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Dec. 30, 2024 - Epoch Times
22:26
The Grim Future of Hong Kong Under Xi Jinping: Mark Clifford
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45 Hong Kong Democrats were sentenced to a total of almost 250 years in prison.
For what?
Because they held an election primary to try to get the strongest candidates for a city council.
Most of them have been held in jail even before they were convicted, and now they've gotten sentences up to 10 years each.
Mark Clifford has lived in Asia since the late 1980s and served as editor-in-chief of the South China Morning Post and executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council.
He witnessed Hong Kong's transformation from a largely free society in 1997 to an increasingly repressive one, especially after the 2019 imposition of its national security law.
What we've seen is Hong Kong go from being a place that would welcome Western business to one that's increasingly become a kind of rogue state that is Home to smuggling of a lot of high-tech equipment that's most notably, worryingly, going into the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
Now he's president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong.
He's the author of multiple books, including, most recently, The Troublemaker, a biography of Apple Daily's billionaire founder, Jimmy Lai.
He said, I would rather be hanging dead from a lamppost in central Hong Kong than to give the Chinese Communists the satisfaction of saying that I ran away.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Yee Kelly.
Mark Clifford, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Terrific to be here, and thanks for your interest.
Well, it's high time.
I mean, you've written enormously on issues that are very deeply important to me.
So why don't I just jump in with something.
Just two weeks prior to the election, President Trump indicated that he wanted to get a certain man named Jimmy Lai out of prison in Hong Kong.
So here we are.
What do you think the likelihood of that is?
Well, I think the odds are increasingly good.
President-elect Trump has promised to get Jimmy Lai out.
He said it would be easy, 100 percent guaranteed that he could get him out.
And I think that's a pretty powerful statement when the president of the most powerful country in the world says he's gonna work to get a A political prisoner out of jail.
And I think there's other areas where we're starting to see some momentum.
Jimmy Lai is a British citizen, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer told General Secretary Xi Jinping that he wanted Jimmy Lai out of prison.
So I think we're seeing the kind of top-level engagement that we have to see to get Jimmy freed.
Well, and things maybe changed a little bit since the election because there was this mass sentencing.
And I want to dive into that.
Like, what actually happened?
And when these sorts of things happen, my sense is that sometimes it's to kind of hide the details a bit, right?
But the details are actually quite stark and shocking.
It is shocking.
Forty-five Hong Kong Democrats were sentenced to a total of almost 250 years in prison.
For what?
Because they held an election primary.
to try to get the strongest candidates for a city council.
So think of this.
These are people that are trying to work within the system, work within the basic law, which is the mini-constitution laid down by China to govern Hong Kong.
They were playing by the rules, but the Chinese Communist Party didn't like the fact that they were getting too much support.
So they had a dawn raid four years ago.
They've had a prolonged trial.
Most of them have been held in jail even before they were convicted.
And now they've gotten sentences up to 10 years each, as they said, a total of almost 250 years in all.
I mean, it's outrageous that you would take some of the best and brightest, most passionate of your citizens who were working nonviolently, legally, within a system, and lock them up.
But the actual numbers of the people that have been basically through this Hong Kong legal system for similar type transgressions, basically political activity or advocating for freedom, frankly, is actually much larger than that, right?
It's unbelievable.
More than 1,900 political prisoners have been convicted and been jailed in the last five years.
It's up there with Myanmar or Belarus in terms of the growth, the numbers of political prisoners.
Ten years ago, Hong Kong had no political prisoners.
And, you know, you look at now almost 2,000 people, but it goes beyond that.
More than 10,000 people have political charges hanging over their heads.
Over 3,000 prisoners are being held in Hong Kong before they've been convicted.
Political, they're basically political prisoners, but they haven't been convicted.
They're just being held without bail for years and years on end.
About 40 percent of the people in the Hong Kong prison system right now I mean, this is the kind of behavior you expect from a totalitarian state, not from a place that calls itself a global business center.
This is actually a huge number.
This is something I didn't realize.
You're basically telling me that almost half of the entire Hong Kong prison population is basically innocent people.
Yeah, well, it isn't until proven guilty, and they haven't been proven guilty, and they're just being held behind bars.
But proven guilty of what?
Yeah, even if they were proven guilty.
They haven't even gone through a sham trial.
I mean, almost everybody is convicted, but they haven't even taken the trouble to convict these people in a kangaroo court.
They're just holding them, and it's years on end now.
Let's talk a little bit about your background.
I put together a few notes for myself.
You have been, I guess, deeply involved with Hong Kong, in Hong Kong, for a very long time.
Right now you're the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong here in D.C. You were executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council, right?
You were the South China Morning Post chief editor?
Editor chief, yeah.
You've been writing, thinking, and you got a PhD from the region, and many other things.
So how long have you been working there?
Or how long did you work there?
Why did you leave?
And how has it changed?
Wow, a lot of questions.
I was in the region for 33 years.
I'm kind of an accidental Asia person.
I was a business and finance and economic journalist who was lucky enough to have a fellowship at Columbia University in New York and then be hired by the Far Eastern Economic Review and sent to Seoul, South Korea in 1987, just as the country was about to start its process of democratization.
I saw South Korea go from more or less a military dictatorship to this vibrant democracy that it is today.
I saw the neighboring island of Taiwan go from martial law again to a robust democracy.
And so I was lucky enough to witness extraordinary changes in Asia on the political side and, of course, on the economic side.
So I watched China rise.
I wrote a book with the head of the World Trade Organization When China got into the WTO, and so I was really optimistic about the ability of Asia and Asian countries to keep growing economically and also to transform themselves politically and socially.
And some places work better than others.
South Korea and Taiwan are the shining examples, and China's unfortunately the laggard.
It's been a tremendous disappointment to see China actually going backwards.
It's much less free than it was even in the early 1990s when I first started going there.
You know, I think we're going to have to do another episode on the pros and cons of China having been welcomed into the WTO, of course, with the huge U.S. support.
It's the only reason it happened.
But that's a topic for a different day.
Yeah, you've been Described also as an accidental activist, I think, because for most of your time there, you were actively very neutral, if I recall.
But then things changed in 2019, the year I went there myself.
Absolutely.
I was a journalist.
I mean, journalists, whatever their feelings are, have to be neutral.
I never marched in a demonstration in Hong Kong.
Whatever my feelings were, were my feelings.
And I ran the Asia Business Council.
It's a group of chairmen and CEOs.
I was the editor-in-chief of the two English language newspapers in Hong Kong.
But in 2019, things changed, and that's the first time.
June 9, 2019 was the first time that I ever marched in a demonstration in Hong Kong.
And it was against the extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kongers to be sent to the mainland to face so-called justice in the Chinese courts.
And I, like millions of other Hong Kong people, were out in the streets that summer peacefully protesting against that legislation and for more accountability, more democracy, more transparency, In the Hong Kong government, push came to shove, things came to a crisis point in Hong Kong, and I decided that I needed to take very, very small actions, really.
Then I came to the States in 2020, and I was on the board of directors of Next Digital, which publishes Jimmy Lai's, the company he started, Apple Daily Newspaper.
Unfortunately, many of my colleagues, including Jimmy, ended up in jail, and the newspaper was shut down forcibly by the government.
One thing led to another, and a group of us decided we were outside of Hong Kong, but we needed to do what we could to keep shining a light on Hong Kong and keep protecting freedom in Hong Kong to the extent we could.
We haven't been as successful as we would have liked.
I mean, there's not a lot of freedom left in Hong Kong right now.
So let's talk about this a little bit.
In fact, we hung on at the Epoch Times.
We hung on with an office just until quite recently where we had to close it as well.
I was there in 2019, and this was just before the national security law came down.
And I'm going to get you also later to kind of just remind us what exactly that is, because I think we could, if we both went to Hong Kong today, we could actually be charged for doing what we're doing right now under the national security law, if I'm not mistaken.
But so I interviewed a number of people there.
I mean, Cardinal Zen, who I've always had this, you know, incredible, I guess, admiration for, you know, with a quiet man, who's also quite unrelenting in his support of the Hong Kong people.
Leung Kwok Hung, I always forget his name, of course, Long Hair, colloquially known as Long Hair.
Alvin Young and Benny Tai, who got this, the biggest or the longest sentence in this recent I wanted to comment on a few things that they told me.
Benny told me that he saw Hong Kong as the forefront of a new Cold War, this conflict between authoritarian and democratic values or freedom.
So why do you call it a new Cold War?
Well, I think it's to compare with the last Cold War between the USSR and the United States, and China as one of the most powerful authoritarian regimes in the world, and surely the United States and with the European countries representing or leading the world of freedom and democracy.
So it's now Hong Kong is in some way caught In this new Cold War that Hong Kong may be unexpected, that Hong Kong is itself not yet a democratic place, and also a very small place, only a city with a population of 7 million.
But now we are kind of raised to a very high profile that the trade war between China and the US, and also it's not just a trade war.
I think the trade war is more than a trade war we have seen now.
And so that's why we use the term that the New Cold War, that Hong Kong is now kind of caught in between.
So what do you think?
Well, Hong Kong is definitely on the front lines.
Its role historically has always been a meeting point or almost like a...
A chamber between East and West where it was a great laboratory for freedom in China and was really the freest place certainly in the PRC. But before Taiwan opened up, I mean, Hong Kong was really the freest place in the Chinese world.
And I think now it's very interesting.
Benny's comments, I think, are quite prescient because what we've seen is Hong Kong go from Being a place that would welcome Western business was a safe place for Western capital to one that's increasingly become a kind of rogue state that is home to smuggling of a lot of high-tech equipment that's most notably, worryingly, going into the Russian war effort in Ukraine.
So Hong Kong has really gone to the dark side.
But I also think it's important in this new Cold War sense Because we need to stand strong, we need to stand firm in Hong Kong to the extent we can and preserve the freedoms, not let the world forget Hong Kong.
Because if they do, it simply encourages Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party to go to other places, notably next stop Taiwan.
But I think the entire East Asian region is really at risk.
I'm not...
Kind of trying to reinvent the domino theory that American planners talked about during the Vietnam War days.
But I do think it's important to hold the line for democracy and freedom to the extent that we can.
People like Benny Tai and the others that were sentenced to almost 250 years, they were simply trying to work within the basic law and to extend the freedoms and to work towards full democracy, which China itself promised.
And now China's just gone back on those promises.
I think it tells us That China's claims to want a rules-based international order are hollow.
They're nonsense.
They can't be trusted.
Mark, we're going to take a quick break right now, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.
Well, one of the very kind of touching anecdotes in your book, The Troublemaker, we're going to talk about Jimmy Lai now, is Jimmy talking to Natan Sharansky.
I loved seeing that he wrote the introduction, one of my favorite interviews I think I've done on this show.
He says that Jimmy Lai said, nonetheless, despite all of this, he believes in the victory of the good.
So let's talk about The Troublemaker.
It's a biography of Jimmy that goes back to this boy born two years before the revolution in China into a family that, like so many millions of others, was just destroyed by the revolution.
The family was split apart.
They lost their property.
They lost their money.
Father went off to Hong Kong.
Half-siblings melted into Guangzhou in southern China, and Jimmy was left with his twin sister, A sister was two years older who was mentally challenged, disabled, and his mother, who was in and out of labor camps because she'd been married to a rich guy.
She'd been a peasant, but somehow she was a class enemy now and had to wear the dunce's cap and apologize.
Jimmy left.
He never made it through primary school.
He was just hustling.
He was selling scrap metal.
He was working the black market.
He worked as a porter.
If he found a field mouse, caught a mouse in the field and grilled it, he thought this was a great delicacy.
I mean, he was hungry all the time.
And he got a one-way permit to go to Macau and never looked back.
Stowed away and washed up in Hong Kong.
Made it to his aunt and uncle's house.
They were living even worse than he was in China.
They didn't even have room for him to sleep on the floor.
They were in such a small shanty hut.
He ended up, they found him a worker, they got him to a factory.
He slept in the factory that first night.
Woke up the next day and there was more food than he could eat.
Just the smell of the congee and the The rice and the dough.
Food was freedom to him.
Then he became one of Hong Kong's most successful entrepreneurs, first making sweaters, then setting up a chain of retail clothing stores.
He was a typical hard-charging Hong Kong businessman who split his time between New York and Hong Kong.
Then Tiananmen Square came in 1989. He was not political, but he was enormously encouraged by by Deng Xiaoping's economic reforms in the 1980s, and he decided to support, he thought political reform would follow,
and he started making t-shirts with the picture of the student leaders on them, sold them in his Giordano retail stores, sent the money up to Beijing, sent tents and other material up there, and was really supporting the students, probably the most proactive of any of the Hong Kong businessmen.
I mean, a lot of people were doing it quietly.
He was out front, which is his character.
And then, of course, the crackdown came, the crushing of the movement.
And he's just looking at this global spectacle.
The whole world's watching Beijing.
CNN had just started.
And so Jimmy thought, I can do this.
We're going to have more media.
Media now has technological possibilities of the sort that CNN shows transparency.
We're going to shine a spotlight on the Chinese Communist Party.
Pretty soon it'll just be gone.
So he set up first a magazine.
He knew nothing about media.
He was about to set up a Chinese fast food chain, and instead he decided to go into media.
But he's an incredible entrepreneur, and he set up first a magazine and then a newspaper in Hong Kong.
A decade later, he did the same thing in Taiwan.
Within 20 years, he had one of the biggest and most powerful Chinese-language media enterprises in the world.
So, with all of this, and frankly the writing was on the wall, I think, for the Apple Daily and Next Digital, Why did Jimmy stay?
Jimmy's a guy with principles.
He's a guy who does what he believes is right.
I mean, everybody knew that he was a marked man.
I mean, there were, from the time of the handover, there were rumors that there was a secret list, and when that came out, Jimmy Lai was number one on it.
There was a list of people who were going to be rounded up.
I mean, it was almost like the national security law was written to convict Jimmy.
So, there's no question but that he was going to jail.
And he said to one friend that I've talked to, he said, I would rather be hanging from a lamppost in Central, hanging dead from a lamppost in Central Hong Kong, than to give the communists, the Chinese communists, the satisfaction of saying that I ran away.
You know, something you mentioned at the beginning of the interview I want to touch on a little bit.
There's been increasing sanctioning of Chinese companies that are, for example, producing things through slave labor in Xinjiang and other places.
One of the ways of evading these sanctions has been something called transshipment, right?
And this is something that's happening both to get goods into Russia.
That's a similar situation with Communist China.
So, tell me a little bit about that, because you alluded to this at the beginning of the interview.
My colleague Sam Bickett, Samuel Bickett, who was unjustly imprisoned in Hong Kong for several months, did a remarkable report earlier this year for the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, looking at Hong Kong's role in illicit shipments, transshipments.
An extraordinary amount of evidence showing that military use technologies were being shipped into Hong Kong at an increasing rate for the most part and often were being shipped, just turned around and shipped to Russia, often to sanctioned companies.
We're seeing arms and we're seeing Iranian oil being sold through Hong Kong, money and arms going to Iran.
So Hong Kong has become, you know, on a global scale, has become a very, very important node for shipping money and especially, I think more worryingly, technology.
It's being used to kill people in Ukraine and elsewhere.
This may sound a little bit grim, but is Hong Kong over?
Well, this phase of Hong Kong is over, and I think as long as Xi Jinping is in power and continues his current policies, Hong Kong is going to be facing a pretty grim time as a business center, obviously as a social center, and certainly in terms of political freedom.
I think that the Hong Kong people in their DNA have a strong component of freedom, the freedom gene, I guess.
And I think that that's a core part.
It's a core value in Hong Kong.
It's a core part of who Hong Kong people are.
Six out of ten have always voted for pro-democracy candidates, and I have to believe that in their hearts the people of Hong Kong are living and waiting for another day.
When they get the chance, they'll be out on the streets again.
Maybe they won't need to be out in the streets.
They can just elect their city council and get on with their business and be free again, have free newspapers, free media, freedom of worship, and all the freedoms that they were promised by China.
I remember the Berlin Wall.
I lived in Berlin.
It was an ugly, horrible thing that separated the city and the country, and we don't have a Berlin Wall anymore.
I think that China will change.
China won't go on forever in this horrible form.
We really will see a rejuvenated, great China and a free China.
And we've seen in Taiwan an example of what a modern, prosperous China could look like.
Well, Mark Clifford, it's such a pleasure to have had you on.
Thank you so much.
I really appreciate your knowledge, your interest, and, of course, your commitment to freedom.
Thank you all for joining Mark Clifford and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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