Today, Explained - "First Hong Kong, then the world"

Episode Date: May 27, 2020

While most of the world was distracted by the pandemic, China unveiled a law to strip Hong Kong of its autonomy, setting off a new wave of protests in the city. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. The streets of Hong Kong sound awfully familiar. It sounds a lot like last June, when massive protests erupted in Hong Kong. They were big, they involved millions of people, they were sometimes very violent. After hours of chanting and song, police moved in to disperse the crowds.

Barriers torn down, rubber bullets and tear gas fired into the chaos. Umbrellas and plastic bottles their only defense. Last year, the protests were driven by an extradition bill that would essentially allow criminals to be extradited over to mainland China from Hong Kong. The law would allow suspects to be sent to mainland China to face trial. Critics of the bill fear this could lead to arbitrary detention and unfair trials.

Last year's protests never really ended. They only started petering out during the onset of coronavirus when obviously people were afraid to gather en masse and kind of stayed at home. But two things have changed. One, coronavirus here is sort of no longer a major concern. There have been no local cases in a few weeks now. And two, Beijing has taken the opportunity of the world being distracted to essentially make huge moves here and rewrite the rules of Hong Kong.

China has drafted a new sweeping national security law. It will criminalize foreign interference, successionism, subversion against the state, and all of these things are extremely broad. The law is the most dramatic in a series of attempts to erode Hong Kong's autonomy in recent years. In a statement, Secretary Mike Pompeo said that no reasonable person can assert today that Hong Kong maintains a high degree of autonomy from China, given the facts on the ground. This certification means the U.S. could revoke its special trade relationship with Hong Kong, which would hurt the economies of both Hong Kong and China.

And now, once again, the streets of Hong Kong are filled with protesters. You know, Hong Kong is back to normal in many ways. Restaurants are open, bars are open, and protests are back, and tear gas is back on the street, right? That's our normal. Shabani Matani, you're the Hong Kong bureau chief for The Washington Post,

and you were at the protest this weekend. What was it like out there? News of the new national security law broke kind of late last week. We will stop violence and restore order, Chairman Wang Yong announced, suggesting the autonomy Hong Kong enjoys under one country, two systems was no longer on the table. And already immediately we saw calls to protest.

I mean, it only took me two interviews to find someone on the streets who had already been arrested before as part of last year's movement. And, you know, once you obviously get arrested, you know, the next time that happens to you again, you won't get bail and, you know, you'll be in a detention center somewhere. And when I was on the subway, I saw like thousands and thousands of people. And then when I got out, like the streets were all choked again. You couldn't move. There were people chanting the same slogans as last year, but some different ones, too. Some were shouting Hong Kong independence, the only way out. And I was really actually taken aback because it does seem to me that no matter what and no matter how hopeless the situation seems, like Hong Kong people still want to fight

back. They still want to try to protect their rights and freedoms. And it was only 20 minutes into the march that the police fired tear gas and tried to break it up. And even before the protests already start, more than 100 police with the rubber bullets and the guns already used those equipment to crack down and to target the dissidents in Hong Kong. There were scenes of chaos really reminiscent of last year. Last year, actually, especially in the beginning, they let these marches go on for hours and hours before they did make moves to clear it.

So the pace was quite stunningly fast this time of them trying to break it up and get people off the streets. You mentioned you spoke to protesters. I mean, did anything stand out from some of those conversations? For sure, their resolve and their insistence that they will literally die fighting remains the same. I think these protesters, a lot of them, like I said, are very young, but there's also an older generation that felt like they didn't do enough in 1997. They didn't do enough when Hong Kong was handed over back to China

from the United Kingdom. They felt like they let down the younger generation and they kind of let Hong Kong slowly get subsumed into China. They let its freedom slowly get eroded. And they're very emotional about that. And they really want to come out and try to protect the future of the younger generation. They basically feel like this is their last chance to fight back, to kind of stand up for what they believe Hong

Kong should be. And a lot of them, you know, they keep repeating, we just want Hong Kong to be left alone. We just want Hong Kong to remain Hong Kong. We just want the freedoms we've always enjoyed. We just want the right to protest. And, you know, we want our children to have the same. It all just kind of feels like deja vu. I mean, is it basically China just going one step further, trying to officially bring Hong Kong into the fold? Yeah, I mean, I think it's very much Beijing's response to the protests and the protest movement of last year. I think they have grown intolerant with Hong Kong. I think they've decided, you know, enough is enough. We have to find some way to basically, you know, crush this dissenting, you know, territory that's right on our border, right? I think that they see this protest movement,

not something, you know, that's organic or something that's driven by Hong Kong, but a product of US interference, foreign interference, that there are rabble rouses, people who want independence for Hong Kong, who are trying to essentially, you know, upend their national security. So I think they fought back very strongly with this. And the most remarkable thing here is that instead of going through Hong Kong's legislation, instead of going through Hong Kong's processes, they've decided to impose this essentially unilaterally in Beijing. That's been the thing that's really shocked many. If China can just do something drastic like this unilaterally, why didn't they do it last year?

Why did they start with the extradition bill? This is the riskiest move that Beijing could take. It is certainly something that I think stunned all of us because the risk level is so high. I mean, presumably the economic impact and the political and geopolitical sort of just consequences, right, of Hong Kong losing its special status with the U.S. would be so far reaching. And I don't think anyone could have imagined that Hong Kong would even be discussing this,

right? The end of Hong Kong status as a global financial hub and, you know, the end of the US-Hong Kong trade relationship. I think they severely underestimated what the response would be, right? I think they didn't think millions of people would come up to the streets. I think they didn't think that it would, you know, give birth to a whole new generation of activists that, you know, they would see universities literally become Molotov cocktail factories and so on and so forth. So I think the mistakes of last year have sort of prompted them to take this extremely bold and extremely risky move without really thinking about the international consequences.

And the protests last year, they were at least partially successful in that Hong Kong did end up withdrawing the extradition bill. Is there any chance that these protests have a similar effect? Yeah, it's really interesting. They were, but now it looks like China doesn't even need the extradition bill. They brought their law into Hong Kong, right? So they don't even need to extradite you there. They can just use their own laws here in Hong Kong. Beijing has sort of lost trust with Hong Kong's government and authorities.

They know that they totally mishandled the crisis last year. And instead of responding in a way that made people stop protesting and, you know, quell the anger on the streets, it seemed like at every turn they inflamed the situation and made it worse. So instead, I think what they're doing now is totally bypassing Hong Kong and their allies here even to just impose their will de facto from Beijing. And I think that will be something that will be much, much harder to fight back against. Up next, the global consequences of China's new national security law.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Shabani, this new national security law, it's been unveiled, but it hasn't taken effect yet. So how much do we actually know about what's in it? So the specific details of the law are not actually public yet. And everyone's been trying to get more information on what exactly it means and the implications. But it is a national security law that will seek to criminalize a number of key things. Successionist behavior, which is anybody seeking independence for Hong Kong, subversion of the state,

any threats to national security, extremely broadly worded, and foreign interference, which is the thing that I think perhaps most concerning for, you know, diplomats, journalists and others operating here. What actually counts as foreign interference? I mean, we don't have too many details, but could you as a journalist be punished for interviewing someone that the government doesn't approve of? Right. No one knows. And I think that that is the concern, right? So I'm on the board here of the Foreign Correspondence Club. A few years ago,

we hosted a Hong Kong independence activist and Victor Mallet, who was the Financial Times Asia editor at the time, who was sort of the moderator of that, got his visa extension denied and had to leave Hong Kong very hastily. And that was before all these laws were in place, right? So now with those laws in place, does it mean that if we publish quotes from, say, an independence activist or a protester in the street who's advocating for independence or something that, you know, Beijing disapproves of, or if we ourselves are considered the ones who are interfering and we are foreign journalists, like the implications are so sweeping and huge and broad. And I don't think any of us have really sort of figured it out yet.

The timing of this new law can't be a coincidence, right? Is China using this pandemic as an opportunity to pass this new law? Yeah, I think that's definitely what we're seeing, not just in Hong Kong, but across the region. In the past few months, China has made various moves to assert itself in the South China Sea, you know, with Vietnam, Taiwan. And, you know, we're seeing it now here in Hong Kong, too. I think, you know, Xi Jinping considers his handling of the pandemic a win. The CCP feels very emboldened right now. And they see the U.S. as weakened. And in that environment, they feel like they can push, you know, for things

and hopefully have no one respond. But I think Xi Jinping wants to call the U.S.'s bluff. I mean, he wants to see if they'll really do it and they'll really push back that strongly. I don't think that the fate of Hong Kong will necessarily be defined by the protest, but I think it will definitely be defined in large part by the reaction of the international community, especially the United States. And, you know, Secretary Pompeo reacted today saying that Hong Kong no longer warrants the

same kind of special treatment it once had from the U.S. Do you think that could have any effect on China? It's hard to say definitively just because the U.S.-China Cold War here, the new Cold War has taken up so much bandwidth in Washington and already there's been such a huge push for some of these measures, the sanctions, the rethinking of Hong Kong's special status and everything else. And I think the protest environment adds more of an unknown because the more people protest in the streets, the more violence there is, the more images of barricades and tear gas

and police having projectiles thrown at them and stuff, the more Beijing will say, you see, this is exactly why we need this national security law. And then it just sort of spirals downwards, right? So I think everyone's kind of predicting a very, very difficult summer over here in Hong Kong. Just how risky is this for China? Could the whole thing fail? Yeah. I mean, already China's economy is hurting because of the impact of COVID.

And there is also separately a move in Washington to kind of delist Chinese companies, you know, from the stock exchange. Right. So they need Hong Kong. They need Hong Kong's capital. They need Hong Kong as the international hub of finance and trade that it's always been. And I don't know how quickly that will end or whether that will happen in stages or it's very hard to kind of see what the future will be there. But China certainly benefits a lot from Hong Kong. And so if that no longer is the case, economically, it could have huge, huge impacts, I think. But I think they're just making the calculation now that Hong Kong protesters are too much like Xinjiang and Tibet. They're like a restive region that needs to be kept under control.

And I think maybe that's a bigger calculation for them right now than the economic factors. Yeah, with Tibet and Xinjiang, I mean, these aren't exactly economic powerhouses. If China is able to do something like this with an economic powerhouse like Hong Kong, what does that mean for China's standing in the world order? Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, the Hong Kong protesters will tell you, you know, first Hong Kong, then the world, right? They'll say, if they can do this to us, you're going to be next. We're like Berlin 1989, like watch us to see which way the world's going to go. They've always framed their struggle that way. They've always seen themselves as between a sort of liberal democratic order that

they're trying to uphold and protect and this regime that wants to kind of crush them. So that's what they would say, I guess, that it would be us first and then the rest of the world. Shabani Matani is the Hong Kong bureau chief for The Washington Post. I'm Noam Hassenfeld, filling in for Sean Ramos-Furham. This is Today Explained.