Grubstakers - Episode 93: The Hong Kong Protests and Li Ka-Shing feat. Matthew Dagher-Margosian

Episode Date: August 27, 2019

This week we are joined by Matthew Dagher-Margosian to have an in-depth look into the Hong Kong protests, as well as a profile on Chinese billionaire Li Ka-Shing (profile begins at 52 minute mark) After the episode Matthew Dagher-Margosian graciously sent us an additional bonus audio on the triads and their involvement on the protests. Links to the journalists and activists Matt mentioned on our show as well as his information below. Asia Art Tours: Asiaarttours.com Youtube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC37MGjfMHBkusWRESbxn5pA Podcast (The Arts of Travel): https://player.whooshkaa.com/shows/the-arts-of-travel (also on iTunes and Spotify) Hong Kong Folks to Follow: @rosemarieho_ @HongKongHermit @wilfredchan @promiseli_ @hyjpang @maryhui Good Web Articles to follow or follow up on chuangcn.org/2019/06/anti-extradition-translations/ https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/hong-kongs-fight-for-life https://crimethinc.com/2019/06/22/hong-kong-anarchists-in-the-resistance-to-the-extradition-bill-an-interview https://multimedia.scmp.com/infographics/news/hong-kong/article/3016815/hong-kong-protest-city/index.html https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/08/hong-kong-protest-china-carrie-lam-umbrella-movement-extradition-bill-xi-jinping https://www.timeout.com/hong-kong/blog/tycoons-the-men-who-rule-hong-kong-100416 Literature- Land and the Ruling Class- Alice Poon A Concise History of Hong Kong- John Carroll https://www.researchgate.net/publication/235956977_Neoliberalism_and_Privatization_in_Hong_Kong_after_the_1997_Financial_Crisis Between Colonizers: Hong Kong's Postcolonial Self-Writing in the 1990s - Rey Chow

First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world. Berlusconi flatly denies that any mafia money helped him begin a start to this. I have always had a thing for black people. I like black people. These stories are funnier than the jokes you can tell. I said, what the fuck is a brain scientist? I was like, that's not a real job. Tell me the truth. But anyway. In 5, 4, 3, 2... Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. In 5, 4, 3, 2, Show love.

Hello, welcome back to Grubstakers, the podcast about billionaires. My name is Sean P. McCarthy, and I'm joined here by everyone I know. Steve Jeffries. Andy Palmer. Yogi Poyol. And so this week, we're talking about the ongoing protests in Hong Kong, and we're also talking about Li Ka-shing, the richest man in Hong Kong. Forbes estimates his net worth at about $27.7 billion.

But so we wanted to just kind of get more background on what has been going on in Hong Kong. And we're very thrilled to be joined by an expert on this subject. We're joined by Matt Dagger-Margosian, who is the founder of Asian Art Tours. Matt, thank you for being with us. Sure. I am the founder of Asian Art Tours. Matt, thank you for being with us. Sure. I am the founder of Asia Art Tours. I was too timid to correct you. It's okay. It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah. And so Matt, for I guess people who are not familiar with Asia Art Tours and just the work that you've done, what is your familiarity with Hong Kong? What has made you an expert on this subject? Sure. Well, so I guess Asia Art Tours broadly, we are annoyed with the Orientalism of the modern travel industry. If you looked at any advertisement for a country, typically you'll only see the dominant cultural forms of it being represented rather than its myriad

complexities. So this can come across in sort of semi-harmless ways. China, we'd think of the pandas and the Great Wall. Thailand, we'd think of Buddhas and temples. But it also can come off in much more sort of insidious ways, where in many ways it's sort of muting the possibility of other cultures coming forward muting a lot of voices and saying this is the culture of the country and so I wanted to push back on that and this sort of theme of orientalism that we push back on in our work at Asia Art Tour is trying to bring predominant artists and academics who are not part of the sort of hegemonic discourse of how countries try to present themselves. On the other side of the Great Wall, I guess you could think of it, there's like a vast China that most people don't know. And so in Hong Kong, this idea of Orientalism has been bothering me for some time as I saw the Hong Kong protests. It's about I think close to the 79th day of them but when

they first started off no one was asking questions about them and when they were they were doing the narrating. So many of my favorite podcasts, my favorite sort of left media, they would either ignore the protests or they would narrate for their audiences what was going on rather than get someone from Hong Kong or even better, a myriad of perspectives from Hong Kong, because this is a really complex movement, on their shows to talk about what was happening. So I think very gently, I would say this is sort of a form of Orientalism whenever the West tries to narrate for the East. And really me being here, I hope is just as an ambassador to get people on Twitter, on podcasts, in these various forms of media to look at their own practice, say, could we do better? And if so, to reach out to those people in Hong Kong who are very easy to reach on Twitter, on their own leftist magazines, which they do in multilingual publications for

an English audience, to reach out and talk to them rather than have the story told to them. Because what I loved about the left is that it told me a different story compared to what was going on in mainstream media. And it's made me a lot happier person. So what I'm here to do is be an ambassador to sort of ask the US left to do the same. Do what you did for us. You told us these different stories about capitalism and government and how we could have a better and more just world. Carry that forward for Hong Kong and reach out to them rather than ignoring them or doing the narrating for them, which, again, I think is a bit orientalist. Now, before we go any further, I think the first question many of our listeners will have for you is, are you or have you ever been employed

by the U.S. State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Endowment for Democracy, or any NGO that is a front for the CIA? No, I have a horrible background. I almost flunked out of Western Michigan University, which is really hard to do. I lucked into luxury travel because it was during sort of the boom period of that operation. But for most of my life, no, I was an inner city school teacher. I taught in the Bronx for a couple years at a failing well one year actually and then I was fired at a school I then taught in Detroit couldn't hold on to that job was just sort of drifting around got a job in luxury travel moved out to China found it really complicated and interesting and challenging picked

up enough of the language that I could be a guide. Spent some time in China being a guide in sort of the hinterlands, taking people hiking and cycling and doing outdoorsy stuff. And then I moved to Taiwan, where I live currently. Okay. And did you used to, or are you currently in contact with Jeffrey Epstein? No. Did you used to or are you currently in contact with Jeffrey Epstein? No, I only had in my area of luxury travel. I had one billionaire, but he was just sort of a docile, nerdy billionaire.

And he just wanted to take his kids to do science activities in Japan. But no, no contact with horrible monsters who should rot in Japan. But no contact with horrible monsters who should rot in hell. Well, that's good to know. Recently or as far as I know in my past work in luxury travel. You're sure it was Japan, not the U.S. Virgin Islands?

It was Japan. There were a lot of requests for ryokans and skiing in Hokkaido. All right. And so what I wanted to ask you was, because I don't really know that much about the Hong Kong protests. I know what I see on the news. You know, just yesterday they were cutting down the smart camera streetlights or whatever. There's more tear gas and violence. I guess I wanted you to explain as best as you could, I know it's a big topic,

why these protests are going on in Hong Kong, and feel free to provide as much background as possible for just listeners from the West who really don't know as much about the history, myself included. Sure. Can I give just a super quick shout-out to some also good sources for listeners after I'm done explaining? Of course. Rosemary Ho is a badass

motherfucker who's based out of New York. She's written for The Nation. She wrote a great piece asking why the U.S. left is ignoring what's going on in Hong Kong, she might be a good person to interview. Wilfred Chen is a brilliant scholar who has been going back and forth between Taiwan and Hong Kong, trying to connect the protest to issues of police abolition, tendencies within anarchism of abolishing hierarchies, looking at various class conflicts. He can be found on Twitter. Promise Lee has been doing really great work about how activists are trying to get migrant workers, of which they're a significant portion of Hong Kong's labor force, involved in the protests. They can be found on Twitter just by searching for

Promise Lee. And I would also really like to shout out New Bloom Magazine based out of Taiwan, who's been doing really excellent work in between China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong of doing bilingual publications for an audience. The founder is bilingual between Mandarin and English. So those are all excellent sources for people who, if they are interested in what I have to say, you know, let's have less white people. Even Armenians. Let's even have less Armenians. We never really know what the hell we are. I still ask my dad

if I have privilege, and he goes, you know. Anyway, so Armenian issues aside. You lived 100 years ago, but things have changed. Yeah. We'll link those people you talked about into the description of our bio so people can check them out as well. Yeah, that'd be great. All right, so the Hong Kong protests, to push back on the narrative I've seen,

some people who I think do very good work in Latin America but are out of their depths when it comes to Hong Kong. So Hong Kong, a popular misconception about it is that it's English-speaking. It is relatively if you're in the middle class or upper class, but to understand a lot of what's going on in the front line of the protests in various media, you need to be bilingual with Chinese. Hong Kong, the majority of the population speaks Cantonese, which I don't know if we would call it a dialect of Mandarin, but it's a separate, it's a, it's a subsection of that sort of language family. And also a lot of the writing is in Chinese. So there's been a lot of press from left adjacent media that does a very good job, again, I think, in Latin America, but is a bit out of its depths in Hong Kong.

So the first thing to understand is you can't look at these as a singular event. Pressure has been building in Hong Kong since the handover from the United Kingdom to China in 1997. The tensions within Hong Kong are built into its founding laws. It has what's called sort of a mini-constitution or basic law, where China, in assuring Britain during Britain handing Hong Kong back over to China, assured that it would run the territory as one country, two systems, and that the people of Hong Kong would eventually have universal voting rights, the right to pick their representatives and having a sort of a functional democracy. But China, being the sneaky country that it is, all countries are sneaky, all major powers anyway,

has chosen to interpret that as it sees fit. So what that looks like in Hong Kong is that the leader, who is a woman called Carrie Lam, who we'll get to shortly, is not elected by the people. Carrie Lam is selected by a 1,200-member committee called the Election Committee, who are a group of representatives from various trades, as well as individual business owners and tycoons you have to be selected by an individual sector of an organization so let's say you work in education you might be able to be on the election committee if within your

various trade you're selected to go on it. The point, though, is that this committee is who votes for Hong Kong's chief executive, their leader. And the candidates to be Hong Kong's chief executive have to be approved by Beijing. So you are not able to be the leader of Hong Kong unless Beijing, prior to you going forward before the election committee deems you all right. Hong Kong also has a tension built into its government through how it's structured its legislature. So it has a very bizarre governmental system where half of its representatives, sort of what we would think of as congressmen, you elect based on sort of their geographic distribution. So if there are, you know, a million people living in Mong Kok, they would get to select out of the population of Hong Kong a proportional number of representatives. That's half of the legislature.

The other half of the legislature is what's known as functional constituencies. So those are representatives, again, chosen by various trade groups to sit in sort of a bicameral house, half the house being sort of democratically elected representatives, half the house being these functional constituencies.

In order for any law to pass within Hong Kong, there needs to be a majority in each side of this House, in this bisected House. I'm not sure bicameral is the correct term. So you need a majority from the elected representatives, You need a majority from the functional constituency, except when the CEO of Hong Kong introduces a bill. Then you need a simple majority to get any bill passed. Okay, so why did I explain all of this? It's because for Hong Kong, if you live in Hong Kong, number one, this puts incredible strain on people's daily life. There's no real sense that they have a democracy in terms of their chief executive. There's also no real sense that even when a bill goes through the normal, what they call LegCo, their legislative council, that it is again sort of a rigged game where half the representatives, they don't even get to choose. And so ever since Hong Kong has been handed over

from Britain to Beijing, you've seen a series of protests that sort of represent a lot of this tension. In 2003 would be the start of a large scalescale series of protests, but in 1989 there was a million point five march against Tiananmen Square. But in 2003 you started to see protests essentially over this tension of this one country, two systems that introduces a very flawed, stillborn democracy that doesn't really work and is not really a democracy in any sense of the word. We have protests in 2003 about sedition laws so these were laws where Beijing was probably feeling the waters because again they have back channels to every sort of section of

Hong Kong government where they introduced a bill, if you criticize China, basically you could be prosecuted with very serious laws. Huge protests came out for that. Moving forward then, we started to see protests in 2012 when China again sort of tests the waters and this is probably all very deliberate on the part of their statecraft, sort of seeing how the public reacts and gradually boiling the frog, cooking it faster and faster and faster. In 2012, we see Joshua Wong, who tankies are obsessed with for someone who just seems like a harmless liberal nerd to me. But in 2012, we have Joshua Wong leading the scholarism sort of movement where he and student activists protest the introduction of patriotic material to Hong Kong school systems.

And eventually they get those kicked out. 2014, we start to see really powerful protests, and those would be the Occupy Central protests. Now, those were connected to leaders. There was sort of an informal group of leaders and individuals who emerged out of that who called protests. Eventually, those just sort of fizzled out. After they fizzled out, we had what was known as the Mong Kok fishbowl riots, where we start to see an energy that we can interrogate in these protests that's not positive. It's a very sort of what we would consider in the left right wing energy, where you have sort of a nativist element of Hong Kong, very loudly saying, we, you know, Hong Kong is not China. And you see various tensions within the protest movements roughly around 2014.

Earlier you'll see them in fits and starts, but it really emerges in 2014 during sort of the Mong Kok fishbowl riots when Edward Leung and other sort of far-right people at a Hong Kong mall, they weren't allowing street vendors to sell fish balls and other sort of street food. So they go down there and it becomes just sort of this all-out brawl with the police. How much of a riot it actually was is up for interpretation. If you take sort of, I think, a fuck the police attitude, which is a phrase bandied about now in Hong Kong quite a bit, I think it was just sort of,

you know, a rigged game against Edward Leung. But anyway, he becomes sort of this martyr because he's arrested for participating in these quote-unquote riots, and nativism gains a whole lot of steam. 2016, we see sort of a liberal approach to try to combat Beijing, where you see a lot of individuals, sort of what we would call the pan-democrats, who are libs. They're like less obnoxious Kamala Harris's, basically. They're liberals. Okay, that's how we should think of them in a U.S. sort of context in their politics. We see numerous pan-democrats try to enter LegCo as representative candidates elected by their geographic constituencies, barred for ridiculous reasons when

they're swearing in their oath. We also see this for nativist candidates. Beijing does not like either candidate because they both represent a threat to sort of Hong Kong eventually being absorbed into the government of China. Nativists represent a threat because they want independence for Hong Kong and have a very strong element of trying to forge a Cantonese identity. Pan-Democrats obviously offer a threat because they want to establish democracy and a real universal sovereignty within Hong Kong. Numerous legislators are sort of not allowed to take office for very various bullshit technicalities one of my favorites is they were

reading their oath at six second intervals so they would go like though i but every six seconds just reading saying one word and then the judge said that that rendered it nonsensical and not adhering to the spirit of the oath so just huge amounts of bullshit the liberals and the nativists sort of tried to play beijing's game beijing is still saying fuck you and then sort of things are are building under the surface you know we still have marches every july 1st to sort of ask for universal sovereignty. That's organized by the Civil Human Rights Front. That's how you know these organizations, by the way, the sort of tanky press doesn't know their shit. Joshua Wong is not really affiliated with any organization that can bring out huge amounts of people. He was part of movements in a sort of this liberal face,

but the Civil Humans Right Front is the group that ever since 2003 in that sedition protest I talked to you about when 500,000 people came out to protest, they're the ones who call the march every year, July 1st, to sort of ask for universal suffrage. They're the group who's been organizing the marches for about, you know, bringing out 1 million, 2 million people on certain weekends. They're a loose affiliation of about 50 different organizations. It's very, it is impossible to really say they have a leader. They're this loose association of Christians and

civil rights groups and human rights groups. But when you read these tanky publications about Joshua Wong, that's how you know it's a bunch of bullshit. He is not the person calling these marches. The Civil Humans Rights Front is the one organizing the main marches. And then let's turn to the present, because I'm going to get mad at talking about tankies. So what's happening currently is,

so Carrie Lam is a devious woman. The chief executive of Hong Kong is paid extremely well. I think their annual salary is about 500,000 US. So the idea behind that is to eliminate corruption. If you pay your civil servants extremely well, they won't fuck you over, but it doesn't work. So anyway, Hong Kong tourist is visiting Taiwan with his girlfriend. For reasons that are unclear, he brutally murders her, and then he flees back to Hong Kong. Hong Kong at this time, this would be, I believe in the fall of 2018, I wanna say,

I might be getting that a bit off. Does not have extradition agreements with numerous countries, including Taiwan. So Carrie Lam, from every journalist I've interviewed, this appears to be her trying to brown nose with Beijing. So she uses this murder case, where the murderer cannot be extradited back to Taiwan, to introduce a bill, which essentially would allow Hong Kong to formalize extradition agreements with Taiwan, but also, and this is a big but also, with China. Now, why would that really threaten activists? Well, first, you have to understand most people have very negative impressions of China within Hong Kong. They have been black bagging people, as we might call it in the US, where during this period, roughly, I think 2014 to 2017, snatching various Hong Kong citizens who they viewed as too much of a threat to the Chinese state, most notably several booksellers who were publishing sort of tabloid material about Xi Jinping, and renditioning them back to China.

The other reason, and again, this is more why lefties would care, Hong Kong is a huge hub of NGOs. NGOs are all dead in China under Xi Jinping. No NGOs anymore. So if you want to organize labor, particularly in this region of China, which is a huge hotbed of labor unrest, where there is huge potential to disrupt global supply chains, where there's huge potential to say, fuck you to Apple, or any technology manufacturer that uses the factories in these areas to manufacture components of their electronics with extremely low wage labor. You need NGOs, you need labor organizers. China, you do that, your ass is going to get black bagged. Or you're going to get a very stern talking to saying, if you do this again, we will put you under house arrest, we will arrest you. Don't do this. Do not do labor organizing.

We will fuck you up. But Hong Kong, because it does not have an extradition agreement with China, can act as a hub for labor organizers. So the extradition bill, in terms of why it would scare a lot of human rights groups, civil rights groups, labor organizers, anarchists, of which there's a good contingent in China. Most of the communists are now sort of nationalists. That's a separate issue, is that they could be extradited to China. And then you have just general panic where maybe a

girl is dating a boy. I read this in an anarchist, a Chinese anarchist magazine. It's in English. I can send it to you. Please. He's interviewing people and he's saying he's talking to the girl and she's going, they'll see my nude pictures that I sent to my mainland boyfriend. They're going to extradite me. the region because they have been black bagging people. It's sort of the the the communist who cried wolf where people just do not trust the Chinese government in terms of anything where if they post a picture of Winnie the Pooh as Xi Jinping, where he's been teased because there's a very famous photo of Obama as Tigger and Xi as Winnie the Pooh because he's a bit more portly and jowly than our former Mr. Barack Obama. Oh, yeah. Didn't they try to block the Winnie the Pooh movie for a minute because of that?

They did block the Winnie the Pooh movie. It wasn't for a minute. That shit did not go down. So the Christopher Robin movie. So this basically caused a panic. And the Hong Kong government ever since then has been shooting itself in the foot. There's been a steady escalation of protests, and we could go into the intricacies, but you wanted to talk specifically about last night, and I can, where it's just an escalating cycle of violence, where the only interaction now that people have with their government is through the police. Carrie Lam has basically shut herself

into the legislative compound. They have these special sort of area where they all live, like our Congress, and not talk to anyone, not dialogue with the protesters, not really addressed any questions during press conferences, giving these mealy mouth bullshit answers, refusing to say that the bill is withdrawn. She used this incredibly archaic sort of Cantonese to describe the process that the bill was now under. And the protesters, you know, the journalists when they're interviewing her, I'm sorry, the journalists are just like, can you just say the bill is withdrawn? And she's refusing to say that, and obviously that sort of means she wants to reintroduce it later when things have died down. Right, of course.

And so this has just led to probably what we'd be familiar with in sort of things. mass action on this scale where essentially what happens is this and it's not as sinister again as fucking idiots who only speak spanish and try to report on hong kong make it out to be i'm an organization i'll call a protest it could be uh the protest genuinely will be several different kinds you you might have let's say like an organization. So the teachers, teachers of Hong Kong will all call a protest, or the students of Hong Kong will all call a protest, or a particular trade group of Hong Kong will all call a protest. And they'll be official. They'll apply for a police permit. That permit will be accepted or rejected. Okay, and that'll happen. It might be something like we talked about where the civil human rights front, where it's this sort of pan-organizational group, where they're, again, going through proper channels, but trying to do something not necessarily to represent a trade, but the city itself.

So they're trying to represent, you know, we are Hong Kong, we are against this bill, and getting huge crowds to show their displeasure. So crowds of a million and eight, two million people. Or if you're a tanky all CIA informants who for somehow all decided to come out with their grandmothers and their poodles. Where I think there's a bit of confusion is okay, so well then what, who are these people I'm seeing on the front line waving American flags and so on and so forth? First, Pepe does not have the same connotation in Hong Kong as he does in the U.S. context where it's been adopted by the far right. No. He's

just a fucking frog there still. He hasn't been ruined by fucking assholes. He's still the roommate who pees with his pants down i i don't know the lineage of pepe i just know that within hong kong he's not adopted by you know a far right they have no idea who any of these fucking idiots are right and in a better world neither would we so they they have no connotation or understanding of pepe as something malicious. Second, the groups you see are selective snapshots, where again, if you go on Twitter, and if you want to re-verify it again,

you can then follow it up with people like Austin Ramsey of the New York Times, or the Southern China Morning Post, where it's a communist-owned paper, Jack Ma owns that paper, and they'll share the same shots of where it'll be a very small corner of, let's say, you know, 500,000 people and then some fucking crazy people with flags. They're the Lyndon LaRouche of Hong Kong, right? It's a very small, weird, radicalized group that has very strange ideas about nostalgia.

And also to their, in defense of some of them, they're fucking desperate. They're going up against the number two superpower in the world. They feel the world has abandoned them, especially after having this very weird relationship. We don't really know what it's like to be a colony. We know what it's like to colonize and brutalize people as Americans. But to be a colony is a really weird, strange thing.

And so people have nostalgia for sort of a Britain that never was because they were a colony. And again, I think a lot of American leftists do not understand that. And it's very ignorant. But that's an ignorance that can be explored and remedied and interrogated. These, however leftists have behaved in the U.S. towards Hong Kong, are things they can examine and reform and fix. Okay, but then going back to this, you'll then have what sort of what we call the front line. They're a mix of what I would call anarchists, so people who basically are furious at the living conditions of Hong Kong, which are, as we said, Milton Friedman's wet dream, incredibly low minimum wage, coffin houses, where there's an amazing protest

photo I will send you, where it says essentially $7,000 for a flat every month and you think I'm afraid of a jail cell, which is pretty fucking badass. People living with their parents until their 30s, no job prospects, and now with sort of this existential dread about China taking over their country. So you have this mix of sort of anarchists who will also mix because they are against the state in this case, the sort of Hong Kong government acting as a Vichy France on behalf of China, with sort of right-wing people. So these will be people who, again, we can't fit them perfectly into the u.s right wing but they have a very strong sense of hong kong identity that at times will intermingle with xenophobia so you know um calling mainlanders locusts um there was there was a very disappointing

episode in the hong kong airport i about two weekends ago, where they found an undercover cop from the mainland and beat the shit out of him. They found an undercover reporter from Xinhua Daily, which is a government paper. And they beat the shit out of him and zip-tied his wrists. And he said to them, I love Hong Kong police. You can beat me now. And then they did. And they beat him up but then they released him and and then you just have kids who feel like their future's fucked

where they've never known democracy they've been told by everyone around them they're losing you know sort of their home um where they're they're losing whatever sort of sense of identity that one has. I think we, again, don't really understand how traumatic it is to be colonized twice, in this case by Hong Kong and then another government, China. They have all these competing different influences of, they're incredibly atomized individuals who have to study incredibly hard to work a dead-end job where they would have to save about two decades i think is the average to even consider buying an apartment i think for some people 70 of their income goes to rent hong kong has the

highest jinny coefficient in asia um they don't have a fucking future. So they're out there on the front line being angry at a state that has delivered this reality to them. And they will usually appear after or sort of at the front line of these organized protests. So a neighborhood might call a protest, a trade organization might call a protest, a civil rights group might call a protest. And then at night, when all the sort of the liberals go home, this sort of motley group of, you know, it might be anywhere from 200 to 2,000 hardcore people dressed in tear gas masks, carrying umbrellas, just tonight beating the shit out of police will appear and sort of say, fuck you to the state. We want our five demands met. There are five key demands of the protests now.

Those demands are, let me pull them up just really quick, and then I'm moving to the end here of the speech. Sorry if I talk like a robot. No, this is fantastic. Thank you for laying this all out. So the five demands. Oh, sorry. Go ahead. Just the last thing. So basically where they're at.

And again, these demands keep evolving as the Hong Kong government keeps shooting itself in the foot, as police brutality keeps escalating, as Carrie Lam refuses to dialogue. The demands are the bill must be withdrawn, this extradition bill. Carrie Lam must resign. The government must retract calling the clashes riots. And again, that's about prosecution. If I charge you with rioting, it's a much stiffer sentence than other criminal charges. There must be an independent inquiry into the actions of police. The Hong Kong police have blinded numerous young people, have broken the arms of numerous young people, have sent numerous young people into sort of black sites, black detention sites where lawyers can't reach them. And then five, everyone arrested must be freed. So that's where we're at sort of with the Hong Kong protests in terms of these demands. And it appears that the government is not going to give an inch unless it's basically brought to the bargaining table, like how you could argue, I guess, the black

radicals of the 60s and 70s eventually forced the government to make a bargain with more sort of liberal organizations to push back against the excesses of the racism of the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. So I've been looking at some of the footage from the people fighting back from police, and I mean, I'm struck by how daring it is that they're like taking baseball bats to cops against their nightsticks. One thing that worries me, though, is could is it possible that this could become like another tiananmen square oh i mean it's hard to say um huge amounts of money are in hong kong's property i believe it's the most densely populated urban area in the world so if you try to do a

tiananmen you're probably going to kill a lot of innocent people. You're going to damage tons of property and you're going to lead to huge amounts of, you're going to create a bubble that's going to crash. And then depending on how much Chinese capital is in Hong Kong at this time, and it's difficult to say, the government of China has clamped down on capital flight from China recently but there's still tons of money in Hong Kong all the money in Hong Kong is based on property that's what everyone invests in because the the interest rates there are so low that but you can get a return of about 11 to 13 percent during the bubble cycles of Hong Kong real estate. So if you do a Tiananmen,

you're going to create, you're going to do a huge real estate crash where the economy of Hong Kong will collapse. You'll lose the support of all the billionaires. You'll lose the support of all the people. You'll be trying to fight a war in the most densely populated urban space in the world. I think strategically it doesn't make sense. I imagine what the party is going to just do because they can throw resource after resource after resource at these protests, and also in the form of paramilitary gangs like triads

who I used to think were cool and now I don't. They're going to try to exhaust these people. They're going to try to demoralize them. They're going to try to shoot them through the eye with beanbag guns like they've done to several protesters. They're going to try to break their arms. They're going to try to get them fired. They got the head of Cathay Pacific's union fired. The head of Cathay Pacific recently had to resign for allowing freedom of speech at his company. They're going to try to exhaust that, is my opinion of what will happen. So the main barrier between this and a Tiananmen Square massacre type situation is property values, is what you're saying.

I don't know. I mean, we just had a monster who molested children for 30 years die without facing justice. I mean, if we want to take a really cynical look at governments, probably, yeah, I don't really think there's a lot of governments

that value human life these days. Probably also part of it, like I said, is capital flight. If you do that to Hong Kong, it'll never recover. All that capital will flow elsewhere. China does care somewhat about its international reputation. It would lead to, I mean, you think the trade war is bad now. If there's footage of you rolling tanks over the skulls of teenage protesters, it's going to lead to huge pressure to make China, again, sort of a pariah government, as I think it has been at

times throughout its history. So there's a lot of collateral consequences, as Eric Holder famously said about why he's a fucking coward and didn't prosecute Wall Street. There's a lot of collateral consequences if you send the army in. Beijing was relatively isolated. It was a small population. And at that time, it was relatively cut off from the rest of the world. China is globalized now. They want to be seen as, you know, the center of the world. And killing a bunch of teenage protesters, I don't think wins more than it loses for them. So do you think that so the 70th anniversary of the People's

Republic of China is coming up on the 1st of October? Do you think that presents like a particular risk to the protesters in terms of Beijing's thinking about like how precisely they should ratchet things up? It's like they don't want to be seen as losing control of what they consider to be one of their provinces. I think that's probably being talked about at really high levels and it would just be speculation on my part. Under Xi Jinping and Eli Friedman, again, if you want someone who's been blessed by Bhaskar Sankara, he has written extensively in Jacobin Magazine about China's basically shifted to sort of a settler colonial capitalism. It's extremely nationalist under Xi Jinping.

There's a variety of historical reasons for that, but nationalism is a huge part of modern Chinese identity under Xi Jinping. So on one hand, I certainly, I do take the nationalism of China seriously. It is something that's very real. You're seeing it at these conflicts at protests worldwide where Hong Kong Cantonese or Taiwanese protesters on one side will be supporting, and also mainland Chinese who have come to oppose their government. That happens everywhere. On one side and the

nationalists on the other. And this is, again, a weird thing that I think we're seeing more. The closer you are to the country, the more likely capital is to reward you in China. So oftentimes, Vancouver is a great example of this. At their protests, they had these inter-country skirmishes, inter-ethnic skirmish, where on one side, Hong Kong, Cantonese, Taiwanese protesters. On the other side, nationalists in China. like a fleet of luxury cars for the Beijing, pro-Beijing protesters with Chinese flags to drive around the pro-Hong Kong protesters. Literal Cadillac communists. Yeah. And so this is something that I'm researching. And again, I think Eli Friedman's work is great. I had him on as a guest. But from my very crude understanding of how things work, the closer you are to nationalism in China, the closer you are to making money or the more likely it is the state will reward you.

And you see that in Hong Kong, where if you're a tycoon, you better toe the line. Or guess what? There's no way in hell you're investing in our country. And again, that's a central tension of the trade war. But within the China-Hong Kong dynamic, it takes on this element of nationalism, where if you don't support the Chinese government, you won't get the rewards of Chinese capital. And something you gestured at earlier and that I found amusing just looking it up is we're kind of talking about Milton Friedman. So if you look up these annual Heritage Foundation or Cato Institute rankings of the most economically free places on earth,

Hong Kong is always either number one or number two, maybe with Switzerland. But also at the same time according to business insider they are literally the number one highest rents in the entire world so try to figure out if those two things are related but i just i found it amusing because that's just how fucking moronic these freedom indexes are you can literally just as long as you change the word tax to rent that means more freedom like as long as you're paying to a private cartel that just doesn't officially call themselves the government, you have extra freedom points on the little annual ranking. Well, I mean, I think Yanis Varoufakis,

who I know oscillates between being cool and being way too much of a liberal for our taste. You know, he had that great quote where he was interviewed by Russell Brand and he said like, economics is a weather report where you make up the weather. So, you know, like how a weather report works is you make a guess

and it may or may not happen. Economics is you make a guess and then that becomes a reality. But just a quick point on Hong Kong neoliberalism, it's complex where generally the state has acted to bolster social reproduction of capitalism. And we can talk about this with Li Ka-shing a bit, because he played a hand in making Hong Kong more what we would think of as just sort of pure evil neoliberalism. Historically, Hong Kong's neoliberalism is just the government will not fuck with capitalism. A lot of that is inherited from its colonial mechanisms. And then over time, a lot of that was just how Hong Kong

capital works. But there's subsidized public health care in Hong Kong. There's huge queues and it needs to be fixed. But, you know, if you can, if you want to go see a doctor, you can. Bernie could go see a doctor in Hong Kong. There are subsidized rents in Hong Kong. Now you have to apply for, there's a very long queue for them, but they still exist. There are subsidized houses that you can own. Again, that's a lottery, but they still exist. There are subsidized houses that you can own. Again, that's a lottery, but they still exist. So Hong Kong capitalists are kind of odd.

Generally, they don't give a shit if the government, except in key instances where it affects their bottom line, they haven't really had multiple points in their history where they've intervened in sort of a Kachian or um i'm trying to think of who would whisper uh who's the fucking economic secretary volker they haven't intervened um through sort of governmental agents to to fuck up uh their economy or to to to control it they've generally let the Hong Kong government create piecemeal social protections that still outstrip what we have in the U.S., the Thunderdome of nations. is a good model than compared to Quinn's Lobodian. And then it's just an asterisk to that. Milton Friedman at times was praised by the Chinese government and was brought into China at multiple points, I believe in the 90s. And they liked some of his economics. There's a great book called, well, it's a good book.

It's, again, kind of dry, called Unlikely Partners by Julian Gertzman that talks about Friedman being sort of this vector of evil that spread in Hong Kong and also in China. I was going to say, I was looking up a chart of Hong Kong rental prices, home prices and rents and like the two the two main waves of protests in the last two years have probably accounted for more uh greater reduction in rents and home prices than the 2009 crash so i mean can i oh please oh well i was just going to say is like if you if you're really concerned about inflation in China, then you should be pro protest, I guess. Well, Hong Kong is weird in its capital in that the government gets about 45 percent of its revenues through taxation and land sales, taxation related to real estate and land sales. So it constantly has this sort of sick incentive to keep real estate prices high. How you do that is you restrict the supply of housing artificially. So right now, if it wanted to, just like if we wanted to snap our fingers into universal health care, we could. Hong Kong could immediately solve its housing crisis um i think like i think

i guess i guess this is to me like a really clear example of how we can solve it without creating any more houses i mean artificial restrictions of housing that's a completely alien concept to us here in new york they haven't been able to build any more units during the protests, arguably, but they've been able to reduce prices by like, I want to say, looking at this chart, about 40% during the two protests. Well, I mean, it is, Hong Kong will have to tackle its monopolists. to the truck that drives to the grocery store, to the grocery store that stocks the food, to the food that you then buy, to the apartment that you bring that food into, that might all be controlled by one tycoon. What the tycoons did basically is once they made a lot of their money through the wave of immigration that occurred during the turmoil in China of the 60s,

which provided them a great opportunity for low wage, no fuss, no muss labor pool, is they moved into property. Once they moved into property, they moved into integrating that property into every aspect of a person's life. So someone like Li Ka-shing, with what he controls, he controls the busiest port in Hong Kong. He controls a duopoly of electricity. Electricity in Hong Kong is provided by two companies, both privately owned. He controls Park and Shop, which is a grocery store triopoly where, that doesn't make sense, a triptych, where he, it's three, two chains account for 70% of the grocery stores in Hong Kong. And then he controls numerous properties throughout the city. And so what ends up happening is just like, you know, people will say,

oh, the Koch brothers, I'll leave that mispronunciation of those fucking evil motherfuckers. They, you know, well, they gave a lot to charity. But the carcinogens that they released and the damage they did with climate change did far more harm than good. Hong Kong's tycoons are very much the same. They often give to charity,

present themselves very humbly in terms of their public demeanor. But by keeping the supply of land, they have huge land banks where they don't build they'll buy up vacant land and then sit on it so property prices can go high and plus their relationship with the government where basically if the government even sniffs at making serious dents into the vacancy rate uh into the rate of housing, where they are saying, we want to introduce a larger supply of housing to bring down property prices, they'll go ballistic. And so, yes,

they will donate a lot to charity, like someone like David Koch. But the sort of carcinogens that they release can be found everywhere from very high electricity prices to inflated rent to inflated food prices to inflated prices on the goods that go into the port because they control these monopolies. And that's sort of how the neoliberalism that how neoliberalism rolls in Hong Kong. It's not that they need to control the government because basically they are the economy. At one point, Li Ka-shing accounted for a third of the value of the entire Hong Kong Stock Exchange. These are lords. These are kings. These are not billionaires in the sense we think of them. They own the land. They own the food that grows on the land, and they own you. Well, that might be a good point to transition into kind of just a short biography of lee kasheng um i read

some of this book asian godfathers by joe studwell and i looked at some forbes articles and it is interesting like you were saying there lee kasheng his foundation is apparently the second largest private foundation in the world after the bill and melinda gates foundation uh they they brag about how they've donated something like 2..6 billion to various charitable, and that's less impressive when you look again at his Forbes net worth as of August 2019, $27.7 billion. Who was that again? Li Ka-shing. My God. Yeah.

He just hung up on us. So Li Ka-shing, again again just a short kind of biography here he's born in uh 1928 in mainland china just from forbes at the age of 12 he fled china with his family this is around 1940 so around the time of the japanese invasion and occupation. Two years after that, his father, who had been a school principal in China, died. And so basically, Li Ka-shing, if you look at, all right, stop. If you look at like Forbes or Fortune or any of these Western press talking about Li Ka-shing, you get this like, really distorted picture of this like completely destitute guy who worked his way up from the bottom and worked i think 16 hour days in a plastics factory but what they don't say is that his rich uncle owned that plastics factory like um just i think we might be mixing

things up my understanding is that he an uncle a watch factory. He married the first cousin of that watch factory. And then he received a loan from that uncle with which to purchase the plastics factory that was the basis of him eventually getting into property. One of us, I think, has our Ghostbusters dreams crossed. But that was my understanding of his sort of little, his not so much rags to riches. Right. No, I think you're probably right there. But yeah, so like his official website brags about him working, like I said, 16 hour days in this plastics factory. But like you were saying, he had a rich uncle and he married his uncle's daughter. And then he got a loan in 1950. He got a loan of about $6,500,

which is today's money, about 70 grand. He got this loan from his uncle and his mother-in-law to start a plastics factory in 1950. And so this plastics factory, it does various things, but they make their initial money like selling plastic flowers. Apparently, those are very popular on foreign markets. And and then what happens in 1967 is there's riots in Hong Kong and he has the capital to buy up a lot of real estate at bargain basement prices. Yeah, Chris Patton, who I'm not fond of,

but he was the last governor of Hong Kong. And he said, you know, Li Ka-shing sort of, he comes across like a genius in some ways. Certainly how he's how a lot of the Hong Kong billionaires scaled up was just they weren't racist. The British, when they were losing control, and when they saw all the natives acting up, they sold their property. They got out. Part of that was after Tiananmen. Part of that was during the riots. But whenever Hong Kong had sort of something that the British couldn't understand, which is you're a colonialist. You're not going to understand any of this. They would sell their property and then Hong Kong local tycoons, Chinese tycoons, would buy it up. And they would scale up their enterprises that way. When everyone else was selling,

especially the British, they would buy it up. So that's a pretty good assessment. I think Li Keqing, it is fair to say, does have business skill. This doesn't make him a good human being, but he's among the most international of the tycoons. He's constantly looked for ways to internationalize his empire. Charity is a fig leaf for oligarchy, as we all know, but I mean, that is something that is better than if you're going to put a cigarette out in my eye, you know, at least give me a dollar bill while you do it. So there is some interesting things to him there,

but he certainly is impressive in his sort of work ethic. He's, he has peculiarities, which we can get into that make him a bit more sympathetic even if we ultimately want to eat him bones and all as we do to all the rich well just a couple other things i found interesting like again if you just kind of look at forbes and fortune and these kind of western profiles you will always hear anecdotes about his um austere lifestyle like he doesn't dress fancy and he talks about he has a 50 watch and it's just funny from this, uh, Joe Studwell book.

Uh, one of his executives, uh, said quote that fucking watch unquote in reference to it. Cause it's just like the same story he always tells again and again. Um, or another point of pride, according to Joe Studwell,

he talks about how he only draws like tiny salaries, like 10,000 Hong Kong dollars from his companies. But this is not mentioned that in Hong Kong there's a tax on salaries, but not on dividends. So it's essentially a tax avoidance incentive to not draw a big salary and draw dividends instead. Right, because salary is taxed. He's trying to like, just sort of like Warren Buffett, He's trying to scream, I'm normal over and over again. Like, look at how look at whatever an average life I have. He sounds like the UCB for.

Well, and that's just like another thing we've we've gone through on this podcast a lot is like, again, I can't really speak to his business acumen. I'm sure he does have some. But, you know, like buying a property on the cheap after riots, like, okay, that's kind of a smart business play, but you need to have the startup capital to be able to do that. Like all of these billionaires had to have the startup capital from somewhere. And like many of them, he just happened to have a rich uncle and a rich mother-in-law who gave him the money to get started, you know? So it's not anyone can do this if they just work hard enough. You have to have the connections. Sure.

I think a lot of it is connections. A lot of it is luck. He's lost a lot of money as well. Whenever there's a property crash, if you don't get out in time, it wipes out huge parts of your net worth. I think he's lost about $3 billion of his holdings since the protest began. He's famously lost huge amounts of money trying to, in various technological ventures, one of them involving 3G. He's lost huge amounts of money investing in Husky, which is, I think, the largest group of tar sands anywhere in the world, in Canada, which has dropped, I think, over 80%

from its peak value. So he's lost money at numerous times throughout his career. But like all sort of tycoons, he has avenues through which he can weather those storms, whereas what will happen for an ordinary Hong Kong person, because as we talked about at one point in this conversation, so many normal Hong Kong sort of middle-class petty bourgeois will invest in property because it's a sort of, it's seen and it's marketed. Again, a lot of the tycoons will own the salespeople who market the property to these people and they'll control the papers, a lot of what the papers can and can't say about them, so they'll make it seem like a surefire investment. Hong Kong is full of Lyle Landleys, basically, is what I'm getting at,

saying buy property, it's a safe investment. They'll lose all their money. And there's horror stories throughout Hong Kong of whenever these bubbles burst that have been artificially inflated by Hong Kong tyong tycoon saying it's a good time to invest this is safe nothing's going to happen they lose their life savings and you'll you'll read stories all the time if a couple will buy property it'll be their first property they've heard it's a surefire investment the property bubble bursts the tycoons are fine because they sell high, buy low. But what happens to that person is then they become sort of destitute. And that is,

I think, also important to think about when we think of these economic systems that we only see the success stories like Li Ka-shing. And Li Ka-shing is very careful about his media image. He'll only give certain interviews. If you piss him off, he'll never speak to you again. That comes up again and again in profiles of him. But he's billed as Superman. That's his nickname in Hong Kong.

And so people have this image of, you know, if I work hard enough and I invest in property, maybe I can become Lee Cushing. What's far more likely to happen is you're going to end up broke and ruined because you tried to follow an investment model that, as you said eloquently, is largely based on having large pools of capital that allow you to make these purchases or allow you to weather the storms during the downturn. At least where Hong Kong real estate prices, he's more than willing to accept the volatility in that market for the two to three years that protest movements spring up in order to eventually consolidate more of it and use his vertical integration from Ka S's uh oligopolistic operations i guess uh in order to set prices more advantageously for himself whereas like the average petted bourgeois will not will not have access to those resources no and i mean he invests overseas and he tries to integrate

himself into infrastructure something the h the Hong Kong tycoons are quite good at is where you and I would look at a bus station and go, okay, well, you can buy buses. Great. A Hong Kong tycoon sees the land. So a lot of Li Ka-shing's plays are not so much on what he buys. He recently bought for about 6 billion, what many people thought was an overvalued series of pubs and restaurants in Britain that play most likely is for real estate. It's very likely he doesn't give a fuck about how the pubs are doing. Yes, they offer sort of a steady stream of money. What he can do, though, is redevelop those areas as property and make huge amounts of profit

and then repeat his cycle of monopolistic vertical integration that he's done elsewhere. So tycoons in Hong Kong do that shit all the time. They'll buy a bus station or they will buy something that is for public use. It could be a railway station or something near a railway station and then create their vertically integrated monopoly out of that. So land is the key for a lot of them. Yeah, I've heard that's like something that Starbucks used to do in the early 2000s in New York City is they didn't make any money off of having a Starbucks in every block from selling drinks, but it was all a property investment. Well, they, I mean, Kaqing and also Starbucks, like they, one thing they kind of treat land

as like an option value rather than like a definite use value. So they'll say like, well, it could, I mean, maybe in the future, if you're Starbucks, we could open another store here, but also we could just hold the land and wait, maybe laws will change so that they can build a condo or a mixed use or something we can sell it for that and so what lee cushing sort of plays now are mostly infrastructure he's investing out in israel he's trying to currently control half of their desalinated water. That bit, from what I could tell, is up in the air.

And the main source of where probably his next great money will be is Obor, One Belt, One Road. Let me see if I can pull up where this was. But it's something like 18 of the 22 ports currently. I'm going to have to go with that. It was from Southern China Morning Post. 18 of the 22 ports currently are going to be through Hutchinson Wampo, one of his giant parent companies. So Old War, the infrastructure that China's building, Li Ka-shing is just following them along. He's going along the belt as they build. But Joe Studwell makes the argument that he really becomes integral to the entire way of life in Hong Kong after 1979, where HSBC sells its stake in a company called Hutchison Wampow. I'm hoping I'm getting that right.

They sell his stake in 1979, and this company happens to control what was at the time, and I believe still is, the world's largest shipping port. So Joe Steadwell essentially makes the argument that even when Li Ka-shing loses money in the property crash, as we've mentioned, he's able to subsidize that through his massive income from just controlling essentially global shipping by owning this port. Right. And that was a very shady deal where the person running it, Studwell can't prove direct corruption in any of these cases. These are all sort of closed door meetings, but people have a habit of when they do a deal with Lee Cushing, he takes care of them later.

And I don't agree with studwell's sort of uh running dogs i think he's being a bit ugly i don't think that's a good analogy but cushing uh what studwell points out analogy aside uh is that uh cushing has a habit of bringing in foreigners who he'll do these sort of shady deals with uh as was it in the case of acquiring Hutchinson Wampo, where it was a closed bidding process. If they had opened this up to all the tycoons, they could have gotten significantly a lot more. It was sold for Hong Kong $639 million at the time,

could have sold for many times over that, but it was closed. And then the executive, Michael Sandberg of Hong Kong Bank, it's sort of alluded to that he was later taken care of. And this is a pattern with Li Ka-shing where he'll do business deals with foreigners in Hong Kong who just stud well paints them with a very sleazy brush, which I do think is okay.

I do like that analogy. They'll do something like sell an asset in an undervalued way, or they will help Li Ka-shing list a stock in a way that's very beneficial for him, such as a joint venture, where he will own a percentage that's just below what would lead to regulatory scrutiny. So Studwell talks about how the joint venture stock scam is very popular in Hong Kong, where you'll own something like 49.9% of another business. And then this means you can do insider trading,

you can do all sorts of financial shenanigans and deals and not have it open to regulatory scrutiny. There's a pattern of Li Ka-shing doing these deals, and then the foreigner will turn up later, whoever orchestrated the deal, in his business empire. So that is something that comes up multiple times in Studwell's research. Right. And we've kind of gone through, like, once he gets the port and all this real estate, he starts integrating his empire. He becomes part of the electricity duopoly uh studwell points out like he sells televisions and then sells the electricity that powers the televisions um but so and another thing um that i found from this book is essentially there are like i believe two major grocery chains in hong kong one of which lee ka-shing controls or i

guess there's the companies of park and shop watson's and fortress which Li Ka-shing controls, or I guess there's the companies of Park and Shop, Watson's, and Fortress, which Li Ka-shing controls. And Studwell brings up essentially the idea that when competition comes in, like a French retailer Carefour, as well as a local startup called AdMart, they both tried to compete with these two existing grocers and what happened was admart had to withdraw because the company's delivery trucks were not allowed into residential and office buildings controlled by uh lee ka shing so the existing tycoons will just because they control the real estate they will not give competitors any access to existing infrastructure and they will tell their suppliers or whoever else, like, if you deal with these people, you're dead to us, you know?

Right. And because of the power of the monopolies, they can do all sorts of bizarre price fixing where they can coordinate at all the grocery stores because, again, it's 70 percent controlled, all right, we'll just make our strawberries lower than anything you can sell. Or because they can put so much pressure on various partners who have to work with their infrastructure, they'll just say, as you said, if you deliver to them, you have to charge them two times the price. Alice Poon, who it is unclear what happened to her. She was sort of an insider who wrote a book called Land and the Ruling Class and then now just writes historical fiction, which is bizarre. Makes me think that someone said you better not write another book. Talks about sort of these price fixing in relation to how the monopolist will say if someone comes in, they'll threaten any partners who are adjacent to their monopoly and say, if you work with that person, make their life as difficult as possible because

we don't want them taking our business. Right. And one last thing from the Studwell book is according to like managers, I guess Li Ka-shing is retired now, but when he was working, the first thing he would do when he came in the morning morning came into the office in the morning is read all of the press accounts that mention him or his businesses and then quoting from the studwell book anything he took serious exception to translated into curtailment of advertising expenditures by his companies they give the example his businesses stopped advertising with next magazine and its sister publication, Apple Daily, after investigations into the circumstances surrounding the death of his wife. But less speculative reporting can produce the same results.

A mention of Li's 1986 censure for insider trading, for instance, in the South China Morning Post in November 2003 led to an immediate drop-off in Li Company advertisements placed with the paper. And again, this is very common with Lee Company advertisements placed with the paper. And again, this is very common with billionaires who advertise with media properties, leverage that to get favorable press coverage. Let me, can I do one quick case study? It shouldn't take more than five minutes. Of course. It's important for understanding Hong Kong neoliberalism.

Studwell, I think, should be read in conjunction with Alice Poon. Studwell, you know, he's trying to be a little salacious. I think a more fair reading of Li Ka-shing is just he's really boring and vicious. There is a bit of color, which maybe we can close on, and if you want

to ask any more questions about the recent protests, we can close with sort of potpourri about Li Ka-shing and recent closing thoughts on the protests. But anyway, so how Li Ka-shing was integral in shifting Hong Kong's neoliberalism from one that was one governor called positive non-interventionist, which I don't know, that sounds like something the most boring dominatrix in the world would do to you to you know a big market small government which was more of the the government ensuring proper profit for for the market ie capitalist ie in Hong Kong's case, monopolists. So in around 1997, Hong Kong had a pretty robust housing authority,

which is a governmental body that offers subsidized housing and rents to people. This is around the time that property tycoons started to see their profits go down because there was not a very strong demand for rent. The housing authority at this time was making great strides to try to alleviate housing shortage. So what does that do to rent? Well, because there's less demand or where there's more supply, there's less demand and prices go down. So Li Ka-shing, it's unclear if it's in a newspaper or if it's privately to the government, but this is from a great article I can send you about neoliberalism and privatization in Hong Kong.

He complains. He says basically in sort of the cryptic way he does, probably behind his desk to a trusted reporter, this is really hurting the market. We can't have the government be providing housing. It's taking away from the market spirit that made Hong Kong so great. So the government immediately moves to do two things. It essentially stops, and this is sort of a Karl Poyani double movement. It's very tragic. It kills the scheme to sell the subsidized housing where people could buy in to subsidize rents that I think were about 40% lower than market value. Affordable, in other words. Actually affordable because the rents are pegged in Hong Kong to cocaine and prostitute using, well, just financial douchebags.

They don't have to use cocaine and prostitute financial douchebags. They don't have to use cocaine and prostitutes as douchebags. But the rental market is for Chinese citizens who have the money to buy in or people who work in the sort of 1% fields. And that is sort of the peg, for the most part, for rents. So Li Ka-shing, through his interference, basically when the government is actually doing its job, supplying housing to the people through the housing authority in what was called the Home Ownership Scheme in 1997, he gets the government to kill that. And then what happens? Because the government has planned a huge portion of where its revenue is going to come from.

It then has to privatize huge amounts of its land. It has to sell those to the same monopolists who killed what was going to be their revenue. So to make up for the revenue shortfall that was going to be brought in through selling these subsidized housing to people who need them, that was killed by monopolists like Li Ka-shing, it creates what's known as LINC, which is a real estate investment trust. It's sort of like how I think of it, but economists could do a better job explaining it, is like sort of those tranches that Ryan Gosling and that weird makeup he had on in that movie, you know, is explaining with the Jenga towers

where it was an IPO that was the various evil motherfuckers helped bring to market, Goldman, Bayer, so on and so forth, that people could buy as a stock that was made up of the privatized real estate that was in what was going to be subsidized housing. So Hong Kong housing oftentimes will have malls on the premise. It will have restaurants and other things that a local community might need because things are very far away, people are busy, so on and so forth. Before that used to be like maybe an uncle,

like Uncle Ho, Uncle Ho's Market. He sells duck and he sells it well. He's just selling some sort of cheap street food. You'd have a wet market. You would have probably very local eateries. The Link Reet, which the, again, the Hong Kong government uses to fill that deficit caused by Li Ka-shing and Monopolis killing their subsidized housing plan in 1997, enables capitalists, Monopolis, to buy up all this land that is not

the apartment itself, but the sort of structures that are related to the apartment, these restaurants, parking lots, malls, wet markets, and redevelop it. So what do they redevelop it to? Well, they redevelop it to the market they want. Out go the family restaurants, in go the chains. Out go the wet market, in go their franchise, out go the wet market, in go their franchise supermarkets. What do you know? Hey, that worked out really well. And what this does is sort of, it's a cancer from the inside that for a lot of these, what was going to be subsidized

housing for people who desperately needed it, who can't afford the going rate of Hong Kong's artificially inflated rents, they get priced out over time. As tenants with a higher income move into these places, their rents are increased and eventually they move out. So it's a cancer that eats these people from the inside and shifts Hong Kong neoliberalism from one that was basically you can be the king to one that we would be more familiar with, where the government is more interventionist. Hong Kong is restarting the homeowner investment scheme, but that was 20 years of people's lives ruined over the greed of people like Li Ka-shing. And there's one last anecdote about Li Ka-shing, and then maybe we can close out with a little bit more on the Hong Kong protests. But I just found this interesting. He has two children, two sons.

In 1996, one of them was kidnapped by a gangster, I believe a triad member. Big spender. Yes, big spender. He kidnapped his son and then showed up to his house and demanded and received Hong Kong one billion dollars in ransom, which I believe was a bonus level in the video game Sleeping Dogs. But but. Oh, yeah. And so the interesting thing here is that this guy, Big Spender, even though this crime took place in Hong Kong, in 1998, he is tried in mainland China and executed by firing squad. And some people suspect Li Ka-shing may have cut a deal with mainland authorities or pulled some strings to get him tried and then later killed in mainland China.

This is where I think Studwell again, and this is sort of the theme of our episode, looking up local sources. I don't know how good Studwell's Chinese is, but if you read publications where the reporters are bilingual, so they can speak Cantonese and English or Cantonese Mandarin and English, they don't paint it with as much of a sinister brush. I would probably imagine we would need a bit more evidence to say Li Ka-shing orchestrated it. What we can say definitively are two funny anecdotes, though. One, the billion dollars cash was so much, the gangster had to come back twice because he couldn't fit it all in one car. And then two, while he was taking the cash, he talked to Li Ka-shing and asked for investment advice about the ransom money that Li Ka-shing had just given him. I think they were talking in person or over the phone,

but that's verified by the Southern China Morning Post. You kidnap someone and then you say, well, where should I put this money? You're giving me for your son. Yeah, I hate those drive from X to Y levels. Very repetitive level design when you're trying to take the ransom money and you have to go back. Oh, by the way, so just one last thing.

Li Ka-shing's wife died and most people suspect it was a suicide. I mean, do you have any information on his wife's death? section i just have a section i should have just called it like podcast chicanery but um triads tried to ransom the body uh from my understanding so they they kidnapped his son and then uh from my understanding let me just pull this up here uh i want to make sure it's the wife or the mother, but they tried to rob. Okay, here we go. Let's do this. Okay, yeah. In 2007, Mainland Brothers Triads conspired to steal the remains of the late wife of Li Ka-Shing and ransom the corpse.

So this was another horrible thing gone awry. They weren't able to do it. But yeah, he had the living relatives ransomed, and then he had even the dead relatives. There was an attempted ransom. I'm so disappointed we're not going to be able to play that in Sleeping Dogs 2. But I look forward to that in Oceans 14. Do you want to do something quick about the triads?

Do you want me to teach you a little bit about them? Yeah, I'd love that. Okay. Triads are dicks, but they're useful in real estate. So I'm not going to go into a whole spiel. There's Lynette Ong is very good on the triads. The Hong Kong Free Press which is a liberal rag. If you're

going to support Hong Kong, you're going to have to be a leftist who occasionally talks to liberals because they're doing some of the best reporting and it's just a sad fact of life. You've got to grit your teeth and talk to a liberal if you do want to learn more about Hong Kong. Not everyone's a liberal and I'll give you great leftist

names, but you're going to have to sit with Camilla if you want to learn more about Hong Kong? I believe that everyone's a liberal. And I'll give you great leftist names. But you're going to have to sit with Camilla if you want to learn a little bit about Hong Kong. So anyway, the new territory, when it was absorbed by Britain, had really strange real estate laws were basically to grossly oversimplify things. And, you know, I might get feedback that this is a bit off, but my understanding, because this is incredibly opaque, Britain never really was able to control the new territories, even though it absorbed them. They remained very close to China, very dangerous. And basically Britain had the governmental techniques of just ignoring it, not going anywhere near it. That's part of the reason that the triads were able to develop there. But Britain and later the Hong Kong government, to try to develop these areas, had really strange relationships with local residencies where they got very preferential land rights, where basically if you're a native

Hong Konger from those regions, many of them have deeds to land that can be developed either by that individual or sold. So what the property tycoons typically will use the triads for, and the triads, you will see them meeting with Hong Kong leaders and there are often allegations that they meet with property developers as they are sort of the paramilitary of real estate tycoons in the new territory where let's say I'm farmer I'm trying to think of the Hong Kong name but I'll just use an English name, Richard, because we have the English and Chinese names in Hong Kong. I'm Farmer Richard. I live in the New Territories. I have a deed to my land that is very preferential because I'm a native Hong Konger. My family has existed in the New

Territories since it was taken over by Britain, so I have this preferential land deed. Oh, here's Paul, the friendly local triad. What's Paul have that bat for? What's Paul breaking my legs for? Oh, it's because he wants me to give him this deed at a very low price, much lower than I could get if I sold it at an auction, or if I developed the land myself. then the triad Mr. Paul after threatening to or maybe actually breaking your legs with a bat will then sell that to sort of a middleman who will eventually funnel that to a property developer so the triads in the new territory is how they've been able to make a lot of money whereas before it would be drugs and corpse robbing and

ransoms and so on and they're still involved with that. But real estate and making sure they control with an iron fist the new territories, not all the new territories, but large swaths of it, is a huge source of revenue now, for my understanding about triads. And so they also don't want this apple cart upset. They're very happy with the non-democracy of Hong Kong because it allows them to have this very lucrative industry of sort of controlling who owns or doesn't own real estate in the new territories. Well, you know, the sound of a triad member breaking your knees is also the sound of being number one on the Economic Freedom Index. Yeah, I'm sure Milton Friedman would. That guy probably watched 8mm, that Nicolas Cage movie.

Probably got off on that. But I guess if there's nothing else that we didn't get to, I did just kind of want to ask you about your predictions going forward. And I guess what people in the West who are on the left, what they can do for, let's say, critical support of these protest movements, what we should who essentially what can be done and what you hope comes out of, you know, this conversation with people on the western left sure for me personally i you know i'm someone who would happily vote for bernie sanders and would even support something like dsa but at the end of the day if some douchebag with a history phd from cuny is my overlord i'm going to be upset where hong kong is interesting for me not and not all history PhDs are douchebags, but probably a lot are. So what, not a lot, some. I've not been happy with the DSAs. It's complicated, as you know, but I would still support them in many different facets. I think, like we were talking about with

Hong Kong, they haven't done a good job listening. Why Hong Kong, for me, listening to criticism, why Hong Kong for me is exciting is it's what sort of John Holloway calls like a radical no. It's a radical refusal where you have a grandma next to an anarchist, next to a conservative, next to a wine drinking mom, next to a grandkid next to you know people who would never be together in any other circumstance we often forget when we're not listening to podcasts how fucking atomized and alone that we are so it's a moment of radical solidarity and you have these millions of different no's they're all saying no to different things. Some people are saying no to neoliberalism. Some people are saying no to a boogeyman specter of communism that

may or may not be accurate. Some people are saying no to a future, again, of a democracy that may ultimately disappoint men. Some of them are saying no to this idea of Hong Kong identity, whatever that means. But they're all saying no together. And when we have these radical breaks in the atomization and rule of neoliberalism, or the rule of whatever you would call the US government, or a government like Hong Kong, which is run by millionaire technocrats basically that to me is a space where the left can have a lot of power but if the left doesn't get involved you know what happens the right gets in there chuck schumer gets in there fucking people we do not want and who are our uh our enemies chuck schumer is our enemy i hope we can say that um we'll get in there and co-opt the

movement because you didn't say anything and you didn't raise the issue. That's happening all throughout Asia, in Taiwan, in Xinjiang, in Japan, in Korea. The left, I don't know why, it could be fear of ignorance, it could be I've read Mao's Little Red Book, so that's all I ever need to study about Asia. I don't know why, but what I would plead for people on the left to realize is if you don't learn about these issues, if you don't interrogate them, the right will. And you've already starting to see that. People on the right are fanning these tanky narratives that we talked about so that the left loses interest and that whatever emerges out, the people who reach out will have a say in whatever happens after. And you might not like the direction it goes. So the first thing I would say, again, is reach out to people on Twitter. Reach out to publications that aren't Jacobin.

Bug people. Bug people in a polite way. Don't be a dick, but bug people like the Michael Brooks show or the Antifada or Trill Billies or Chapo to say, you know, look, guys, I think you've done great work on helping criticize forms of government that are very unjust. But could we have someone who's not white on as a guest? Could we have someone talk about Hong Kong who lives there, who has seen maybe their friend get their arm broken or shot through the eye? Can we have a perspective on this that's not just reading out of the New York Times paper? Talk to people in Hong Kong and ask them what they want.

They're all available on Twitter. They're very easy to access, and they're very interested in talking to people. And again, you might not like the conversation. There's a lot of liberals in Hong Kong, and a lot of people who think democracy is going to be this cure-all. But when people are asking for help, you know, if the worst that they are is a liberal, I'm still going to ask if I can help them. There's people there who are who are really scared who are suffering and who are punching cops in the face and tearing down surveillance lamps because they believe in something and they don't know what it's going to look like but that's more than i can say about my life i don't really

believe in anything and that's a horrible place to be. And I think that's where a lot of leftists find ourselves. We're just sort of in this nihilistic stupor. And there's people there who are doing radical things. And I think that always merits investigation. So I would say ask questions. There's numerous threads for more techie-oriented leftists on GitHub, on places that you can donate, technological channels that you can follow if you want to help. You can do the thing that Chapo just did, which we would probably consider liberal yesterday, where they got their audience members to call into Senator Jack Reed and asked him to stop the involvement of the U.S. war in Yemen. If you investigate the movement and you think it's something you want to support, pressure the people who can put pressure on China or put pressure on the global capitalist community. Do the sort of boycotting tactics and the building of dual power

that people in DSA are doing, but for the quote-unquote international leftism, we're always saying we want to build. So if I could take away anything from this chat, it's please stop or Hakka or from mainland China or a minority who's Indian or Filipino or Indonesian. There's numerous minority activists there. Just talk to someone who you normally wouldn't talk to because that's what's making these protests, for me at least, so interesting. It's a bunch of people who'd never be together otherwise, bandied together. They don't know where they're going, but they're talking to each other. And it's the first time in a while I think any of them have spoken to each other.

And that to me is pretty radical in the very alien and nihilistic times we live in to even have hope that there can be change. Right. Hey, Matt, resident Indian host of the show here. I had one question for you. What do you think the perception of the protests have been from the neighboring countries of China? Because as you've mentioned previously, there's corruption in all countries and all superpowers. But do you think the protests have inspired the activists of those countries? Is any of that rhetoric being told in these protests in China?

That's a really interesting question so in neighboring countries that China says are part of China Taiwan they've really resonated with young people and it's throwing a major monkey wrench into the elections of Hong Kong of Taiwan good because the Chinese government just like not like the Russian government, because that's a bunch of stupid fucking bullshit that irritates me. Even though we're all sinners in neoliberalism, as Wendy Brown says, we're all neoliberals. We all suck until we defeat this thing. They've spent billions of dollars to influence Taiwan's elections. And so this is a natural organic thing that has made people alert to China and any candidate who would be pro-China. And to be pro-China means to be pro-Chinese capital, because what they essentially want to

do is sell out Taiwanese democracy to instill state capitalism that doesn't even, as we said, sort of a fig leaf of democracy in defense of it. In China itself, you do occasionally see mainlanders who go to Hong Kong with an open heart, just curious. There was very recently a civil rights lawyer who went who uh was tweeting about it and we don't know if we'll see him again that's very brave to do you do run the risk of again being black bagged but uh figures like that sort of mini celebrities um uh chinese ufc fighter who's quite popular has tweeted his support uh on weight on weishin they're sort of all-encompassing social media app. It might be Weibo, their sort of Twitter, about Hong Kong. Within China itself, from what I've read of labor activists who work there,

there are periodic breaks and the state will viciously move in. But there's not really a sense of class consciousness, I think, as we would understand it. A lot of people, and this is very crude, and I'm sorry I can't be more Marxist, but it's a lot of research to compile and I wouldn't be doing it justice. But there's basically a sense that you can still make money and that the state is still rewarding you or that you can have a China dream. Yeah, hard work will pay off essentially, yeah, sure.

Yeah, and so most people aren't interested in it. Where China is getting nervous is in places like Xinjiang, Tibet. Right. Where they're very nervous. And Macau, actually. Macau, which we think of as, again, maybe an Epstein mini episode, probably went there and did horrible shit. But Macau is starting to see sort of pro-democracy whisperings. An online poll was just shut, asking if, if I think alluding to if Macau should have universal sovereignty. Numerous activists have noted increased tension from China there. My experience having lived in China for a number of years is people aren't going to tell

you shit until they trust you. And so the journalism that has to be done there has to be done over periods of years, or months at least, of getting to know people, getting them to trust you. And even then, you might not be able to put it on the record. Everything under there is under surveillance, whereas we are dealing with data mining, and if we're Muslim Americans,

and increasingly protesters of any stripe, we might get investigated. In China, you can be prosecuted or arrested for what you do on social media. So it's very hard to say in China. My sense would be, though, that for the most part, the state media there probably echoes how a lot of people feel or if you want to be cynical how they've been taught to feel that it's an unruly ungrateful and again i mean that is gross to say but this is how it's framed in chinese media

ungrateful uh sort of group of people who had it good for a very long time and, uh, are just acting like spoiled brats. There's a lot in Chinese media of like a mother spanking a disobedient child, the child being, uh, Hong Kong, Chinese, uh, netizens. So sort of patriotic people who are very pro-China have been doing really creepy things to female journalists where they dox them sort of Gamergate style. So they will find their English language Twitter, and it's ironic because they have to hop over the great firewall. They will hop over the great firewall, be like, you fucking bitch, I hope you die, and then hop back over or dox that person's personal information, again, sort of Gamergate style. There's a lot of very strange misogynistic language which Lita Hong Fincher, again a liberal but I think a good scholar, has written about where there's a noticeable

strain of misogyny in how a lot of the very pro-nationalists talk about Hong Kong and how they treat women who are part of the protest. Numerous women have been sexually assaulted by police within the protest. This has varied from sort of involuntary strip searching to the pulling down a woman's underwear and skirt in public and then exposing her genitals to the press. And so things like the police, things like mainlanders have been pretty vicious, and I don't think we'll be coming to the side of the protesters anytime soon. Well, Matt, my last question for you, and maybe my co-hosts have one, but my last, is essentially I heard some of you on Poddem America, and you were talking about something that's very fascinating to me, and I think the left in general, and that's the idea of a general strike.

Which, you know, maybe the dream of how the left wins, and I don't know if we're anywhere near that yet, is a straight up international general strike. But Hong Kong itself is such like a key port in global capitalism that, you know, a general strike there would be seriously disruptive. And, you know, I mean, maybe it's a fantasy, but maybe it would spread. And I was just wondering if you could talk a little bit about, let's say, the likelihood of a general strike and what that looks like and what it could mean. These young kids are punching cops in the face. And you've built your media around saying you think that's cool. So a lot of the leftist podcasts that I'm really disappointed with, and we don't need to name names, but it should be obvious from some of the brands that they've built. These are kids who are going toe-to-toe with cops. Right.

Who are willing to take bullets to the face. Non-lethal, but still a couple protesters are now blind who are willing to take tear gas. Who have created really innovative mechanisms of protest using laser pointers, walks, they've taken walks for cooking, and they'll put tear gas grenades under them to defuse them, who are using really interesting social organizing tools as a way to outthink the police in terms of building barricades. Again, if we're going to go against capital, we're going to get shot, right? This is most likely not going to be entirely peaceful.

You know, utopian scenario, right? For anything on the left, be it socialist or communist or anarchist, probably a lot of people are going to get fucked up. And so even if, let's say, you've built your brand on, you've read Mao's Little Red Book, you don't speak Chinese, you've never been to China, you're white, you go to Momofuku, and that's probably the closest you get to Asia. Even if that is who you are,

it's still valuable to study these protests for the techniques and tactics because there's a lot of interesting things going on and You know, I think that these kids are really brave when they're arrested they're like 18 to 22 Oftentimes these are kids who basically like I was saying before they don't feel they have a future so they're fighting for Sort of their lives in terms of the general strike, that's sort of interesting. So Hong Kong's Umbrella Revolution was built on the back of an Occupy Central that was connected to the Occupy movement in the U.S. Not a lot of people know that. They think it was just sort of this liberal thing that Joshua Wong did.

And again, he's not that important. Stop obsessing. But there was a period of time in 2014 where there were general strikes at Hutchinson-Wampo's port, the busiest port. And workers were considering doing a wildcat where the union unfortunately eventually convinced them to strike outside of the Hutchinson-Huangpo corporate office, as opposed to actually shutting down the port. But there was a brief flicker of sort of anarchists and leftists talking to these workers and murmuring like exactly what you said. If we can shut down this port, we will shut down Hong Kong infrastructure, basically, or seriously injure it. So in terms of another general strike happening, or if that do a global strike, something like that. Billions of dollars can be evaporated because so much money is in property globally. Right. So we can recreate sort of this dynamic of harming the ill-gotten gains of capitalists by looking at what Hong Kong has done to property values, where it's wiped out billions of dollars of the portfolios of these

robber barons. In terms of the solidarity of the movement, and as you were saying, the Indian of the group, leftist activists are trying to build solidarity with South Asians and people from the Philippines and Indonesia and Southeast Asian nationals who work as migrants. And you are you see flickers. But again, that's why it's it's a frustrating thing. And it's not going to be a perfect thing for leftists because you're protesting next to grandmothers who think probably Hillary Clinton. And you're protesting next to wine moms. Right.

Except at night who are with her, if you know that stupid saying. So you've seen flickers. There was a general strike in Hong Kong. It was successful. I don't think the protests currently are at a point where there is a class consciousness to them. There are elements of that, but I don't think you could rally currently the whole body of these protests, these million, two million marches, to call for sort of an end to the tycoon capitalism that we've been talking about today. But every day they go on, and every day the tycoons support Beijing and every day another kid gets their eye taken from them or is arrested or is sexually assaulted is another day that they link that tycoon to the tyranny and violence of the

police that are protecting that private property. So every day is a new potential for new radicalism and a new radical consciousness to be born in one more person's mind in Hong Kong. So for me at least, that's what we should keep in mind. We shouldn't be obsessing over is this leftist or not. We should be obsessing over there's a radical, like a Zapatista mindset. There's a radical potential here.

We don't know where it's going to go. And every day a tycoon stands next to Beijing or stands next to their own interests in capital is another day maybe where that radical potential for it to become a more leftist movement will be born. And there's numerous brave leftists on the front lines, facing down with cops, taking pictures, trying to awaken this consciousness in a larger and larger sections of the protest. And when when if the protests go away, that possibility goes away. Well, first of all, thank you for talking to us. i guess the only question i have left is uh how do you um sleep at night knowing that you're betraying the great people's revolution

i mean it's interesting when i when i moved to china i was really you know my dad had mel's little red book a lot of our parents probably did. You know, they were very sympathetic to China. And Mao, I was talking to another person today, and I think Deng had it right, even though Deng in many ways betrayed China, you could argue, where Mao was, what is it, 60% good and 40% bad. I think there was really interesting revolutionary potential in China. And I'm, you know, I'm reading all about the Cultural Revolution now. And this sort of, some scholars might argue, a last stand against China hardening into, it's just capitalists. They send their kids to Harvard with, you know, the Trump's kids. Or I don't know if the Trump's have kids. They have like, I don't know what the hell they do.

But, you know, they're the global elite. And they are not the China of Mao. And that's very important to remember. There doesn't appear from what I'm researching, and I'm going to do a deep dive into China, so maybe I can come back in like four or five months and do a Chinese billionaire with you, because I think that would be a really interesting discussion.

But there doesn't appear to be a horizon where China is going to destroy neoliberalism. I think what will emerge is sort of China will become a settler colonial capitalist power. You're seeing that in places like Cambodia. You're seeing that within the logic of One Belt, One Road, where they're using infrastructure as a means to get Chinese capital into more and more markets. And I just see it, unfortunately, and it's very depressing. I wish it wasn't true. I wish I had two sickles and I was wearing my Mao hat. But I just see it as a contest of capitalists at this point. And China does not offer an alternative for the global left.

That doesn't mean there's not great leftists in left. That doesn't mean there's not great leftists in China. That doesn't mean there's not great literature that's been produced by Chinese writers. That doesn't mean there's not brave Chinese activists. And that doesn't denigrate the history of China. It doesn't denigrate the culture of China, both of which I'm very fond of. I spent many years there. But it is to say, as a project of statecraft, I see it as one of capital. So I don't see it as an avenue that the left really should be taking seriously. I

think we should be talking to our Chinese workers or organizations that talk to Chinese workers and say, you know, how can we help you? Because the situation you're in isn't a good one currently. Well, Matt Dagger, Margozian, I want to thank you so much for being with us, for staying up until 2 a.m. to explain Hong Kong to a bunch of Western leftists. And I guess I just wanted to ask you, first of all, where can people find you online? And if there's any other last things you want to say or advertise or plug or just say generally. And again, thank you. All right. So plugs.

First, what I would say is to any leftist podcast that I've annoyed into blocking me because I keep tweeting about Hong Kong and saying, why aren't you covering this? I'm sorry. Just a lot of the people I care about or have come to care about are hurting and scared. So if I've been overzealous on Twitter, my apologies to anyone. I don't mean to be a nuisance. It's just when you see people getting hurt, sometimes you become really insistent. So where people can find me if they unblock me on Twitter or if they if they want to follow me, no blocking, no blocking or blocking, is I'm at Asia Art Tours. We do a lot of media with artists who we feel would be difficult for Western audiences to discover on their own on our YouTube channel.

So we're going to put up a great Thai artist called Kawita, who does really interesting work of becoming the tools of labor and labor production. And she's a capitalist, but her work is very Marxist. She's a fabulous artist. We have an interview up with Helen Fung, who is the leader of one of China's most badass rock and roll bands, Nova Heart. So we're constantly putting content up there. We offer tours in Asia that I'm constantly trying to push more and more to the left. So a good example of that is our tour with the Radical Grandmas. They're a group that has stood up to the Thai state, another unfortunately democratic, unfree capitalist state, who wanted to take away land that had been within their village for hundreds of years. And they figured out an enterprise of sustainable agriculture and

making sustainable textiles. And a lot of them have gone to jail. That's why they're called the radical grandmas, not the bake you cookies grandmas, the fuck you up grandmas was probably the original title. So that's a good example of a tour where we're trying to bring in leftist elements to travel so it doesn't recreate the Orientalism that I think has ruined a lot of travel in Asia. And reach out to me anytime on email. You know, if you just want to chat, I'm happy. Max Alvarez is a very kind soul who, when I was first sort of reaching out to leftists, podcasts and media and so forth, you know, it's sort of taught me this idea that podcasts are praxis. They're a way to bring people. They're not a way to create monopolies.

I'm very happy for the success of a lot of people, but I'd much rather a world where we're all just talking to each other because we all have really interesting things to say. So reach out to me at matt at Asia Art Tours. And lastly, I'm a busy guy, as you can probably tell from my frantic tone of talking, but you can follow my own podcast, The Arts of Travel.

And that is something I started because I would see a lot of leftists have these questions about Asia and not really know where to turn. So being based in Taiwan, speaking decent enough Mandarin that I could pick up your, you know, I can do okay at the bar if I choose, from time to time anyway, when I'm feeling myself. But I interview leftists from around Asia. There's some liberals on there because, again, there's a lot of great liberal scholar academics. But it's a place where if you're curious about Asia and you don't have the bandwidth to go through hundreds of pages or things are difficult if you can't read Chinese, I talk to people in English on there from all over Asia, Thailand, China, Japan, about what's going on in their countries, in the arts, or in various fields of leftist or progressive causes. So those are a bunch of places to find me, and let me thank you so much for being open-minded and having me on. I really appreciate, after Epstein, that I was able to make it on the show. I thought you guys were going to big-time me, and I'm really happy that that wasn't the case.

Well, thank you again for being on our show. Yeah, Matt Dagger-Margosian, again, Asia Art Tours on Twitter. We will have links to the other things he mentioned in the description of the show if you want to follow him, and we will keep our eyes on what's happening in Hong Kong and with our good friend Lee Ka-Shing.

Cool. Thanks so much for being with us. Yes, thank you. Thanks. And with that, this has been Grubstakers. I'm Yogi Paiwal. Yes, thank you. Thanks. And with that, this has been Grove Stakers. I'm Yogi Poyol. I'm Andy Palmer. Steve Jeffries.

I'm Sean. Thanks for listening. Keep your eyes out. Solidarity with Hong Kong. Bye. So something we did miss about triads is their involvement in these protests. On July 21st at Yuen Long MTR station, there was an incident where about 40 to 50 men in white shirts came into the station and started attacking both protesters but also citizens. How the protesters in Hong Kong typically move around is they will use subways or public transportation as a way to

avoid the police. They can barricade these stations if the police follow them. In general, the MTR, the Hong Kong subway, has been very supportive of the protesters. So they'll leave out, anonymous people will leave out single use cards within the MTR for protesters to use so they can't be tracked by using their octopus cards, which are these cards that are connected to multiple payment systems within Hong Kong. Normally that's how you'd pay for things, but you can be tracked potentially through using your octopus card. So people will put out sort of single swipe cards for protesters to use. People will leave out areas where you can change clothes if you need to, so you can't be recognized. The police, they'll put out food

in the MTR stations. So the MTR stations have been a really vital node for the Hong Kong protesters. So on July 21st in Yuen Long Station, this large group of men in white shirts just starts beating the living hell out of people. They do that for about 40 minutes before police show up. Now it's later been revealed that apparently police have the ability to surveil any MTR station in Hong Kong and it appears though it hasn't been confirmed I think universally but it appears plausible that they knew what was going on in the station, that essentially they had knowledge that these attacks are going to occur, these triad launched attacks, or even maybe that they coordinated with certain figures, certain back channels. There are numerous politicians in Hong Kong who, as we talked about, are very close to Beijing. A figure like Junius Ho, who's a pro-Beijing lawmaker who sits within LegCo, has been photographed shaking hands with triads. Cops were seen on that night

going around and just sort of giving the nod to triads or ignoring them. And since these attacks, which again were pretty brutal, people were beaten, some people were hospitalized. I think there's only been about two prosecutions, something like that, out of 40 or 50 potential individuals charged or individuals who could potentially be charged. So triad involvement is a really real component of the Hong Kong protests. It's something, it's part of the reason why protesters are getting more and more sort of armed or protected when they go out, especially at night, especially the frontline protesters, because there are numerous sort of attacks now that occur in certain sections of Hong Kong where they might

encounter triads. So certain neighborhoods, especially in the new territories, would be associated heavily with triads. And triads, how they present themselves in the protest is the protesters wear black. The triads will usually wear white, blue, or red. And again, triad, just like the protesters are sort of a mixed group, triad is sort of a mixed group. You probably have people who are just what the scholar Lennon Ong has called thugs for hire, so have been contacted through back channels, perhaps China or pro-China lawmakers or some node like this, and are just out there beating the shit out of people, both what we talked about in Yuen Long, but also as these protests have gone on at night. Basically, if you go into certain areas, you might get attacked. So that's one element. There are obviously people in Hong Kong

who support China, who may not really be affiliated with gangs per se, but are very nationalistic, very pro-China, and see the protests as sort of an insult to China, which is how China's sort of nationalist rhetoric manifests itself. It's based in shame and humiliation and foreign powers, and the media that they would absorb from Chinese state media or just from seeing the Hong Kong protests probably has triggered some people to sort of be vigilantes. So there are these isolated incidents all the time in the protests where someone who speaks accented Cantonese, implying that they haven't lived in Hong Kong perhaps their whole life. Maybe they immigrated from the southern part of China or another part of China.

They have gotten into conflicts with protesters from time to time. There are, and obviously not everyone who speaks accident Cantonese isn't a Hong Konger. That is another layer of complexity. Who isese isn't a Hong Konger. That is another layer of complexity. Who is and isn't a Hong Konger? And I think the protest, broadly speaking, needs to do more work in interrogating and exploring this. If you're saying, okay, we are Hong Kong, we are Hong Kongers, what does that mean? And does that include people who are pro-Beijing? And then sort of lastly of this sort of loose group of what the Hong Kong, you might read in media accounts as sort of quote-unquote

triads, are people who maybe are bust in. So China has been known to, with these protests, you know, they want good optics for their domestic audience. So what has been, I think, documented in a verifiable way is that people will get bussed in over the border from Shenzhen. They will all be wearing the same shirt. And it almost sort of, it can be almost like a tour, like you're promised a meal and maybe, you know, 20 bucks to come over, go to a pro-Beijing protest, of which they will have them in Hong Kong, organized by various groups, or a pro-police protest organized in Hong Kong. And that's another thing to keep in mind. If you are pro-China in this situation, you're also pro-police. So that's a paradox you're going to have to deal with because the Chinese state media and the consistent narrative of pro-Beijing protesters is that they support

the Hong Kong police. So that will be a paradox you'll have to deal with as a leftist. So you'll see sort of these tour groups if you support China, which I don't. I don't like nations. So these tour groups will come in, go to a rally, go back over the border, and then for some of the other groups, they'll come in through the border. There's rail links to China.

There's buses, ferries, and they'll come as sort of like a gang. They're very clearly coming there to do violence. Those groups, I think it's more likely they might be triad adjacent or sort of maybe within a network of another gang system in mainland China, but they're clearly being brought over there to do violence against protesters. What that violence looks like, again Hong Kong doesn't have gun violence the way we would in America but it would look like people using metal rods, baseball bats, meat cleavers, exacto knives and attacking people, ganging up and attacking them. And there's

horrific footage from throughout these protests of triads doing just that, just beating the living hell out of people. That is another catalyst that's driving a lot of the anger of the protests. How protesters respond to police is they'll call them black police. They will call them dog police. They will call them triads. That's a slur now that a lot of the protesters and even ordinary Hong Kong people, you know, just people who are so pissed off the police are in their neighborhoods every other night shooting tear gas and not letting residents go into their apartments, they will call them triads. Because I think originating from this incident at Yuen Long

Station, July 21st, where these people, citizens and protesters got the hell beaten out of them for 40 minutes. And then over the course of the night, other incidents and police were nowhere to be seen. So triads actually, beyond video games and movie iconography, actually have a fairly major role to play in the Hong Kong protests as well. And so they're with the billionaires, they're also sort of this paramilitary force that can be unleashed by China in Hong Kong in lieu of sort of sending in the People's Liberation Army. And they have a very interesting role to play in the language and narrative of the protests in terms of why people are so upset.

So that's a bit more about the triads. Whoa, triads? I'll see you later. Okay, Matt, so I guess let's just introduce this and then we'll start the episode here. But you can hear all of us okay? You all sound like brilliant children Who made your parents proud Oh, thank you I don't know if the audio is working