democracy and nobody else, he didn't even need the moat. Nobody else wanted to come near that. And so he kind of had the field to himself. So very sharp, very innovative businessman. And yeah, never forgot that first conversation. It's sort of marketing 101 or blue ocean strategy or something like this, right? Yeah.

Yeah. Very interesting. And just clarify what you mean the Chinese are coming in four years. This was 1993. And in 1997, the British colonial authorities were going to leave, pull down their flag and turn the place over to China, to the People's Republic of China, ultimately to the Chinese Communist Party.

So everybody, and Tiananmen of course had happened four years earlier. So we were basically halfway between Tiananmen and the handover. And many people, especially business people, people with money, were moving their assets out. Often were moving themselves out, were getting foreign passports, were, I think, quite rightly concerned about the coming of the Chinese Communist Party. Many of them or their parents had fled mainland China, especially the Shanghai business elite, and come to Hong Kong, and now China was coming after them. And Jimmy had fled China. He'd fled the hunger, the privation, the political chaos,

the humiliation of seeing his mother have to confess and crawl in front of other people because she's supposedly some kind of class enemy. Jimmy witnessed political executions when he was a little kid. I mean, he saw bad stuff. And yet he said, I'm going to believe the promises China made. Again, he was very enamored of Deng Xiaoping and the economic reforms. And he thought that was going to carry things and that we could see the leopard change spots,

so to speak. I mean, he's admitted, of course, he was wildly optimistic, but that was his thinking, that we need something, we need to try. We might fail, we need to try. And if we don't try, we'll never know. By 1997, in June 1997, the same month that the handover was June 30, 1997. I saw him on stage in a large panel at the Grand Hyatt Ballroom in Hong Kong. And he started crying.

And he said, I think I'm going to go to jail. Honestly, I thought it was a little bit over the top, a little melodramatic. He was right. He was just 20 years, a little bit more than 20 years early. Fascinating. But what did he see then that made him react that way? Well, I think that he had the hope and the optimism,

and he'd seen the Deng Xiaoping reforms. On the other hand, he had the searing childhood memories of knowing the cruelty and the, yeah, just the cruelty and irrationality of the, I mean, the gratuitous cruelty of the Chinese Communist Party. I'm just thinking of this famous Schultz-Heatson quote, right, that the line between good and evil cuts through every human heart. And so on one side he had this huge optimism.

On the other side he had this stark reality that he was facing. And, of course, there was this promise that the one country, two systems would be maintained. How long did it last? So I think in the early years, the Chinese authorities really did make a good faith effort to carry out this promise of one country, two systems. It's all the People's Republic of China, but Hong Kong would have a quote unquote high degree of autonomy. That meant its own currency, its own tax system, its own government administration, its own way of doing things, its own anti-corruption body, and above all, what Jimmy always calls universal human values or Western values, free speech, rule of law, freedom of press, freedom of assembly, all the freedoms we take

for granted in an open society. In those first few years, at least, there really was a good faith effort. And I think a real turning point came in 2003 when authorities tried to push through quite a sweeping and draconian national security law. And I think that's when things, that was 2003, so six years later. And that was a real turning point. It was a turning point for Jimmy personally, for his media, Apple Daily and Next Magazine. And that set the stage for further conflict because the Chinese communists weren't going to back down.

They weren't going to keep to their promises. I think China naively felt that somehow the Hong Kong people just fall in line, that like everybody else, they could use carrots and kind of cajole them into submission. They thought if that didn't work, a little light bullying will work. And in the end, they had to beat and destroy the place because Hong Kong people and people like Jimmy, but millions of others, really did have a backbone and really wanted to stand up for the core values of Hong Kong, for all of Hong Kong's freedoms. Hong Kong really was one of the freest, economically one of the freest places anywhere.

Possibly in the world they saw indices that ranked it number one. And that's really all gone as well, isn't it? Well, I think that there's just clearly not the same degree of freedom in Hong Kong economically or politically. The political crackdown has been much more severe. But let's just take the example of Next Digital, the company that I was on the board of that was founded by Jimmy and that published Apple Daily, the newspaper, and Next magazine. One day, the newspaper, and Next magazine.

One day, the board gets a letter from the Secretary for Security, John Lee, and he says to the directors, basically, I think you've broken the law. I'm going to freeze your bank accounts. No court order. Our only recourse was to write him a letter of appeal, which he more or less brushed off. And so we were shut down. We couldn't pay our staff. We couldn't pay our electricity bill.

We couldn't pay our telephone bill. We couldn't get ink or paper to print the newspaper. And the banks refused to process payments from our 600,000 digital subscribers. So all of a sudden, we're just out of business. And there was no court order. They've still never proven that we did anything wrong. I guess that's part of this trial right now that's going on with Jimmy. But you can just shut a company down.

And they've done similar things with other companies that they haven't liked their actions or they just felt that the owners were too pro-democracy. So when you start having a political test to be able to run a business, that's not the freest economy in the world anymore. So with all of this, and frankly, the writing was on the wall, I think, for the Apple Daily and Next Digital,

why did Jimmy stay? Jimmy's a guy with principles. He's a guy who does what he believes is right. He's a man of incredible strength. He was forged in fires that I think you and I and most people can barely imagine. The childhood poverty, the hunger, the escape to Hong Kong as a stowaway, living as basically a child laborer, living in a factory, and building his way to great wealth just on his own efforts.

It wasn't some favors from the government or anybody else. So he has enormous self-confidence, belief in his own capacities. And he didn't want to give the case, he said to associates, many people suggested he leave. I mean, everybody knew that he was a marked man. I mean, there were, from the time of the handover, there were rumors that there was a secret list. And when that came out, Jimmy Lai was number one on it. There's a list of people who are going to be rounded up. I mean, it was almost like the national security law was written to convict Jimmy. So there's no question but that he was going to jail. And he said to one friend that I've talked to, he said,

I would rather be hanging from a lamppost in central, hanging dead from a lamppost in central Hong Kong, than to give the communists, the Chinese communists, the satisfaction of saying that I ran away. I'm not going to run away. And he and Cardinal Zen used to kind of half seriously, but actually really seriously, say, wouldn't it be great to die in prison, to really, really show how much we believe in freedom, how much we believe in our faith. And I think he's underpinned. I mean, he's an

interesting combination. He's got wealth and a media mean, he's an interesting combination. He's got wealth and a media platform that allows him to have an international reach. He's obviously one of the great global exponents of the free press. And he's a man of deep, deep Catholic faith who's buttressed above all by his wife, Teresa. And so he has principles. And I think the Chinese have, communist Chinese have never, in their 75 years of running China, run across somebody quite like Jimmy Lai. There are a lot of many incredibly brave dissidents,

political prisoners, but none of them have had the wealth and the international profile that Jimmy's had buttressed with this deep spiritual faith that means he's ready to die if he has to. Now, I deeply, of course, everybody who knows him, you know, prays that Xi Jinping realizes the folly of letting somebody like Jimmy spend his last years in prison and allows him to go free and spend his last years with his family. Well, it was amazing to read some of the anecdotes that you provide through your very, very long relationship with him. I hope you have great success with your book.

You wrote another book earlier, right? And this one, I can't, you know, we've been talking about people being prescient. The book title, I want to make sure I get it right, it's Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World. And you're talking about what China's crackdown reveals about the plans to end freedom everywhere. And you would say, well, you know, isn't this a little bombastic? Isn't this a little exaggerating? You know, what's your reaction? bombastic? Isn't this a little exaggerating?

What's your reaction? I'm sure people say that, right? What's your reaction? They did when the book first came out in early 2022. Then Russia invaded Ukraine a couple weeks later, and I didn't hear that too much anymore because I think more and more people understood that when you have dictators like Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, that if you don't stop them, they just keep going. And I think Hong Kong is an example where we need to try to stop Xi Jinping and make him realize that there's a high cost to pay when he breaks his promises. Because if we don't start enacting a cost, then Xi Jinping is going to go into Taiwan next. And after that, I think he'll try to increasingly assert Chinese influence throughout East Asia, as is already happening with the Philippines, notably, but also Japan

in disputed waters. But also Vietnam, Indonesia are having issues, but right now it's with the Philippines. But I also think there's a different issue, which is it's a kind of blueprint for taking a free society like Taiwan, for example, and shutting it down. How do you actually shut the newspapers down? Well, you bully people, you brow-pee people, you control people, you make them afraid so that they basically censor themselves. And then every once in a while, you run across a really stubborn guy like Jimmy that won't stop. And then you shut his bank accounts down, you throw his staff in jail.

So it's interesting to see the kind of methods, the tricks of the trade. It's almost like it's version 1.0 of totalitarianism in how you almost overnight destroy a free and open society. Yeah, and I worry that too many people took the absolute wrong lessons from these processes. There's even encroachments in free societies of this nature. Well, I think that's absolutely true. I think people don't understand the degree to which

the Chinese Communist Party has, if I can use the word, penetrated even open society. So certainly smaller countries throughout Europe have an enormous amount of pressure. It usually starts economically, but it's often through political bullying on the part of China, as we do in the U. the US. So there are often pressures on schools not to invite certain people, or to show certain films, or to teach about the truth about Tibet, or Xinjiang, or Hong Kong, or Taiwan. So it's outrageous to me that even in some of the largest, most open economies and freest societies in the world, we're getting

these kinds of pressures. Right now, they're mostly directed at ethnic Chinese. And a lot of them are subjected to harassment, surveillance, intimidation, even in the United States and the UK in ways that I think would shock most Americans and British people. Well, and this is very interesting, right? Because people have asked me this question,

are you worried? And usually my answer is basically what you said. I said, I mean, yeah, I've been worried at different times for different reasons, but I'm much more worried about my Chinese colleagues. And how do you read why that's actually the case? Because the regime definitely feels a lot more, let me use the word, ownership over Chinese, whether they're from Taiwan or from the mainland here in America or in Canada, especially. And so how do you read that? Well, I mean, it's a racist regime, right?

I mean, we have to be honest. For example, Jimmy Lai isn't given consular access despite the fact that he's a British citizen. So UK diplomats don't get access to him in prison of the sort that's promised by China under international treaties because they see him as a Chinese citizen because he's born in China. This has nothing to do with law. He's never had a Chinese passport. And I think there's a very racist assumption. But I also think it's easier because I have no Chinese colleagues who've been harassed and they've got family in Hong Kong or in China, so it's a lot easier to squeeze people when there are actually other people that you can hurt.

I mean, I might make a choice to do something, but if, well, my mother were being harassed, I might have to think about it a little bit differently. And so Chinese officials and, you know, some of their operatives here know how to work in the Chinese community more effectively, know how to put pressure points on businesses or families. We may see a point at which they do start harassing Caucasians and non-Chinese. Benedict Rogers, who runs Hong Kong Watch in London, was subject to some really quite insistent kind of harassment in London. I'm sure you know him. I mean, they harassed his neighbors. They had all sorts of dirty tricks, letters. They very condescendingly offered to buy his British neighbors some beer

if they would support him. They, at belief's end may have even harassed his mother. I think most worryingly, Benedict himself got an official letter from Hong Kong authorities threatening him under the national security law if he didn't take down his website. Now, the NSL provides for a minimum penalty of 10 years, and it's up to life imprisonment. So that's a pretty intense thing to tell a guy who's sitting in London that he's broken Hong Kong law because they don't like a British-based website he's running. You mentioned this letter that he got, Benedict Rogers, who's been on the show a number of times. He's been sanctioned by the Chinese regime. And so here in America, of course, there's quite a number of people who have been as well,

including the incoming Secretary of State, Marco Rubio. And so what does that actually mean in terms of being able to conduct business in the context of dealing with the Chinese regime, in your view? Marco Rubio in particular? Yeah, I think this is going to be very interesting because the Chinese defense minister, a previous defense minister, they seem to go through them pretty quickly these days, but had been sanctioned by the by the US and so in response the Chinese refused to let the US Defense Secretary

Lloyd Austin meet his Chinese counterpart. So you know it's weird the way that it cuts. Why you would do that, I don't know. John Lee, the mayor, the chief executive of Hong Kong, has been sanctioned by U.S. authorities. He wasn't allowed to come to the APEC meeting in San Francisco. I think if the Chinese decide they don't want to meet with Marco Rubio, they'll find it's kind of hard to conduct diplomacy with the U.S., but it's kind of up to them if they want to keep him on the sanctions list or not. I'd like to see some kind of movement that would see Hong Kong prisoners, including Jimmy Lai, of course, released, and perhaps there'd be some easing on, you know,

sanctions might be a good place to start. So maybe we could see a little bit of softening on sanctions on both sides, some prisoner releases. I mean, a kind of good faith effort to set the tone for the new administration. I mean, there does have to be a way to move forward. And we do have to have dialogue with Chinese counterparts. And it would seem rather short-sighted on the part of the Chinese not to want to talk to the Secretary of State. Well, but what do you think the implications are of making a choice, obviously with the full knowledge that there's a sanction that exists? It seems like he made that choice intentionally. I guess that's what I'm getting at. Senator Rubio, I'm delighted with Senator Rubio's choice. He's been a really consistent supporter for Hong Kong freedom

and for standing up to China. And I'm sure that President-elect Trump understands that he will robustly defend American interests, defend freedom around the world, and defend the freedom of people in Hong Kong and China. You know, something you mentioned at the beginning of the interview I want to touch on a little bit, because this has become, I guess, a big issue in the reading that I'm doing and the research that I'm doing, but not generally known writ large. Basically, there's been increasing sanctioning of Chinese companies that are, for example, producing things through slave labor in Xinjiang and other places. One of the ways of evading these sanctions has been something called transshipment.

And this is something that's happening both to get goods into Russia. There's been huge kind of spikes in goods passing through to countries that are kind of neighboring Russia. And similarly, that's a similar situation with communist China. So tell me a little bit about that, because you alluded to this at the beginning of the interview. Well, Hong Kong has always been a place that stuff gets shipped through. And sometimes that's good, and sometimes it's bad. But I mean, there's always been an illicit part

of Hong Kong's entrepot role. There's been a lot of money laundering, a lot of technology that's gone through there. Back in the Korean War, when the US sanctioned China and the UN sanctioned China, Hong Kong was a very important place for technology and money to get into China. I think that's come back.

Its history, in a way, has come full circle. And Hong Kong has now taken on a very important role, not only for China, but for authoritarian regimes everywhere, notably North authoritarian regimes everywhere, notably North Korea, Russia, Iran, and Myanmar. My colleague Sam Bickett, Samuel Bickett, who was unjustly imprisoned in Hong Kong for several months, did a remarkable report earlier this year

for the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation looking at Hong Kong's role in illicit shipments, trans shipments. We found an extraordinary amount of evidence showing that military use technologies were being shipped into Hong Kong at an increasing rate for the most part, and often were being shipped, just turned around and shipped to Russia, often to sanctioned companies in Russia. There's no willingness, quite the contrary, on the part of Hong Kong authorities to enforce U.S. sanctions. I think that John Lee, the chief executive of Hong Kong, basically gave a green light to sanctions evaders,

to black marketeers, when a Russian yacht of a sanctioned oligarch sailed into the Hong Kong Harbor at the end of 2022, and Alexei Mordashov's yacht. And there's a lot of attention globally on the fact that this guy's mega yacht was in Hong Kong when yachts like this were being seized around the world. John Lee publicly stood up and said, we're not going to enforce U.S. sanctions. It's like green light to sanctions evaders. And we've seen it in, I think, just a horrible way. We have ghost ships that are Hong Kong registered that are, I say ghost ships because they try to hide themselves, that are being used to send oil to North Korea to keep that horrible regime going. We're seeing arms and we're seeing Iranian oil being sold through Hong Kong, money and arms going to Iran. So Hong Kong has become, on a global scale, has become a

very, very important node for shipping money and especially, I think more worryingly, technology. It's being used to kill people in Ukraine and elsewhere. This may sound a little bit grim, but is Hong Kong over? Well, this phase of Hong Kong is over. And I think as long as Xi Jinping is in power and continues his current policies, Hong Kong is going

to be facing a pretty grim time as a business center, obviously as a social center, and certainly in terms of political freedom. I think that the Hong Kong people in their DNA have a strong component of freedom, the freedom gene, I guess. And I think that that's a core part. It's a core value in Hong Kong. It's a core part of who Hong Kong people are. Six out of ten have always voted for pro-democracy candidates. And I have to believe that in their hearts, the people of Hong Kong are living and waiting for another day. When they get the chance, they'll be out on the streets again. They'll be, maybe they won't need to be out in the streets. They can just elect their city council

and get on with their business and be free again, have free newspapers, free media, freedom of worship, and all the freedoms that they were promised by China. I remember the Berlin Wall. I'd lived in Berlin. It was an ugly, horrible thing that separated the city and the country, and we don't have a Berlin Wall anymore. I think that China will change. China won't go on forever in this horrible form. We really will see a rejuvenated, great China and a free China. And we've seen in Taiwan an example of what a modern, prosperous China could look like. This is a subject for perhaps even another interview, but given your depth of insight into the region and understanding the relationship between China and Hong Kong and how it's been absorbed to some very significant extent now, including

the systems of surveillance and propaganda and everything else, what is your advice on to the incoming U.S. administration and how to approach this? Is there something to be done with the Hong Kong people in particular? Is it a broad effort on approaching communist China? I mean, just very simple ideas here. I think we should keep the focus on Hong Kong. We shouldn't let Hong Kong be subsumed totally by the broader U.S.-China relationship. And there's been some disappointment on the part

of many Hong Kong activists that the Biden administration, for all its talk, has been pretty light on Hong Kong and seems to be more concerned about the broader relationship, particularly in the wake of the spy balloon incident, where there was so much effort just in kind of having talks, just for the sake of talks. And so Janet Yellen and others would go and try to make nice for the Chinese. I don't think making nice for the Chinese really has paid a lot of dividends. And I think Hong Kong has kind of been lost a little bit. So I would hope that with Senator Rubio becoming Secretary of State

Rubio, we hope that you'll have somebody in there who really understands the importance of Hong Kong. It's not my job. I'm not a diplomat. I'm not a negotiator. But I do think that there's room for some opening. Xi Jinping needs to understand that there is an off ramp and that Hong Kong is going to be a real difficult issue for Sino-US relations, really for relations with the whole world, and that if he eases off a little bit on Hong Kong, that it could really go a long way in terms of restoring more trust in the Chinese administration.

And I think the best way to do that would be to start releasing some political prisoners. Maybe you see some people on both sides being swapped. I don't know. Maybe there's some easing of those sanctions. I mean, really baby steps that aren't going to cost Xi Jinping anything in terms of national security. Jimmy Lai is not going to be turning on the presses of Apple Daily again. I mean, it's just not going to happen. I mean, Jimmy wants to live quietly. I think others who are in prison I can't really speak for, but they're not going to be marching in the streets. They're not going to be two million people out in the streets anytime

soon. So ease off a little bit on Hong Kong as a way of rebuilding trust and confidence on the part of Beijing's policies. And I think for the US administration, keep up the pressure, keep the focus, keep the pressure, realize that for all of our extraordinary military, that our moral force, our soft power, the human rights exponents of American values are something that the Chinese can't

match. We need to use that more effectively. Yeah, that's interesting because that brings me back to this question. I don't know if we answered it fully, but this is, you know, Jimmy saying that he believes in the ultimate victory of the good. Are you with him on this? Well, I'm an optimistic American. I don't know if I believe in the ultimate victory,

but I do believe that history does tend to bend towards justice and that people have such an innate capacity for good. And for, I mean, to Solzhenitsyn's point, good and evil, the line does run through everyone, but I think there's a very strong propensity for altruism, for justice, you know, the line does run through everyone. But I think there's a very strong propensity, you know, for altruism, for justice, for freedom. And that there's it's hard to keep that down. Look at how hard Xi Jinping has to work just to keep people from holding up blank pieces of paper, you know, for singing songs, for not singing songs. You know, the Chinese national anthem enough.

I mean, people want to be free. And so, yeah, I do believe that there is a human impulsion towards freedom and justice and good. Is it always realized? Of course not. Well, Mark Clifford, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your knowledge, your interest, and of course, your commitment to freedom. Thank you all for joining Mark Clifford and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Janja Kelek.