Today, Explained - Hope for Hong Kong

Episode Date: August 22, 2019

Hong Kong ramped up its protests and China ramped up its propaganda machine. But the conflict may have finally reached a turning point. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Matt Rivers, international correspondent, CNN. I spoke to you about these protests in Hong Kong back in June. And since then, it seems they've been turned up to 11. What changed? You know, in some ways, I think that everything has changed since mid-June and nothing has changed since mid-June, and nothing has changed. And I kind of feel like, you know, in terms of what hasn't changed, you have a city in Hong Kong, a little bit more than 7 million people in population, who have vast majorities of that population who are just frustrated and still they don't trust the government. But how these protests have evolved, how the police have responded, and also how Beijing has responded in a more forceful way

to these protests. That's what's been changing over the last, let's say, six weeks or so. Can we start with the demands? The impetus of these protests was this extradition bill, but Carrie Lam tabled that, right? What Carrie Lam, who's the chief executive of Hong Kong, she's a leader that is basically appointed by Beijing. What she agreed to do was to withdraw the bill. So basically take it away from being debated by Hong Kong legislators in the parliament. You know, she didn't completely kill the bill. She only temporarily withdrew it from the debate schedule. And so what protesters said is, well, that's not good enough. At any point,

legislators, when things calm down, they can just bring the bill right back. They basically called it a trick that the Hong Kong government was going to play on them. But then from there, we saw violence. So the first time we saw tear gas deployed was on June 12th. The Hong Kong police deployed tear gas to disperse the crowds, and that's just so unusual for Hong Kong. And there was a lot of accusations about police brutality when protesters were involved

in clashes with the police. So then you've seen demands change where the protesters want inquiries, independent inquiries into police brutality. And then as've seen demands change where the protesters want inquiries, independent inquiries into police brutality. And then as the weeks have gone on, the kind of broader subtext to all this is that protesters do not trust the Hong Kong government and they want more pro-democracy reforms. And so one of the things they've been calling for is actually universal suffrage, you know, to the point where everybody in Hong Kong who wants

to run for office can run for office, which isn't the case right now, and that everybody has an equal vote. Tell me how the violence has evolved. So what we've seen, it really depends on who you talk to. You know, if you talk to protesters, they're going to say, well, they got violent because the police got violent. And the police would say, we are acting in kind to what we're seeing from protesters. I think a major turning point came on July 1st. For most of the day today, protesters have laid siege to the Hong Kong legislature, surrounding it and trying to break inside

through different doors and windows. They've actually taken off parts of the building, some fencing, and rammed these doors. This would be the equivalent of, let's say, the protesters in Washington, D.C. breaking into the U.S. Capitol. I mean, it was surreal. I was there. I watched basically the police retreat from this government building and you saw protesters for hours working at getting through first reinforced glass and then through metal barricades, getting into the legislative council chamber. Police have been filling the hallways. They are all suited up and ready to go, with gas masks on in some cases, but certainly with helmets and shields.

Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go!

Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Let's go! Later on that night, police cleared out the legislative council chambers. There was tear gas on the streets.

There was batons used. There was riot shields used. It was very, very violent. And ever since then, we have seen successive weekends and even weekdays where we have seen police constantly deploy tear gas, rubber bullets, beanbags shot from weapons. And what you also see on the other side is protesters who are increasingly angry at the police. They come ready to fight. They form a

front line and then the police form a front line and the police charge. They kind of had this uniform. They're wearing elbow pads. They have gas masks that they wear, goggles that they wear so that the tear gas doesn't affect their eyes. They build barricades in the streets. And then there's also protesters that have been throwing bricks. We've seen, you know, Molotov cocktails be thrown on the streets. We have seen police rush the protesters, beating some of them very severely. We've seen a woman get shot in the eye with a rubber bullet. There's a thought that she might become blind as a result. And, you know, there are other places around the world that see violent protests, but this is Hong Kong. This kind of violence, while it might pale in comparison to the violence, you know, you might

see between Israel and Palestine, for example, this just doesn't happen here. And I'm guessing airport protests don't happen there either. How'd that go over last week? You know, we had seen sit-ins at the airport before where basically foreign travelers were met by very peaceful protesters sitting in the arrivals lounge, you know, giving out leaflets to passengers arriving, saying, these are our demands, this is what's happening in Hong Kong, please help us, spread the message around the world. But that was all peaceful.

And then on Monday, you saw it kind of ratchet up a level where they went from the arrivals lounge and the protesters then got into the departures lounge, and they prevented flights from taking off. At one point, they shut down the Hong Kong airport, essentially, which is one of the busiest airports in the world, certainly one of the busiest hubs in all of Asia. And Monday night ended. Tuesday night, the protesters came back

and police ended up being there. It got much more violent. Black shirt anti-Beijing protesters locked in battle with riot police, one of whom pulled a gun after he'd been set upon. A journalist with a Chinese state-owned newspaper suspected of being a police spy, first humiliated, then savagely beaten inside

the terminal. And that was in some ways a turning point after all of the violence that we've seen over the past couple of weeks. The fact that this happened in the Hong Kong airport, in a place where you had lots of people who didn't have a stake in this fight going back and forth in and out of Hong Kong. There is genuine shock here over the escalating violence, Beijing branding it close to terrorism. You know, that was something that we hadn't seen before. And you actually saw remorse, I think, on the part of some protesters. You know, there's some protesters who went back to the airport on Wednesday holding up signs saying that what happened in the airport wasn't right and they made a mistake. But it led to this last weekend. And over this past weekend we saw the largest peaceful march since the beginning of these protests. Organizers say 1.7 million people roughly marched

on the streets of Hong Kong and for the first time in weeks we did not see tear gas on the streets of Hong Kong this weekend. And I think that that is a recognition on the parts of protesters that maybe they wanted to change their tactics. Maybe they were losing the narrative here. Maybe they were losing the kind of public goodwill that they had built up over these weeks of protests, kind of getting back to the roots of when this all started. How is China reacting to all of this?

Just like these protests have evolved, we've seen Beijing's response to this really evolve as well. You know, right in the beginning, when you and I first spoke, Beijing and state media specifically were just ignoring this. But then the state media realized, I think, and then Beijing realized that these protesters weren't going anywhere. And so they decided to flip the switch and go on the offense. And what you've seen over the past probably month or so in terms of a very concerted effort is Chinese state media on an all-out campaign to discredit what's going on.

They only focus on the negative actions of the couple thousand who have engaged in violence with the police and who admittedly have made mistakes. The other side of what they've been doing is a tried and true tactic in China, which is to blame foreign interference. The central government in Beijing has condemned the protests and accused the United States of helping to fuel the unrest. These are protests that are organized by outside forces, Western countries like the United States, like the United Kingdom.

In London, China's ambassador lashed out at what they call foreign black hands for inciting revolt. Stop interfering in China's internal affairs. Stop conniving in violent offenses. And so that's kind of their two-pronged approach. Discredit the protesters and blame the protests on Western forces. The final thing I'll mention about China's response is that they've consistently put out these propaganda videos.

Hey, democracy, why you always talking somewhere so hard to see? Yeah, I heard there's even some really bad raps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where's the hurt to be found in the Middle East? People were throwing bombs across the city streets. Yeah, I heard there's even some really bad raps. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But one of the things, kind of the nuclear option, if you will, would be that in the near future, Beijing is going to send in army troops into Hong Kong. Critics of China's authoritarian government say Beijing would be shooting itself in the foot if it ordered these paramilitary forces into Hong Kong to restore law and order. Paramilitary troops, which we saw for ourselves just last Wednesday near the border with Hong

Kong, putting out these very inflammatory propaganda videos showing soldiers drilling in anti-riot scenes in these drills, they're clearly trying to send a message to the Hong Kong people and also to the rest of the world that they are reserving the right to use that kind of force. That is one of the things, one of the messages that China is trying to push. It feels very David versus Goliath over there in terms of scale, but also maybe not because China doesn't seem to be getting

directly involved? Your David versus Goliath point is really interesting in the sense that you have a city of roughly 7 million people, not all of whom are protesting, going up against a country with 1.3-ish billion people. And it's the second largest economy in the world. I mean, David Goliath might even be an understatement in terms of what Hong Kong is up against here. And so the only thing I think we can be sure of is that the momentum has not slowed down for these protests. Their anger has not subsided.

They're out because they're concerned and terrified, frankly, about the future of their city under the rule of Beijing. Hello. Hello. Hello. Hi, so this is me speaking on Skype. Beautiful. Okay. Could I just have you say your name and how you'd like us to identify you on the show? My name is Professor Rana Mitter

and I'm the director of the Oxford University China Center. And Professor, we just heard from Matt that China is signaling with all these propaganda videos that it could quash these protests at the snap of a finger. And yet it hasn't. Why is that? You're absolutely right that in military terms, in coercive terms, China could almost certainly shut the demonstrations down tomorrow by using troops and using force. But it knows that by doing so, it would incur immense reputational damage. Essentially, the rest of the world would look at what China has done, had done, and they would say,

this is not a pragmatic power. This is not a reasonable power. And that would essentially restore the kind of situation we saw 30 years ago in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, when China did crack down on protesters and spent the best part of the next decade trying to recover its international position. And could you just remind us what happened 30 years ago? Of course. In the spring of 1989, students, workers and other members of society started to gather in actually a large number of China's cities, Chengdu, Shanghai, all over the country. But the demonstrations that really attracted attention were in Beijing. In the streets of Beijing, mass demonstrations snaked through the city in support of the students and defiance of the government.

And in particular in Tiananmen Square, the symbolic and literal heart of China's capital, a huge area which is just in front of the famous Forbidden City. There was the feeling of a carnival, good-natured and free-spirited, as people from all walks of life took part. And they were protesting about a whole variety of things, like the rapidly rising rate of inflation in China, which meant that buying everyday groceries was very expensive. But the really basic principle, and the one that they put on posters, that they shouted about in the square,

was about more democratic involvement with the government of China. And although there were attempts to mediate the two sides, eventually, on the night of 3rd into 4th of June 1989, the Chinese government sent in tanks and troops. The military, moving in armored vehicles, smashed through barricades that had been put up by the protesters and advanced relentlessly toward Tiananmen Square. They fired automatic weapons into crowds of citizens who, for the most part, could fight

back with nothing more than rocks and bottles. And many hundreds, possibly even thousands of protesters were killed and certainly many others injured in that confrontation. The mobs were chanting slogans like you are the people's liberation army and we are the people. How did the world respond? The world responded

in one way with outrage and shock. The major Western and liberal governments of the world, the United States, Japan, the UK, all basically condemned the actions of what many newspapers at the time referred to as the butchers of Beijing. Incredibly, despite the horrors and the risks, we have witnessed acts of indescribable bravery on our television screens. A lone man standing in front of a row of tanks, the strength of his will, stalling the might of armour as it rolled down a Beijing street.

And I now call on the Chinese leadership publicly, as I have in private channels, to avoid violence and to return to their previous policy of restraint. But we also know that behind the scenes there there was a lot of diplomatic maneuvering going on to try and make sure that the Chinese government was not completely isolated. So a delegation from Japan went in quite soon afterwards. And in fact, there were delegations from the United States which were going in undercover, so to speak. The reason for that was quite simple. In those very fateful,

very turbulent days of 1989, when nobody knew whether the Soviet Union would survive, Eastern Europe was about to burst into this sort of autumn of freedom, you might say, people really didn't want a civil war, a coup, some kind of collapse in China, which they at the time thought might well be the result of this confrontation, this killing in Tiananmen Square. But it was controversial even at the time. And it's remained so ever since, so much so that you can't even talk about the subject officially in China today. So when you watch these protests in Hong Kong, do you see any similarities to what happened in China 30 years ago? Or to you, does it look totally different? No, there are similarities. And I would say that in terms of the structure of the protest,

what you see motivating people to go out on the streets today, there is one factor that is very similar to 1989. And that's the combination of what you might call day-to-day grievances. So remember I said that back in 1989, high price inflation was one of the issues that actually stimulated people to protest in the most short term. Now, that isn't so much an issue today, but economic issues are people, young people in Hong Kong can't afford to buy an apartment anymore. They can't afford really to maintain a decent middle class lifestyle, and they feel very resentful about that. But just as in Beijing in 1989, in Hong Kong today, those economic issues have fused into a variety of protests that are about much more principled issues of politics. So in the case of Hong Kong, it is about democratic participation in the government, that they

simply don't have enough input, enough influence, enough capacity to be able to change the government and get it to do what they want as essentially well-informed people who want to vote as they would like. So I would say that in those terms, the enthusiasm for a more democratic future certainly looks very similar both in 1989 and in 2019. What would you say the key differences are in this situation? I think the most significant difference is, first of all, in terms of the relative strength of Hong Kong and its people compared to the rest of China. So 1989 was a time when China was still relatively small economy.

It was growing, but it was nothing like the kind of economic superpower that it is today. And Hong Kong was much more important. Something like 20, 22 percent of China's total GDP at the handover in 1997 actually came from Hong Kong. Today, China is an economic superpower in its own right. Hong Kong just isn't as economically important. And for that reason, you can see that when you look at the protests and the demonstrations, that the demonstrations by Hong Kong people, they are clearly deeply worrying and annoying to the Beijing government. But I do not think that the Beijing government believes that the protests in Hong Kong are an existential threat to the security of the communist government in Beijing. That was very different from 1989, where they thought that if they let the protesters in Tiananmen Square get out of hand, the Communist Party might come collapsing down.

Does that give Hong Kong some leverage that the stakes might be lower for China? In a weird way, it does. And I think that the Hong Kong protesters always been very clear that they have never claimed that they are trying to ferment democracy or liberalize the mainland of China. It's about preserving what they have already in Hong Kong. Because the stakes are lower from the mainland's point of view, although, of course, not from the point of view of Hong Kong people, for whom the stakes are incredibly high, there is more capacity for a space for discussion, to actually try and iron out difference in a way that even today there simply wouldn't be

if these demonstrations were happening in Beijing and Shanghai, which, by the way, I think is highly unlikely. How does it end? I mean, it's been months now, and it just seems that these protesters aren't going away. And it seems like China isn't going to step in and quash it. So where does it end and how? Well, unbelievably, there have been at least one or two little glimmers of hope in the last two or three days. So the Hong Kong government under Carrie Lam, the chief executive, has finally put forward an idea which actually plenty of people involved in the local media in Hong Kong have been advocating for some weeks, which is the idea that the conversation has to start again. A lot of what happened has been because Hong Kong's leaders are perceived by the wider Hong Kong population, or most of them, as basically being on receive mode

when it comes to orders and direction from Beijing. And, you know, that's not surprising because Beijing in the end is the ultimate power in Hong Kong, but very much not on receive mode when it comes to hearing from civil society, hearing from younger people, hearing from the sectors like media and education, which are really very, very dependent on Hong Kong being an independent, rigorous, uncorrupt sort of place. And that now seems to be changing. There is the statement by the authorities that they are looking to open up a forum, some kind of big public conversation, which will take views from these sectors of society. It is possible, if they're smart about it, that that kind of conversation could channel the anger from the demonstrations in a positive direction. And the use of nonviolent protest, this is a wonderful image that's now gone around the world of people just sitting cross-legged, singing songs from Les Miserables, you know, the do you hear the people sing? What a great gesture. This is entirely peaceful,

musical, slightly ironic, very, very dignified. It is almost certainly the case that those involved with the demonstrations will try and avoid violent confrontation, because that, of course, gives Beijing much more of an in to claim that actually this is connected to terrorism or some sort of subversive activity. And in fact, of course, for the vast majority of Hong Kong protesters, it's really about taking their own stake in their own city, not about dealing with foreigners or any of these rather distracting ideas. APPLAUSE