Infowars Reporter Sits Down With Mainstream Hong Kong Journo To Discuss ChiCom Threat
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I think we covered pretty much the gauntlet of what's happening in Hong Kong, but unfortunately, what I don't see is this ending well because the government's not yielding, the protesters are not yielding, the police are getting more aggressive, and we have 100,000 paramilitary troops across the border.
it's a tinderbox tomorrow's news today This is Greg Reese with Infowars.com.
We are talking to Harminder Singh, a mainstream journalist from Hong Kong.
Harminder Singh is a Hong Kong-based journalist covering local politics since 2014.
He is also the host of a weekly talk show called Talk the Walk.
Above all else, he is a staunch free speech advocate.
Harminder reached out to us while we were in Hong Kong last week reporting on the protests, and we decided to call him and ask him to get some inside feedback from Hong Kong mainstream journalists.
Harminder, welcome to InfoWars.
Thanks for having me on.
So this whole thing, this whole recent protest really kicked off with the extradition bill that was being proposed in June.
Could you tell us a little bit about that?
Sure.
So the extradition laws amendment bill was brought forward because there was a murder case in Taiwan where a young couple went over there and the boyfriend allegedly murdered his girlfriend.
Because there's no extradition treaty between Hong Kong and Taiwan, he was able to come back to Hong Kong.
And when they found out who did it over in Taiwan, he was already here and they couldn't send him back because there's no extradition treaty.
So Kerry Lam, the chief executive of Hong Kong, I guess you would say the equivalent of a mayor in the United States, she proposed a extradition bill where any jurisdiction in the world could request extradition.
This included mainland China.
Now, since the handover between Britain, China, and Hong Kong, since the 1997 handover, there's been a firewall between Hong Kong and the mainland where we don't send our residents to the mainland for prosecution.
Now, you can clearly see why.
It's not exactly, has the best legal system because it's not rule of law, really it's rule of man or rule of party.
That doesn't blend with our common law system.
We are on common law.
This is one thing that a lot of people don't understand about Hong Kong.
We do not follow the mainland legal system.
Our legal system is inherited from the British when they were here as colonialists.
We still go by common law.
Now, for that reason, that's why a lot of corporate headquarters are here because they trust our legal system for disputes and things like that.
If they have other countries, they're doing business with other countries, they come here, both set up an entity, and then if there's a contract dispute, they go through our courts because it is very clean and they trust it.
However, the problem with this extradition bill wasn't so much suddenly you could be snatched and being and you could be tossed over to the mainland.
Not really.
What that bill would allow is on a case-by-case basis, the chief executive could hear an extradition request.
Once she hears it, it has to go through her, the legislature, and the courts before it could be granted.
Now, because our courts, again, are on a common law system, more than likely if the mainland wanted somebody extradited, they would be denied.
Why?
Because our judges are a mix of local and overseas judges.
We have a lot of British, Canadian, Australian judges sitting on our courts.
So you can understand they're actually quite liberal compared to some other judges.
Some are more conservative than others, but overall they believe in human rights and the rule of law.
However, the problem with the bill was the government gave a very short window of opportunity for the public to have a say in it.
From the beginning, this was an unpopular bill when it was introduced in February.
It was unpopular from the beginning.
People didn't want it, but the government kept talking to people they could trust.
The biggest problem this government had was living in its own echo chamber.
It only listened to opinions it wanted to hear.
It dismissed opposing opinions as you just don't understand us, you don't understand the bill, this is hysteria, on and on and on.
But they capitulated over and over again to the business community here because a lot of businessmen in Hong Kong that do business over in the mainland, they don't exactly do things by the book.
And to do business on the mainland, you have to break some rules, especially when it comes to money.
So you'll notice that they, with the bill, if you look through the history, they really watered it down for economic crimes.
And then they watered it down some more, saying, oh, well, only crimes that can be punishable for up to seven years will be heard.
So any petty crime will not be heard by the Hong Kong government or the courts.
That still didn't satisfy people because knowing how things work, this is how it starts, and then it rolls down a hill that further and further the government may introduce more amendment bills in the future saying, okay, we need to do this, we need to do that, and then eventually it will be much easier to send people across the border.
When one million people came out on June 9th, peacefully, not a single piece of property was destroyed at the time.
One million people came out.
That is more, that is double than 2003 when half a million people came out because there was a very unpopular national security bill where a lot of people were worried that their civil liberties would be hampered.
And to be honest, when you read that bill, that is exactly what may have happened.
But that bill was shelved.
The government listened.
The bill was shelved.
There was a big difference.
People quit.
The chief executive quit on health reasons, but that's just an excuse.
The general feeling is he quit because he became so unpopular and he could not govern.
So he was changed with Donald Jung.
This was Tung Chi Wa to Donald Jung.
This government saw 1 million people.
Carrie Lamb came out two days later before her executive council meeting, her cabinet meeting, and said, oh, I acknowledge there's 1 million people that came out on the street, or what she said, a large number of people, but we're still going to have the second reading of the bill on Wednesday.
That's where stuff hit the fan because people saying, wait a minute, we can't change our government through the ballot box because the chief executive is not elected popularly by the electorate in Hong Kong.
It's only voted on by 1,200 people, mostly pro-Beijing.
They had no choice but to lay siege on the legislative council to prevent the reading, and it was suspended.
But again, then you saw tear gas, rubber bullets, and all that.
The bill was considered dead quickly after that.
Once the government saw, oh my goodness, we really miscalculated the anger on this.
And I blame the executive council for that, her cabinet, for not seeing this because they are the ones that are supposed to be talking to the ordinary people of this city and should have been giving the chief executive the heads up saying, This bill is extremely unpopular.
We need to try carefully.
Or maybe we need to wait.
Her excuse, Carrie Lamb's excuse the whole time was the person that allegedly murdered his girlfriend is in jail right now for financial fraud.
He used his dead girlfriend's credit card here.
So they got him on that.
But he's set to be released next month.
It's September 1st here.
It will be October in a month.
So he'll be released next month.
She used that excuse, I got to run this bill through so I can send him back to Taiwan.
Well, people said, well, just having a one-time extradition treaty with Taiwan then.
No, no, no, no.
We need this whole blanket cover for the entire world.
This didn't just include mainland China.
This included North Korea.
This included Iran.
This included any country that wanted to have somebody sent back.
Right now we have about 20 extradition treaties.
The United States is one of them.
But these are extradition treaties with countries we trust with the legal system that the person being sent back will have a fair trial.
But unfortunately, the government didn't listen.
It miscalculated public opinion.
They cannot change their government here because it is not popularly elected.
So they had no choice but to basically run roughshod through the city week after week after week.
And we're almost three months into this and there's no end in sight.
You said a couple times allegedly killed his girlfriend.
Now that's the proper language to use coming from a city with law and order, but is there suspicion at all or talk at all that perhaps this was all a setup from the start just to introduce this extradition bill?
Yeah, there's absolutely no doubt that this was used as some sort of catalyst for this bill to be had.
There has been rumors of people in higher ups in the mainland who've always wanted some sort of extradition bill with Hong Kong.
You have to understand what Hong Kong is.
It is the most freest capitalistic city in the world.
And you were here.
You can actually see it by what has been built over the last four decades, four or five decades.
This is what happens when you have capitalism run rampant, when you don't have socialist controls.
But that also opens it up to easy money laundering.
This is a very big money laundering center.
And one of the reasons that a lot of businessmen were up in arms is about this bill is because of the fact that what they're doing on the mainland could get them in trouble and then they'll be sent back over there.
When somebody wants, when the mainland central government wants somebody sent back, they don't say we're charging you with, let's say, espionage.
They'll use some obscure law, such as picking quarrels and causing trouble, which can get you four years, or a car accident, something really obscure to bring you back, and then they'll work on you.
So this bill, and I say allegedly, because yes, we have law and order.
I have to use that term.
He has not been convicted in a court of law.
Once that happens, I will change the language.
But that murder was clearly used as an excuse to get this bill through.
Although I cannot confirm for sure that that is why they did it.
But I wouldn't be surprised.
Harminder, in America, the mainstream media here in America seems to be, at the very least, advocating for the communist Chinese, if not working for them.
They seem to stand completely against the patriot movement here.
There would never be any situation where we could get a mainstream journalist in America to come onto InfoWars, which is one of the main interests, which is one of the most interesting things I think about this interview, is your mainstream in Hong Kong.
So my question is, and when I was there, I was watching the news every night, and it seemed to me that the mainstream media seemed to stand with the people, seemed to be somewhat fair journalism over there.
Could you tell me about that?
It's sad that people pick and choose where they want to come on and not come on.
InfoWars has an extremely large audience, whether you agree with what kind of content comes out of it or not.
I think it's sad when we just can't talk to each other on certain issues that we have commonality in.
And right now, Hong Kong is the center point of the world's attention.
So why not reach out to a different audience and let them know what's going on?
But having said that, the media here, the local media and the local journalists are very pro-protester.
You can just look at their Twitter and they're calling the police all sorts of names and calling them terrorists and things like that.
Western media coverage here has been strange because there are a couple of outlets that are getting it pretty much right.
And then there are some that are painting a very simplistic narrative of what's happening.
They don't even explain the bill right.
When I was visiting in North America a couple of months ago, when just a few weeks after this whole thing kicked off, I was watching television and I just couldn't believe what I was hearing.
The whole time they were just saying they introduced a bill that could bring people to the mainland.
It was never that simple.
It is not that simple.
But unfortunately, the whole narrative's been skewed.
But one thing they say in journalism is don't let the facts get in the way of a good story.
And this is a good story of the little people rising up against the central government, the Communist Party of China.
That may be in the minds of some of the more radical protesters, but overall, I think they're just really sick and tired of the government acting like it's their mommy and always saying, and Carrie Lamas, she came out and said this, you know, when a teenager is acting out of line, you don't give them what they want.
You have to be stern with them, basically saying, I'm your mommy.
That really got people upset because over in the mainland, the government is your mommy and your daddy.
But in Hong Kong, the government should be listening to the people.
And she claims that she is, that's exactly what she did.
But with this bill, she clearly failed.
And I'm kind of digressing there.
But with the mainstream media, the Western mainstream media, I think they're really painting simplistic pictures because right now they're making the police look like state terrorists or something like that.
That is far from what's going on.
There's a lot of backstory to every clip that I've seen online, especially what's been happening over this weekend.
But you cannot just rely on social media for your news on Hong Kong, and you cannot just rely on mainstream media in the West for what's going on in Hong Kong.
You really have to read a lot to know what's really going on here.
The other thing I noticed here is in the American social media, there are You know, we have a lot of pro-commies, pro-communist people, leftists here in America.
A lot of people have been coming out saying that the Hong Kong protesters are alt-right Nazis.
I even saw someone saying that this is why the government needs to have the guns and the people don't.
Is there any faction in Hong Kong at all that is pro-communist?
Is there any movement of Hong Kongers that are pro-communist?
Before I get into that, let me just address this far-right nonsense that I see on Twitter about our protesters.
The political paradigm here is not left-right.
It is not like the United States.
It's democracy versus communism.
That's it.
It's that simple.
Whether it's left or right, I don't know.
But they can also have leftist democracy, right?
And you can also have going too far right-wing with fascism as well.
So it's not a left-right thing here.
It is about democracy versus communism.
Anybody saying this is some sort of far-right movement should delete their account straight up on Twitter.
This is the only place where you're seeing it is these clowns on Twitter saying that this is some sort of far-right uprising against the government.
No, that is not what's happening.
I'm sorry, I forgot.
I missed your question there.
Okay, could you repeat it?
Well, when I was there and I talked to everyone I can get a chance to talk to, the impression I got was that the entire city was united.
And what you just told me was the impression I got.
People, you know, I would even ask people, do you want independence?
Do you want, and the answer pretty much was no.
They just want justice.
They want fairness.
They want to maintain the democracy that they're used to, and they don't want communist China.
So my question is, is that accurate?
Does it seem like there is pretty much just solidarity in Hong Kong?
Yes.
I can say that the independence movement in Hong Kong is fringe.
Not to say that they're not very vocal, but they're fringe.
And the government has used the society's ordinance.
It's a law in our books, that banned an independence party a couple of months ago, the Hong Kong National Party, and also banned its leader, Andy Chen.
So independence is very taboo in Hong Kong.
Is there a pro-Beijing faction?
That was one of the original questions.
Absolutely.
There's a very pro-Beijion here.
Just look at our legislature.
It is stacked with pro-Beijing politicians.
But the thing is, it's hard to calculate how much support they really have, because whenever you see their rallies versus a pro-democracy rally, it looks like it's one-fourth of anything that the Pan-Democrats or the pro-democracy movement brings out.
So I don't know really how much support they have, or is it just people forced to be there?
Or people even bust in from across the mainland and journalists have tried to interview them and they hardly know even why they're there.
They look clueless or they just keep repeating the same lines and you know there's something going on there.
But overall, I would say that what people want is what was promised to them.
One country, two systems, a high degree of autonomy, eventually universal suffrage.
What some people say is genuine universal suffrage because what Beijing handed down five years ago and August 31st was the fifth anniversary of this framework that they handed down, the National People's Congress, handed it down saying, if you want one man, one vote, yes, you can have it in the next election.
That was going to be 2017 at the time.
But the candidates will be hand-selected by an election committee of 1,200 people.
So it's basically what's happening now.
Only they would select maybe two to three candidates and then we could vote on them.
So is it really apple juice flavor A, apple juice flavor B, apple juice flavor C?
At the end of the day, it's all apple juice.
So people, that's why it was voted down.
It was thrown out of the legislature because they need two-thirds majority to pass a bill like that.
And that's what people want.
They just want more say in their government.
Unfortunately, it seems to be going the other way around since President Xi Jinping came into power in 2012.
Harminder, late last week, Hong Kong police arrested more than 20 protesters, including prominent opposition figure Joshua Wong.
And it's been reported that more than 900 arrests have been made since June.
Do you have any information on what has happened to these arrested protesters?
Is there any talk about them?
Is there any information about them?
It's over a thousand now because of what's been happening over the past weekend.
Some are being released on bail by the police.
Some are being held by the police and waiting for a magistrate to see them.
The magistrate will either grant bail or they will have them held in custody until the next court date.
Or if it's very serious, they may just go straight to the high court.
It's the second level of our court system here.
Everybody that's been arrested will have a fair hearing in front of a judge.
One thing I will staunchly protect about my city is our judicial system is fair.
The problem is, is when Beijing interferes in our judicial system, and they can, because when the basic law was written, our mini constitution, it's called the basic law, when it was written, it said that basically our Supreme Court, known as the Court of Final Appeal, had final jurisdiction over what they say.
They have the final say on legal matters.
Unless the chief executive asks the National People's Congress for an interpretation of a certain law.
And then the courts have no choice but to listen to what is handed down to them.
That's a problem because it's interfered several times.
Now I'm saying interfered, and that may get me into trouble, but each time they do it, lawyers come out and do a silent march in black, always protesting against this type of blatant interference.
But again, it's a law, it's on the books, they can do it.
It's not like they're doing it arbitrarily.
It's actually allowed under the basic law.
So they all get a fair trial.
They all get a fair hearing.
It's very suspect that Joshua Wong, Agnes Chow, Ao Na Kin, James Tam, and sorry, Jeremy Tam, and Civic Passions legislator.
His name eludes me right now.
These are five prominent pro-democracy activists/slash legislators.
Three of them were sitting legislators being arrested a day before unsanctioned rallies/slash marches were going to happen.
Police, of course, came out and said it has nothing to do with the timing.
They just didn't have the evidence until that Friday.
And then they arrested them at one time.
But they all got a fair hearing.
I can say that.
We left last week, and right after we left, we saw a video of the Chinese army entering Hong Kong via the bridge, via naval ships.
Is there much talk of that going on in Hong Kong once that happened?
Okay, I want to get one thing clear about that bridge.
The bridge was not built to bring the army over.
It can be, but the quickest, easiest way to bring the army over is through the border with Shenzhen.
That bridge will take them 40 minutes to an hour to get here, and then they have to go through where the airport is, the southern, and then they got to go north, where usually they have to go into the city center.
That'll take forever.
It's easier just to come through the land border connecting the new territories and Shenzhen.
So I don't know why people say that bridge was built for that.
It can be used, no doubt, but they'll have to come all the way from Zhuhai, which would take forever.
But you can come across the border with the land border much quicker.
And also, 6,000 troops are already garrisoned in Hong Kong.
They're already here.
So again, we know they're here.
They've always been here.
They have military hardware everywhere.
It's just the 100,000 paramilitary troops that are now suddenly sitting on the border with Hong Kong at a sports stadium.
Yeah, that's a signal.
That is showing their chest, you know, thumping their chest, so to speak, to show that we can come in anytime.
You guys better calm down or we will unleash the paramilitary police on you.
They are not PLA.
They are paramilitary police.
But still, you don't want them coming because the Hong Kong police are going to, it's going to look like child's play compared to them because Hong Kong will have to first come under an emergency law, which will allow even national laws to be applied to Hong Kong.
And then your, it's martial law.
That's what it is.
The emergency law is martial law.
Basically, they can come in and do what they have to to stop the protests.
And that could mean bloodshed.
And nobody wants that, but it's possible.
But we'll see what happens.
Over the weekend, we've been seeing lots of videos that show the Hong Kong police have really gotten a lot more aggressive.
Would you agree that this, it seems to me like maybe the Hong Kong police is under pressure from the Chinese government, as if they're being told, look, if you don't get this under control, we have 100,000 troops right over the border.
We're ready to come in and take control.
Would that be your impression as well?
It's kind of hard to see Hong Konger police attacking their own people like this.
Well, they don't want to, right?
They are Hong Kongers.
Some of them are loose cannons, don't get me wrong.
Some of them are losing their minds out there, and you can see it in the videos.
I'm not going to condone some of their behavior, and I'm also not going to condemn all of their behavior, because you have to also see what some of the more radical protesters have been doing to the police for the past 13 weeks.
One thing I want to jump into, just for a second, you asked about the troop rotation.
That happens at least once a year.
This was the 22nd one.
So that's nothing new.
The only thing that was new was the cinematic video that was released and the voiceover about the troops exchanged by Xinhua, the state media.
That was new.
Usually it's just be a little statement, text statement saying, oh, we did a troop rotation last night.
All is well.
All went fine.
This time they were very thematic about the whole thing and they really enjoyed that, I could tell, editing it.
But in terms of Hong Kong police, are they under pressure?
I wouldn't be surprised at all to say you either stop this or we will stop it.
And they are getting increasingly aggressive, but at the same time, so are the protesters.
So I don't know.
It's 13 weeks and I'm surprised nobody's died yet.
That's the one amazing thing.
Nobody's been killed by these protests, where usually, even to the yellow vest movement in France, there were deaths all across France.
And here, there have been injuries, no doubt, on both sides.
But in terms of deaths, there hasn't been any, and I hope it stays that way.
But the protesters are getting more and more aggressive.
They're now launching petrol bombs at the police.
They're doing all sorts of tactics to try to hurt them.
A police officer just got jumped a day or two ago on his way home.
He left the police station, was waiting to catch a bus, and three people in black or gray shirts jumped him.
Now, I'm not going to say they were protesters.
I'm not going to say they're part of the movement.
But it's not a coincidence that suddenly police are being targeted when the Hong Kong version of Reddit has all sorts of forms saying, this is how you attack police.
This is where you lie for them in wait.
Call them on an emergency and ambush them.
This is all online.
And the police are on a razor's edge as it is.
And now they're being doxxed.
Their families are being harassed.
Their kids are being harassed in school.
You're the son of a police officer.
You're the daughter of a police officer.
And they get bullied.
This is hardly reported in the Western mainstream media.
But it's important, I think, that the police are also trying to do their job.
They're trying to maintain law and order.
If they don't, if they lay down their arms and just say, okay, we're with you, protesters.
We now are on your side.
Well, what's coming across the border is 100,000 paramilitary troops that are easily going to crush any sort of rebellion.
And then after that is the PLA.
So that's not even the first wave.
So the police have to get increasingly aggressive, I think, because the protesters are today, they are no longer just blocking roads and then having a little standoff with the police, tear gas, rubber bullets, petrol bombs, the usual brick throwing.
They're smashing up metro stations and rendering them useless for a few days because they need to be repaired.
It's now, I would say, it's gone into rioting.
We've passed the protester label, and I think we're moving into rioting.
What do you think the strategy is?
Do you think it's that the protesters are trying to force the hand of China to come in?
From my perspective, that's the only sense I can make of it.
Is if they're the more the police try to stop the rebellion, it seems the more the more violent faction of the protesters are pushing back to basically force the inevitable.
There's a hardcore element that has a slogan out right now saying, if we burn, you burn with us.
What that means is if we will push this to a point where the paramilitary police or the PLA will have to come in and launch some sort of crackdown on Hong Kong, hoping for one of a few scenarios.
One, they fight back, and some have said we are prepared to die for this.
And the images of, I would say, teenagers and up to 25-year-olds being shot dead in the streets or crushed by military vehicles is going to go around the world a thousandfold and show that there's been another bloody crackdown on the 30th anniversary of the last one.
That's interesting.
It's been 30 years since the Tiananmen Square crackdown.
That's one.
They're going to somehow be martyrs for this thing.
Another one, another scenario that could happen is they bring them in, and that causes worldwide condemnation where sanctions are imposed on mainland China and the central government.
Even Hong Kong will lose its special status right now.
Hong Kong has a special status with the United States that allows completely different type of trade that it does with mainland China.
That's why the U.S.-China trade war has nothing to do with Hong Kong in a way.
But if they remove the special status, Hong Kong's finished in terms of its role as a major financial center.
And the second thing that will happen is sanctions on China, which will put extreme pressure on the Communist Party.
But if people start losing their jobs and factories are closing and there's civil unrest, they hope that will create a butterfly effect or a ripple effect to the collapse of the Communist Party.
But I'm not exactly sure if that is even possible at this point.
Yes, I mean, it seems the whole thing seems so dramatic because, you know, I was tempted to say hopeless, but there's always hope.
But that does seem to be my take that that's the more hardcore protesters are trying to bring about perhaps another Tiananmen Square to bring in the world and bring some change and some fairness and democracy to Hong Kong.
I wouldn't say it's a hopeless cause of one way.
All they want is the five demands that they have put forward to be listened to by the Hong Kong SAR government.
But Reuters came out a few days ago and through three different sources said the central government has ordered Chief Executive Kerry Lam not to accept any of their demands.
Apparently, Chief Executive Kerry Lamb did go to government, to the central government and say, I think we need to listen to the first two demands of withdrawing the bill completely.
They use the word withdrawal.
She says it's dead.
Legislatively, it is not dead.
It's still on the books, but it will not be revived for debate in the legislature, is what she's saying.
But it hasn't been formally withdrawn by the government.
It's a very simple act.
All you need to do is say it's withdrawn.
I think a lot of the protesters will go home.
They'll be emboldened maybe in the future to try this type of action again.
But I think it would be a good start for the SAR government to bring some peace to the city that a lot of people are hoping that can happen.
The second demand is for an independent inquiry into the whole fiasco and police alleged police brutality against the protesters.
Again, the police are very against that because they have compartmentalized, not compartmentalized, but they have kind of gone into a gang mentality where it's us versus them.
So do not dare criticize us.
Otherwise, we are your only line of defense at this moment and don't mess with us.
And they've kind of proved that at a couple of points with the government.
So it seems like the tail may be wagging the dog or the old saying of the tail wagging the dog.
Yeah, I was surprised when I read that news at Hong Kong, or that the mainland China said that they reject all the demands because it does seem like that is the best option to avoid something terrible for everyone.
You have to understand you're dealing with communists and especially a very hardline communist like President Xi Jinping.
He believes in the supreme status of the party.
Any challenge to that is just not acceptable.
You do not capitulate to the demands of the people because the health of the party, the supreme being that is the party, must be maintained.
And that type of mentality has been applied here, even though Carrie Lamb's a 30-year civil servant.
She's been through the whole colonial era system of governance.
The colonial era here had to listen to the people several times when things weren't going their way.
Otherwise, there was going to be a riot.
In 1967, that's exactly what happened.
There was a massive riot caused by the communists.
It was the other way around at the time.
And the British had to bring in the British Army to bring in some peace and evoke the martial law that's on the books.
They had to do that to bring peace.
But there was an inquiry right after, and they found out what was the cause and what they had to do to get people to calm down.
And from then on, I would say what the British did was focus on livelihood issues and started the public housing programs and just tried to make Hong Kong as open as possible so people could get jobs and create business and all that.
And then we had relative peace for a long, long time until now.
Well, I think you're in a very interesting place.
You're better off without the UK at this point because the UK is becoming more and more authoritarian to a point where it's kind of scary.
And Hong Kong, to me, seems to be right in the center of this entire global authoritarian struggle.
It was an honor to be there.
There seems to be the entire city is united against communism.
So it is a very interesting situation.
Like you said, it's not hopeless, but there seems to be, and like you said, China is very hardline right now.
So all eyes, all self-aware and awake eyes should be on Hong Kong right now.
I think Hong Kong is going to decide a great deal of the future for the rest of us.
So I think also the British aren't exactly all out of the picture exactly.
They are signatories to the Sino-British Treaty.
So they are the only country actually that has a say of matters in Hong Kong.
Of course, China just dismisses it as interfering in the internal affairs.
Makes no sense when you have the Sano-British Treaty saying otherwise.
But before the British left, they gave millions of Hong Kong residents passports known as British National Overseas Passports.
Those passports allow travel.
It's a lot of visa-free travel, so it's actually a good passport to have, but it's not as good as the Hong Kong SAR passport.
That one has even more visa-free access for a lot of countries.
But the BNO passport is becoming a, is being revived.
What may happen, but what people want, is for all BNO passport holdholders to have automatic citizenship in Britain.
That's what happened to a lot of colonies, but for Hong Kong, it was not granted.
Only about 50,000 people.
The elites got citizenship to tell them, don't worry, if something goes wrong, you can always come to England and settle there.
What may happen is not so much that overnight the British will grant citizenship.
What may happen is it'll be very, very easy for BNO passport holders to go to England, get a job in some sort of, because you were here.
Most of these kids on the street are highly educated.
They are not bums.
They're not stragglers.
They're not welfare kings and queens.
They're actually very highly educated individuals.
So it wouldn't be that hard for them to find a job, especially with Britain leaving the EU.
They may need people like this.
There may be a thing where it'll allow them, BNO passport holders, to have a much easier way to get into England, stay there for maybe two or three years and get citizenship that way.
So that may be possible in the next couple of months.
There's some sources I've been talking to who are very active in parliament trying to get this to happen.
There's videos all over Twitter right now in America, mostly of the MTR station, the police violence of the MTR station.
And what are your thoughts on that?
All we're really seeing is the police getting very aggressive on the station.
Is there a story behind this?
Absolutely.
So what you're seeing right now is the police, the video starts with the police rushing in and beating people with batons and then beating people opening their umbrellas with batons.
Okay, the backstory to that.
Some protesters got onto the MTR and had an argument with some people on the train who did not agree with what they were doing, mostly middle-aged elderly folk who got into a fight.
You can also find this video online, but of course that's always conveniently left out by a lot of mainstream outlets.
They got into a fight and one of the protesters slapped one of the elderly gentlemen in a white shirt and they fought back.
And then there was a brouhaha that happened there with objects being thrown.
The next station, which was Prince Edward, they kept fighting and things like that.
The MTR had to call police, telling there's a fight on the train.
You need to come down here.
Then the Raptor team, which is our special tactical unit, they're known as the Raptor team, they came down to the station and they don't know what's going on.
All they see is massed individuals there who had just released a fire extinguisher inside the train, which was going nowhere.
It stopped there and the station was being evacuated.
All they see is that and the police were telling them initially, get out of the train.
Get out.
Now they're ordering them to get off the train.
They did not.
Instead, they were throwing umbrellas at them and throwing whatever objects they had.
Police first try pepper spray.
It doesn't work.
These protesters are very well equipped against pepper spray and tear gas.
And they kept provoking them.
There's a lot of, you have to understand, could you imagine going 13 weeks of just protesters spitting at you, cursing at you, saying we're going to get you, we're going to get your family, all this stuff.
They're working on 12-hour shifts.
They're very high-strung, and some of them are starting to lose it.
And you can tell.
And still, I'm not excusing that, some of their actions, but they're also under a lot of pressure.
And some of that pressure, some cannot handle.
They can't maintain the professionalism.
Now, they went into the MTR train, started hitting people with batons, didn't shoot anybody.
They're just hitting them with batons.
And still, that's no excuse for them to just, there are people cowering on the ground.
You keep hitting them.
No, you can't do that.
You got to stop once they say they surrender, basically.
And then after that, there was a mass arrest at the MTR station.
Everybody that was there, so they got mass arrested.
They said this is now a crime scene.
Once that happens, journalists have to get out.
We don't know exactly what may have happened afterwards.
But from the footage I saw, again, as restrained as possible, but some of the police were out of line with what they did.
But again, the protesters have also been getting more and more violent as well.
So I think we need to always look at it from both sides.
And that's really missing from the coverage so far.
Well, that was my impression when I was there.
I was close enough to see, make eye contact with a great deal of the police.
And it just seemed more than anything like a tragedy.
It was a great honor to be in Hong Kong.
Out of any place I've ever traveled to, I would say that was the nicest, most polite, intelligent society I've ever been to.
I was sad to leave.
And the impression I got from the protesters and the police was that these are the same people, and there is just a very important political movement, a fight for freedom going on.
But everyone involved are Hong Kongers.
And that's the big tragedy.
This is a political crisis.
That's what it is.
It is not a, it's not being painted, it should not be painted as the Hong Kongers versus the Beijing government.
That's not what it is.
Some people want it to be that.
But what it really is, is Hong Kongers saying, stop ignoring us.
We must have a bigger say in our government.
And you cannot continuously say you know what's best.
I'm talking about the government, without having full consultation with its people.
Unfortunately, the government's not learning.
Harry Lam says I'm starting a dialogue, a platform for dialogue.
But it's the same tired colonial era way of getting views of having certain special interest groups bring some people there and just view and just air their grievances or give their viewpoints.
It's wrong.
This is the 21st century.
They need to find a better way to communicate with their people or she's not going to be able to govern.
And the sad part is she can't even quit.
Carrie Lamb cannot quit without Beijing's say.
So if she said to Beijing, I want to quit, they could say no.
Of course, what she could do is go on air on television and say, I quit, but we'll see if that ever happens.
Harminder, is there anything else that you'd like to say that I haven't gotten to ask you about?
No, I think we covered pretty much the gauntlet of what's happening in Hong Kong.
But unfortunately, what I don't see is this ending well because the government's not yielding.
The protesters are not yielding.
The police are getting more aggressive.
And we have 100,000 paramilitary troops across the border.
It's a tinderbox at the moment.
And hopefully, cooler heads will prevail.
And this doesn't have to end this way where we see bloodshed.
Hopefully, they come to their senses and say, yeah, okay, we'll meet one or two year demands.
Let's talk.
Let's talk.
That's really missing from this.
It's all about throwing stuff and firing stuff, but people really need to get to talk.
And even when there is offers of talk, I don't even see others saying, well, they keep saying this is a leaderless movement.
Okay, then who do we, how do we solve this?
If this is a leaderless movement, which it is, but then what's the solution?
Protests say meet our five demands.
You can't do that right away.
But the government needs to meet some of their demands if this is to stop.
At the same time, you have a U.S.-China trade war happening, and China is also wary about that because if they do do a violent crackdown, that gives U.S. President Donald Trump the excuse that he, I have a sneaking suspicion he wants to really put his foot down on the central government's neck when it comes to trade.
Because like he says, they've been ripping us off for the last 30 years.
This may be his chance to use an excuse to get all countries together and say we must impose sanctions now because of what happened in Hong Kong.
And any Western nation worth their grain of salt when it comes to freedom and democracy will have to follow.
If not, you'll find out exactly where their loyalties lie.
A lot of the talk here has been whether or not we're going to see another Tiananmen Square in Hong Kong, which seems very hard to imagine these days, especially with the amount of journalists on the ground there, the amount of cameras there, the negative, the very negative, powerful images that the whole world would be seeing.
Hong Kongers are very intelligent.
They seem to understand communist China more than most, being right next door.
What's the general idea there?
I mean, is there a talk that there might actually be bloodshed from China?
They're hoping it doesn't come to that, but is anybody seriously thinking it's going to happen?
Not at the moment, because up until this point, the protesters have not been duding shops.
They haven't been going into the central liaison office, which is really Beijing's government representatives in the city, even though they're just here to liaise with the Hong Kong government.
But it's really their base of operations.
They did deface their emblem, and that really got them mad.
And they burned the flag again.
So that'll get some responses from the state media.
But in terms of Tiananmen Square, it's not 1989.
It's not just the BBC and CNN here anymore.
It's mainstream media mixed with citizen journalists, mixed with people with their phones.
It says journalists.
Okay, they shut down all the networks in Hong Kong.
Yeah, but we're going to record everything and eventually it will get out.
What has happened here?
Could you imagine the third largest financial center in the world with blood on the streets?
That's not exactly the image they want to portray, especially when they're trying to make Hong Kong, Shenzhen, and the Greater Bay Area the next Silicon Valley.
That's not going to fly if there's this Tiananmen Square-style crackdown in Hong Kong.
But never say never, because this is a very hardline Chinese Communist Party led by a very hardline president in Xi Jinping that believes in party above all.
And if that means short-term pain for what he considers long-term gain, I wouldn't put it past him.
Harmander Singh, thank you very much for joining us.
We really appreciate getting the inside information from a mainstream journalist in Hong Kong.
We wish you, we support, here at Infowars, we support you.
We support freedom.
We are very critical of the Chinese communist government.
So we thank you.
We support you.
We ask you to be safe.
We are going to be following very closely and we hope the best for Hong Kong.
Thank you for joining us.
Thank you, Greg.
It was my pleasure.
For Infowars.com, this is Greg Reese.
This is Savannah Hernandez for Infowars.com.
I'm reporting to you from Hong Kong, where I'm joined by reporter Greg Reese for the next week.
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