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Dec. 10, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:12:01

Hong Kong: Fight For Freedom!

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	The police were firing tear gas and they were also spraying the blue liquid in order to attack the protesters and
	And you can see these incredibly brave protesters picking up the tear gas and throwing it back, which is quite something, because a face full of that gets your attention pretty quickly.
	I think the police are getting in closer.
	Oh, here comes more tear gas.
	They're disabling the tear gas here.
	He's got it. He's throwing it back.
	Oh. And right here, look at them all swarming in to neutralize it.
	Okay, we've got to move out, man.
	Yeah, wake up. You okay?
	I got back. Grace after pressure, baby.
	Nothing more fun than running with burning lungs and burning ice.
	I think we're going to have to stop now.
	The United Kingdom has been proud and privileged to have had responsibility for the people of Hong Kong.
	To have provided a framework of opportunity in which Hong Kong has so conspicuously succeeded.
	In a few moments, the United Kingdom's responsibilities will pass to the People's Republic of China.
	Hong Kong will thereby be restored to China, and within the framework of one country, two systems, it will continue to have a strong identity of its own and be an important international partner for many countries in the world.
	To all the people of Hong Kong, we shall not forget you.
	And we shall watch with the closest interest as you embark on this new era of your remarkable history.
	And is it being shot?
	Oh, there's three, okay. Got it.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah. Forget about the cameras.
	It's just a chat.
	We're just lost in a green void, chatting away about ideas.
	It's time to talk the walk.
	I'm your host, Harminder Singh.
	The anti-government protests have certainly generated a lot of interest around the world.
	Not only are mainstream journalists flocking to Hong Kong to report on what's happening here, but so are prominent podcasters and YouTubers.
	And it just so happens I have one with me in studio this week, Stefan Molyneux.
	Thank you for coming on the show.
	Great pleasure. You know, I found it very curious.
	You're not the only prominent, I mean you have a million subscribers on YouTube.
	Almost, almost a million subscribers.
	You also have millions of downloads on your podcast.
	And then, you're not the only one.
	There's been other prominent podcasters and YouTubers here and mainstream media.
	Why are you here? Why Hong Kong?
	What's the interesting story behind it for you?
	Well, Hong Kong is currently in possession of the greatest story on the planet.
	David versus Goliath, individualism versus collectivism.
	Free markets versus whatever we want to call where the Chinese government is at the moment, some element of collectivist totalitarianism.
	It's an incredibly powerful story because this is the greatest bastion of economic freedom, I think, that has ever existed in the world.
	And it is facing, of course, to the north, this absolute Leviathan.
	That is threatening to swallow it up based upon decisions made by people long dead.
	It is an astounding story.
	And if you were to create this in some novel, your editor would say, oh, come on.
	This can't possibly be happening.
	This is not the way the world works.
	This is the way the world is working at the moment.
	And so many belief systems and wealth versus poverty, redistribution versus property rights, so many stories are kind of facing off in Hong Kong and China that, to me, I just wish I could have got here sooner.
	200 years ago, there was nothing here.
	A couple of shanty towns, some fishing villages, smugglers, and a lot of people who'd run to the edge of China to escape what they saw as civilization.
	And then some accidents of history had Hong Kong pass into the hands of the British.
	And the British were in a fever of small government.
	No bureaucracy. Little bureaucracy.
	No trade tariffs.
	Very low taxation.
	Free trade. And that was the imprint that the British left on Hong Kong.
	Do you know the gold standard of psychological testing when you want to figure out what's genetic and what's environmental?
	It's called twin studies, right?
	You take two twins that happen to have been separated at birth, you track them through their life, That in which they're similar is probably genetics.
	That in which they're different is probably environment.
	Here, here, in this magnificent city, this temple to at least economic freedom, number one on the economic freedom index, is almost a perfect twin study.
	Because genetically, it's the same as mainland China.
	But in the 19th century, it split off.
	And Hong Kong escaped.
	The end. Of the Chinese dynasty, the short-lived republic.
	It suffered under Japanese occupation brutally.
	But when the communists in the US State Department helped propel Chairman Mao into power, Hong Kong escaped all of that.
	It escaped the collectivization of the farms, which killed untold millions of people.
	It escaped the Cultural Revolution that killed millions more.
	It escaped being swallowed up in the maw of the largest, most wealthy, and most powerful totalitarian state that has ever existed on God's green earth.
	China. It is an incredible experiment to see the effect that ideology and different systems of belief can have on a genetically identical population.
	Right, so a very technological society.
	Yes. We're on the boat here.
	Now, these are around from the 1950s.
	Yes. And back then there was a huge controversy and there was a big, not riots, but protests about raising the price, right, on these things.
	So these boats have been around forever.
	Now, let's see the technological marvel of when you go one way or the other way.
	Let's go forwards. Oh, man.
	And then... And let's go backwards.
	Now, this actually does physically change the direction of the boat, too.
	It does. So we shouldn't mess around with it too much.
	It does. So, we're here at Victoria Harbour on a ferry that I believe comes from the age of Victoria, Queen Victoria.
	And, of course, it's a big foundational question.
	Where did Hong Kong come from and why is it so economically free?
	Why is it a tariff and duty-free zone, a free trade zone?
	Why are taxes so low?
	Why is there no welfare state?
	It's all fascinating stuff.
	To understand where Hong Kong comes from, we have to go back to the 19th century to a series of two wars fought primarily between Great Britain and China called the Opium Wars.
	Now the Opium Wars, the first one started in 1839 and In Chinese schools to this day, 1839 until 1949 when Mao took over in the Communist Revolution, it's referred to as the century of humiliation.
	So what happened and why was it so pivotal to China's history?
	Well, remember, of course, China, an ancient civilization of extraordinary progress, extraordinary talents.
	We all know the list of what China is famous for inventing thousands of years before Europeans did...
	Paper, paper currency, gunpowder.
	There was a meritocracy test for the Mandarins, for the elite, for the bureaucrats in the Chinese government, a form of IQ test to ensure maximum cranial capacity.
	An incredibly talented and ingenious people, very high IQ people, who moved ahead of the rest of civilization extraordinarily early and extraordinarily quickly and then kind of plateaued just a little bit for quite a long time.
	So, after thousands of years of dynastic rule and hundreds of years of the current dynasty, China encountered the white man from the West.
	Who came over?
	Well, the Portuguese came over, they met the French, they met the British, and each one of these countries was trying to open up China to trade.
	Access to the Chinese market has been on Achilles' heel of Western integrity for hundreds of years now.
	They wanted to open up China to trade.
	Now, the Chinese government, back in the day, talking the 19th century, late 18th, early 19th century, had become somewhat vainglorious.
	And somewhat lazy because they had ruled China for a long time.
	They faced no particular military threat from any country around them.
	So what happened was they refused or let their military investments languish to the point where when they faced up against the British, they had these ancient sailing vessels and muskets so old they were inaccurate outside of 50 yards and it took a minute to reload and fire another bullet.
	So when the British came, the Chinese did not let foreigners into the country.
	The only place you could trade was in a place called Canton, which is adjacent to Hong Kong.
	And there was a place called the 13 factories where you could trade.
	And you were only allowed to trade in silver.
	So you could come with silver to buy goods from China.
	And that was the only medium of exchange.
	It was hugely corrupt. There were massive taxes.
	Lots of Chinese bureaucrats made a lot of money off of this trade.
	And the British very quickly became addicted to tea.
	Man, if you've ever spent any time in England, you know that's the crack of the middle class there in particular.
	So the British got really addicted to two things from China.
	They got addicted to the tea and they got addicted to porcelain, to China, as it was called when I was growing up.
	So what happened was the British came over with boatloads of silver to buy tea and porcelain.
	But the Chinese didn't have anything in particular they wanted from the British, from the British Isles.
	And China got rich off British silver, and Britain started to run out of silver.
	Now, the British government loved the tea trade.
	Oh, the British, they do love taxing their tea, as my American friends will remember from the Boston Tea Party.
	In fact, fully 10% of the British budget of the time was paid for by taxes on tea.
	So they really, really wanted this to continue.
	But... It was not able to continue because the British started running out of silver.
	So then the British said, well, what is it that we could have that the Chinese government would want?
	and what the British had that the Chinese turned out to want a lot of was opium from India.
	Now, of course, the relationship between China and opium has always been quite complex.
	It has been locally grown in China for thousands of years and is a potent part of Chinese traditional medicine, but...
	The opium that was being brought from India by the British to China was much more powerful, much more potent, and millions of Chinese quickly became addicted to this powerful substance.
	Now, this of course can tell you something about the dysfunctions of the Chinese society at the time, and it reminds me of the opioid crisis in America in the present.
	A society that is stagnant, a society that is dysfunctional, a society where a lot of young people in particular don't see much of a future, is a society where drug addiction can run rampant.
	Now, This caused two problems for the Chinese government.
	Number one, the British opium was paid for with silver, which meant a big outflow of silver from the Middle Kingdom.
	But also, the millions of additional Chinese drug addicts proved to be a huge problem in Chinese society.
	There was, of course, a big debate at the senior levels of the Chinese government.
	Should we try and deal with root causes and figure out where all of this is coming from, or do we just crack down on the drug dealers and throw them in jail?
	The latter Policy won out an award on drugs was enacted.
	Now, of course, opium sales were illegal in England but allowed in China until the emperor sent a representative down who arrested 1,700 drug dealers and seized 2.6 million.
	million pounds of opium that was stored in the Chinese harbors and even on the ships in the Chinese harbors.
	And that representative destroyed all of the opium and threw it into the ocean.
	He actually wrote a rather lengthy poem apologizing to the sea gods for polluting their environment, if you can believe it.
	Now, the British traders were outraged at the destruction of their property, which was legal for sale and legal for trade.
	They first appealed to the Chinese government demanding compensation for their destroyed goods because, of course, they had shareholders and creditors that they needed to appease as well.
	The Chinese government ignored them.
	So then the British merchants appealed to the British government.
	The British government said, well, we really can't afford it.
	What they could afford was a war.
	This kind of...
	Dispute between two sovereign nations should be dealt with, of course, according to diplomatic channels, but China, because of its vanity, because of its isolationism, had refused to establish normal diplomatic relations with the European powers, unless the European diplomats were willing to kneel down and swear that the heads of state in China were vastly superior to their own heads of state, which they weren't going to do, of course, so there was no diplomatic channels.
	To make a long story short, in 1839, The British Royal Navy attacked the south of China.
	It was a very one-sided battle, to put it mildly.
	The British Navy smashed the existing Chinese vessels, sailed up, captured Shanghai, stole, or you could say commandeered, the tax collection barges that were heading with money to the emperor, thus crippling his capacity to make a decent amount of money for the realm.
	And it did not take very long before, utterly humiliated, the Chinese emperor had to sue for peace in 1842.
	The British had some very simple demands.
	They said, we will take Hong Kong, thank you very much.
	They said, we want free trade.
	We want access to a variety of ports.
	Give us that and we'll go home.
	In a later treaty, they demanded equality with the Chinese, and they demanded favored trading status, and they achieved all of that.
	What was interesting is, in this battle, When it first was apparent to the local Chinese leaders how powerful the British Navy was, they refused to tell the Emperor.
	Because they were ashamed to tell him such terrible news.
	They were fearful that he might shoot the messenger.
	And so the Chinese emperor didn't really have a chance to respond to the British aggression until it was too late to win.
	This is part of the vanity and the fear that infected the mandarins at the time.
	So the British got what they wanted.
	They opened up the belly of China to trade.
	The opium trade was legalized.
	They got tariff and duty-free access to the Chinese market.
	And the Chinese political system was shaken to its very foundations.
	And the vanity was pierced through with the reality of how far back China had stagnated relative to the Western powers.
	Its organization, its communications, its military technology, its government technology, so to speak, was all revealed as vastly inferior.
	And since The first Opium War, there were two, but since the first Opium War, China has been waging a war against its own traditions in an attempt to catch up to the West, and as they hope, of course, supersede the West.
	So here's a very interesting question.
	Why were the British so keen to open up China to trade?
	Well, because trade was the most powerful weapon of economic dominance in the West at the time, in the world at the time.
	The British had the amazing capacity to rule a third of the world over time from one small tiny island.
	How? Because the British, along with the Dutch to some degree, but primarily the British, figured out after the Middle Ages how powerful not just domestic free trade but international free trade could be.
	And England's power, its international power as A dominant imperial colonialist was founded upon its capacity for free trade.
	Free trade, you see, was a weapon of war.
	Because with free trade, you gained enormous amounts of wealth, which could be inverted through tariffs and taxes to wealth for the government, which allowed you to build navies and armies to dominate the world.
	So if England didn't get into China, they were afraid that the Portuguese would, that the French would, because the French joined in the second opium wars.
	They were afraid that the Americans, who also showed up, Would also open up China to trade, and if you get to trade with China and nobody else does, the wealth that you as a government can get, well, it was beyond the imagination of the mind at the time.
	So the British were feverishly keen to get into China.
	Because our leaders, our masters, our political masters, they don't want freedoms for us, they want power for themselves.
	Our current system, where you're not tied to your job like serfs, Or tied to a master like a slave, you're kind of a free-range serf.
	You can choose your own occupation.
	This means that you're more motivated, you're more enthusiastic, you can pay more taxes.
	So they love the limited freedoms that generate more income, more wealth, more power for the state.
	They don't love the freedoms themselves.
	But the people here in Hong Kong have grown to love those freedoms.
	Hong Kong is an amazing example of like a fly in amber or ancient air trapped in the bubble of a glacier.
	The freedoms that used to be very common A hundred, a hundred and fifty years ago have maintained themselves in a very low tax, free trade city that has come through the tunnel of time with its freedoms largely intact.
	Now those freedoms were enacted for the power of the British government, but they have embedded themselves in Hong Kongers as a love of liberty, I would argue, second to none in this world as it stands.
	So we're here in Hong Kong.
	This is the Chinazi poster.
	This is called the Lenin Wall, which is where all of the posters that were pro-Hong Kong have been taken down by the CCP. This is an illegal march that we're going to go and join right now.
	You have to have a permit for a march.
	They were not permitted a permit.
	But they're marching anyway, and you can hear this roar.
	And see the umbrellas.
	The umbrellas are there to protect, not only against the sun, of course, but most particularly against the tear gas.
	It's called the Umbrella Movement.
	We're going to go join these people desperate for their freedom.
	They're shouting, free Hong Kong!
	Stand for your freedom!
	And this is what happens when people care about ideas and care about their liberties.
	So when you are going to head into pretty foreign territory and possibly even do some controversial things, it's really, really great to have somebody on the ground who knows what's going on out there.
	I had a wonderful fellow named Stefan when we shot the documentary in Poland.
	Scooter down, he helped us out enormously when we were in California.
	And here in Hong Kong, the task, the man who stepped up and shielded us from the misfortune of our own ignorance is George Harap.
	Thank you so much for taking the time today.
	Not a problem. Okay, so first of all, I just have to ask, what is your sense of...
	The real forces at play in these protests.
	I was there at the first protest.
	And then I was there at the protest we attended on the weekend.
	And there will be protests next weekend as well.
	So this is really sort of an ongoing thing.
	And you've seen it evolve over time.
	Firstly, it was about the extradition bill.
	Then it was... It sort of...
	The reaction from the police sort of morphed it into people being sort of upset at how the police are dealing with this situation.
	And now it's sort of become these five demands which people really want and one of them is on the police, one is in the extradition bill and the other one of course is sort of universal suffrage and all these different sort of concepts that are coming into it.
	I think that I don't really see any way that this is going to get resolved anytime soon.
	Mainly the reason is that any logical sort of government that didn't want to harm the business aspirations of the city would do something and would try and sort of resolve the people's concerns.
	And the people, as we discussed yesterday with some of the lawmakers, they're not really asking for the moon.
	They're really just keep things the same.
	They're not asking for new stuff or give us free stuff or anything like that.
	It's like, just keep things the same.
	Don't screw it up. So I think that why aren't they doing that?
	And right now in Hong Kong, tourism is down a lot.
	So I think last month down 50%, something like that.
	Was it 50%? 50% is the number I saw.
	But that's part of the strategy, which is to get the business people hurting so that they involve themselves in solutions.
	Absolutely. And this is what the protesters really see, is that if the GDP of Hong Kong can be affected, then maybe that's the best way Do I have your attention now?
	Yeah, exactly. And then it becomes, okay, if the business people are affected, then they're going to talk to the government.
	Then the government's going to have to act.
	But why isn't the government already doing that?
	And it's probably because there's Beijing in their ear that is saying, don't do anything that we wouldn't tell you to do.
	But then it just makes the people even more pissed off.
	Because then they go, oh, well, you're just getting your orders from Beijing and there's one country, two system.
	That's not meant to be how it works.
	Yeah. So, ultimately, that sort of just feeds into this resentment towards the police and the government here that the people are just very upset with.
	And I think eventually the government will have to buckle because Hong Kong is a financial center.
	And if that is affected too much, we could be talking massive global financial collapse if that does happen.
	Let's mention that because one of the conversations I wanted to get on record was I mean, everybody thinks back to Tiananmen Square, of course, something like that.
	But you were saying, if anything, even approximating tanks rolling in or, you know, soldiers coming out of the barracks that they're currently in from mainland China, what happens then?
	Well, I think at the first stage is everyone probably just goes home at that point.
	If there is tanks on the street and soldiers with guns walking around, then I think you would probably see less than a million people on the streets.
	But then that starts the next phase of things and Hong Kong could become a guerrilla war kind of place.
	We don't want that to happen, and I don't think it will happen, but that could be a likely outcome.
	Because people are not just going to stop and go, oh, okay, well, I'll just be quiet now.
	They are incredibly resolute, incredibly committed, and I'm just saying this to anybody who's listening from mainland China, from the government.
	My assessment is they are not backing down.
	They are not backing down and their requests are reasonable.
	That is, to me, a very powerful and potent combination.
	You know, communist insurgents don't back down either, but their demands are unreasonable.
	These are not rioters.
	These are not terrorists. These are not disruptors.
	These are not people looking to be revolutionaries.
	They're looking to maintain the quality of life that their parents had.
	I mean, we are not asking for the moon.
	We are not asking for a lot of things that we do not deserve.
	We're simply demanding Beijing and Hong Kong government to honor their promises as stated so clearly on paper in the Constitution.
	That is the basic law.
	And, hey, this is what you promised us for.
	We are not asking something that is outside what was promised.
	And this is fascinating.
	I really want people to understand this, that it looks, I won't say revolutionary, but it looks like you want something with these marches and the conflicts with the police and so on.
	But my understanding is, and again, correct me where I go astray, of course, but my understanding is this is fundamentally a very conservative movement, that you want to preserve what was promised.
	You are not asking for something new.
	As you say, you are not asking for the moon.
	You're simply asking To preserve everything that you have evolved to enjoy and everything that was promised in the handover.
	And so this is fundamentally about keeping Hong Kong as it is.
	It is not a demand for change.
	It is a demand for continuance.
	Another way to look at it is we are not asking Beijing to give up anything.
	We are not asking Beijing to say, hey, go away.
	No. Our demands are legitimate.
	We are reminding those in power that, hey, hey, hey, come on.
	Look at this. You promised us this.
	You promised us that.
	And can we have that?
	This is fundamental contractual obligations.
	And hey, I thought we were having this in this common law system.
	We all know good contracts.
	So let's go back to the contracts.
	It started with the Sanlu-British Joint Declaration, which was the basis of the Basic Law.
	Of course, China wanted Hong Kong back, not just the new territories which were leased to Britain under a 99-year lease, expiring at the end of June 1997.
	But Hong Kong Island and the Kowloon Peninsula were actually ceded to Britain forever.
	As a result of the Opium War.
	But of course, China would like to take the whole thing back on the 1st of July 1997.
	And the British government, under the Margaret Thatcher at the time, negotiated with the Chinese government over Hong Kong.
	That joint declaration contained what was called China's basic policies regarding Hong Kong.
	So apart from China taking Hong Kong back and Britain giving Hong Kong back to China on the 1st of July 1997, the Chinese government wanted to put into the joint declaration its own basic policies regarding Hong Kong, which were spelled out In the joint declaration with some details.
	And that is what Deng Xiaoping called the one country, two systems policy.
	Hong Kong people ruling Hong Kong with a high degree of autonomy.
	Namely, apart from defense and foreign affairs, which are reserved to the central government, Hong Kong would be masters of our own house.
	They will serve conscientiously, dutifully, in full accordance with the law, honestly, and with integrity, and will uphold the basic law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China.
	Hong Kong itself was kind of founded a lot on a lot of the free market principles.
	Only country in the world where your right to free enterprise is in the constitution.
	Literally in the constitution.
	Capitalism in the Constitution.
	We shall not be socialist in the Constitution.
	Yep. So, no, very exciting.
	So, what it means here is that there's actually very few restrictions on doing business.
	So, for example, you can walk up to a bank ATM here and you can bank in about US $30,000 equivalent anonymously.
	You just need to say... Wait, wait.
	Are you saying you can do that without...
	Being directly raided by the FBI before you leave the vestibule.
	And you can carry cash in and out of here.
	There's a $10,000 max in the US and all that, right?
	But you can be like walking Michelin man of money bags and just sail right through.
	Essentially, it's a good place for people to come, spend their money, do business, and then maybe move on to somewhere else.
	Really, as a port, it was a re-shipping hub.
	So you would ship your stuff here, package it, and whatever else, and then ship it onwards to the rest of Asia.
	And did you look at, I mean, I assume you did, look at a bunch of different locales when you were trying to figure out where to bungee out of Australia to?
	And what was your decision process for here?
	Yeah, I mean, so we looked up Economic Freedom Index.
	So we were like... Number one. Number one.
	We were like, Hong Kong, 25 years in a row, number one.
	You wouldn't want to sort that incorrectly and end up, I don't know, Ghana or Somalia or something.
	Somalia or something like that. Make sure you get that sorted correctly.
	Yeah. And here, number one, is it Singapore number two?
	Yeah, Singapore number two. It's so tragic that all the countries that invented capitalism are like way down on that list.
	People here think the West is the ideal model.
	People in mainland China, people in India, people in quote-unquote third world countries, not Hong Kong, but other third world countries say...
	If I have a chance, I'm going to the West.
	And they still are. Canada is a top destination.
	United States is a top destination.
	United Kingdom, of course, all the English-speaking Western world countries are the top destination.
	Exceptions are Singapore.
	That's another top destination these days.
	They all look to the West.
	And they continue to look in the West.
	But you were saying otherwise. No, no, no.
	Gosh. If we had...
	Fundamentally, more freedoms in the West, or at least if we were moving in that direction rather than, as it seems, away from that direction.
	We would have a whole series of productive breadcrumbs to be able to drop in front of the more totalitarian societies in the world and say, hey, man, you want to come?
	Be like us. You know, look at those.
	We've got these wonderful societies.
	You know, we're debt free.
	We have sustainable economic systems.
	We have growth of freedoms and, you know, we take care of people.
	But we don't have that.
	We used to have that more.
	And now we don't. Now we have political correctness.
	We have the stifling of free speech.
	We have massive debt. I mean, you know, the United States has $180 trillion in unfunded liabilities.
	So the problem is that we have these totalitarian systems in the world and they're looking and picking and choosing, right?
	And saying, well, where do we want to go? What do we have to offer a country like China to say in the West?
	Oh, you should be like us. I think that they look at the West and they say, well, we may not be sure exactly where we want to go, but we Sure as heck don't want to go that direction.
	Now, Hong Kong, to me, offers something quite different.
	And this is why I'm here as well, is I'm kind of sick of the West.
	I'm not a big fan of totalitarianism, but Hong Kong is something really fascinating.
	And what fascinates you about it?
	Low taxes, no tariffs, free ports, no welfare state, people take care of each other.
	I know there are problems, of course, right?
	I mean, we talked about some of these before the taping, which is, you know, there's crazy high property evaluations and high rents and so on.
	But it's kind of trapped in time insofar as you can see the effects of 19th century economic freedoms combined with 21st century technology.
	And that is, to me, completely staggering.
	This is one incredible city.
	Look at this. It used to be a shantytown up until a century, century and a half ago.
	Amazing, what a view!
	So here's a study in contrast.
	In the documentary I shot earlier this year, Sunset in the Golden State, when we were in San Francisco, we went to a community meeting between a bunch of local Chinese residents and the police, and the residents were complaining about the level of crime that they were facing.
	The policewoman said, Do not carry your cell phones around because it's just an invitation for thieves to steal.
	You've got like a thousand dollars in your hand.
	Now here, in Hong Kong, it's almost impossible to see somebody who isn't nose deep in their cell phone.
	In fact, it seems that cell phones use people to get around because they don't have legs themselves.
	So here's the difference.
	We're out here. I'm shooting stuff on my cell phone.
	We're in a crowded subway.
	People are on their cell phone.
	You can carry...
	Your cell phone in Hong Kong.
	You can't in San Francisco.
	Look at that. How beautiful.
	Here, in this square, we have two buildings facing off against each other.
	One is the revenue building, of course, for taxation and income.
	And the other is the immigration building.
	I have been criticized for my stance on restricting immigration.
	But I've always said the same thing.
	And it's not even my idea.
	This goes back to Milton Friedman and even before.
	You can have open borders or you can have a welfare state, but you cannot have both.
	Now here, it's pretty easy to come and work here.
	And it's pretty easy to stay and work here.
	Why? Because there's no welfare state.
	If you can't make it here, You go back home.
	This was the case with America in the 19th century.
	A third of people who came from Europe to America ended up going back home because they didn't like it or couldn't make it.
	So people in Hong Kong can look at immigrants and know for a fact, a simple fact, that those immigrants are contributing to society and are not leeching with tentacles into their wallets and pocketbooks.
	So, open borders? Yes, relatively so.
	No welfare state.
	There's almost none. There's a little, over the last 10 years, a little scheme has come in, 5%, 5% for retirement schemes, but it doesn't apply to foreigners.
	So here, the theories that I've been working with for over 30 years have come manifest in the flesh.
	It is like believing in a god and then walking up and shaking his hand.
	Look at this. This is the subway.
	Look at this. There's nothing on the ground.
	I would buy food. I would throw this food on the ground.
	I would eat it off this.
	I'm just telling you this. Look at this city.
	No welfare state, almost no taxation.
	Very little in the way of control over who builds what, where, when and how.
	Very few health and safety regulations.
	And it's very safe.
	What do human beings do in the absence of centralized, coercive, hierarchical oligarchies like the state?
	What do people do?
	What do people do if they wake up tomorrow and there's no government education?
	Or no government healthcare?
	Do they just have their children run wild in the streets?
	Do they give up on having healthcare at all?
	Of course not! In the absence Of the centralized disorganization of state compulsion, human beings instinctively, automatically, and relentlessly self-organize.
	And in fact, that is the only form of human organization that is both moral and sustainable.
	We do have to accept the basic empirical fact that when people are not forced into conformity, they self-regulate into productivity.
	And if you doubt the theory, just look here at all of this empirical evidence.
	So tell us about the octopus cardigan.
	The Octopus card is the way you interact with Hong Kong, really.
	Because there's no... People don't use credit cards here.
	People don't use credit cards. Credit card penetration is very low.
	Octopus does everything. You can buy groceries with it.
	You can buy... Oh, you've got to press this one.
	What do you want? Yeah, I'll just take a pair of H. Okay.
	And then there. Yep, done.
	Press it. Cash is really something which makes sense for the Asia context because cash in many economies, that's all people have.
	Only 20% of the population might have a bank account.
	This blows my mind because I always think of East Asian finances as stratospheric in terms of complexity and digitization, but I keep...
	I keep taking out my credit card and people are like, Tui, we spit on your credit card.
	Yes. Cash, cash, brother, cash.
	Yes. And in fact, when I first took the taxi in from the airport, the taxi driver was like, I might as well have pulled.
	I wish to pay for my taxi driver with dead fish and a kidney.
	And he's like, I'm sorry we don't.
	What are you going to give me, yak dung or seashells next?
	Yeah. They don't want it.
	They don't want it. It's not really a big thing here.
	I mean, credit card penetration in many economies in Asia is like 1 to 3%.
	So, you know, often when people come overseas, like certainly North America, very heavy on using credit cards, debit cards, and so on.
	When you come here, it's all about cash.
	Man, I've got to tell you, if there's one place on God's green earth that you figured it would be easy to pick up 200 bucks, So, one other thing I wanted to mention about Hong Kong is that it is, for a city that's kind of sliding towards a potential precipice of totalitarianism, there's a lot of construction going on here, man.
	It is a really optimistic thing to see, right?
	So, I mean, just turning around here, we can see all of this stuff.
	There's this wild set of bamboo Scaffolding that they can put up in like half a day, like spiders shooting webs.
	It's really, really nice to see this level of productivity and enthusiasm and growth.
	It really feels like, and I don't feel this as much at all really in North America, but it really feels like the future, the future is here and it's growing.
	What is the relationship as an ex-colonial territory?
	What is the relationship to Great Britain, to the history of colonialism, because of course we hear a lot of this stuff around the world, you know, the sort of bitter ex-colodies hating the motherland, so to speak, and I got into big fights on Twitter with some Indians about this sort of legacy, and I get a sense of significant respect for the institutions and a great relief at more self-direction, which of course now is to some degree threatened by the mainland, but do you get a sense of how Hong Kong people feel about the colonial history?
	So, Hong Kong as a place really does exist because of, you know, what happened after the Opium Wars.
	I mean, this place was set up because of the British.
	The institutions were set up here.
	The laissez-faire economic model was set up because of the British.
	A lot of the reason why we're standing in a lovely place and, you know, there's massive buildings everywhere is because of the British system, which they set up after that.
	And why we're not standing on...
	Millions of bodies from the Cultural Revolution, right?
	Yeah, absolutely. You've got to look north and say, bullet, dodge.
	And Mao was not a great fan of Cantonese speakers as well.
	Yeah, because there's that bigotry as well in the mainland, right?
	Yeah, so I think it was essential that Hong Kong was kind of this bastion of freedom during those We're good to go.
	Be a colony of the UK again.
	What we saw, Chinazi, you know, this very much fascism and so on coming out of it.
	And then the British flag, the Canadian flag, the American flag, and very much a loyalty, of course, not to the countries, but to the philosophies and the institutions behind all of that.
	Yeah, free market rule of law, minimal government, free from regulations.
	That is a uniquely Western or used to be a uniquely Western implementation.
	And that's kind of, in a sense, embedded here.
	And it's being tended almost like you'd keep a plant that you hope one day to return to its native soil.
	Yeah, absolutely. Listen, man, I just want to tell you, this is like pizza oven hot in Hong Kong and humid.
	It's philosophy with a good draping of flop sweat.
	So this sign kind of struck me.
	You are here, tiny, tiny little dot here next to this giant red swath of land, a little bit like, I don't know, Hong Kong and China itself.
	When the concept of one country, two systems was first raised by Deng Xiaoping, my comment at the time was it could work, but it would be very difficult to work because they are too vast and they're too tiny.
	So I gave the example of the seesaw game which we all played when we were young.
	Supposing the old man sits here and his little son sits there, it goes like this.
	And the only way for this game to work is for the old man, the bigger guy, to move towards the center of the plank until an equilibrium is struck.
	Then you've worked again. So I said at the time, all right, one country, two systems, if you want that work, there are two key conditions.
	One is that there must be democracy so that our leaders, the chief executive and all members of the legislature would find it necessary to defend the Hong Kong system.
	Hmm. Otherwise, they will not win the second term of office.
	So you've got to build it in, into the system.
	We call upon our own Chinese leaders to give us democracy.
	Elections, fair and open and democratic elections, guarantee stability and freedom.
	But China must also oblige.
	So democracy, so that our leaders will always side with Hong Kong.
	And if there is any conflict of interest between Hong Kong and mainland, our leaders must stand on our side and defend our high degree of autonomy, defend our freedoms, and so on.
	The other important condition is that the central government must not interfere in our autonomy.
	Leave it to the Hong Kong government, Leave it to the Hong Kong legislature to decide.
	To a lot of Hong Kong people, one country, two systems is mind your own business.
	A central question that we have to answer is why are Hong Kong so passionate about their liberties, their freedoms?
	What are they scared of?
	Well, they're scared of a history that they understand deep in their bones, that they still have living witnesses to.
	And this is not to say that this is where the Chinese government is at present, but it certainly is where the Chinese government was in the past.
	And once you understand this history and the tens of millions of dead, whose graves largely go unremarked upon in the socialist or Marxist indoctrination of the West, you can understand the canyon, the chasm of bones and bodies that Hong Kong feels that history is pushing it inexorably towards.
	To go back to the history of the communist takeover in China and its effects.
	I'm not going to do this chronologically because you can find that information very easily on the web.
	I'm going to do this anecdotally because that is where the history really comes to life.
	Or in a sense, this is where the deaths manifest in the hearts and the minds of the people.
	The standard Marxist story about society is that there are rich People who have become wealthy by exploiting, by underpaying the peasants and natural resources.
	This narrative is utterly false.
	It is overthrown by the basic realities of history.
	The supposedly scientific Marxist analysis of history accords neither with reason, nor morality, nor evidence, and its predictive power or capacity has proven entirely false.
	According to the Marxist interpretation, in China there should have been a powerful landlord class with peasants striving under them, but this is not true.
	China at the time, in the 1940s and before, had no landlord class.
	There was nothing that would be even remotely analogous to feudalism that occurred in China.
	Four centuries before the Communist Revolution, land in China had been bought and sold and maintained through sophisticated contracts that were upheld in the courts of magistrates.
	These contracts were so complex, they even drew a distinction between the topsoil and the subsoil.
	The land could be freely alienated everywhere, and tenancy rights were also included in these contracts.
	It was very, very sophisticated.
	Over half of the farmers in China at the time owned their land.
	Many more were pot owners.
	Only 6% of the people who farmed the land were actually tenants.
	There was a survey before the Communists took over, and a significant proportion of the farmers had no idea that there were any adverse conditions.
	Barring them from gaining freedom.
	But of course, a central rallying cry of the communists is land reform.
	And what that means is stealing the land from the most productive who generally have earned it and turning it over to the resentful classes.
	And this process was repeated over and over as the communist ideology began to spread.
	Through China in the grim battle, of course, between the nationalists and the communists who were to large degree funded by the Soviet Union.
	There was endless war.
	Both, of course, the Japanese occupation of Nanking, the rape of Nanking and other areas as well.
	There was a desperate war between the communists and the nationalists that raged in China between The late 1930s into the late 1940s when the Communists finally took over.
	The middle class population in particular in China was exhausted by hyperinflation, the stripping of their savings, the destruction of their income, the rampant instability of a decade of war within China.
	And they were desperate at this point for any semblance of stability, even if that meant Communism.
	The rise of communism in China was aided and abetted by communist spies, as I mentioned before, in the State Department in the United States, with direct ties to Moscow.
	All of the seeming paranoia that was put forward by Joseph McCarthy proved to be entirely factual, and in fact, was far worse than even he imagined.
	The encroachment of communism was barely resisted by the international community.
	Even the United Nations, embroiled in the problems of the Korean War, did little to prevent the oncoming catastrophe of the communist takeover in China.
	How did it work?
	It worked in a repetitive, simple and terrifying manner.
	Village relations, community relations that had lasted for centuries We're, within the span of a few weeks or a few months, disrupted, destroyed and turned almost completely psychotic, murderous and venomous by communists.
	Who came to the local regions, and they would do the same thing.
	They would come to the local regions, and they would start talking to the peasants.
	Now, the peasants, of course, had very little focus or attention from the intellectuals, and so when a communist would come in and would break bread with the poorer people in the local communities, they would start to tell them, and start to put the worm-tongue virus of resentment, of rage, of envy, of covetousness into the ears of the peasants.
	And they would say, you have been poor for how long, my friend?
	You have been poor for generations.
	You have been poor for a thousand years.
	You have been poor for two thousand years.
	And why have you been poor?
	You have been poor because the landowners, the rich, the village elders, the leaders, have stolen from you and have stolen from your family and have stolen from your history.
	And your children, who should be in that big house up in the mountain, are in this tiny little shanty town because they have stripped All of the wealth from your family.
	And they have leeched and they have parasited and they have stolen and stolen and stolen.
	And they would rouse these resentments and they would rouse this envy.
	And it is terrifying how susceptible human beings are to this kind of Iago-style venomous ear poison of resentment and rage.
	The communists, after spending a few weeks or a few months sometimes rousing these resentments, would then arm the peasants.
	Often with guns, more often with pikes or spears or axes.
	And they would make promises.
	To the poorer members of the community, and they would say, we will help you take back what was stolen from you and your ancestors for generations.
	We will help you take back.
	And they call this, of course, land reform.
	Land reform, which is the redistribution of land from the more competent and the more wealthy, too often the less competent and the less wealthy.
	Now, there was no reason for any of this to be violent.
	Any of this to be violent. Even if you accept the idea or the argument that land reform is necessary for a just society, there were two examples wherein it had been done perfectly peacefully.
	In Taiwan, the poorer people were given shares in state-owned corporations.
	There was land redistribution, which did cause a loss of wealth among the landowners, but the land was transferred, redistributed.
	Not one single drop of blood was shed.
	If you look at Japan in the post-war period under MacArthur from 1945 onwards, land was redistributed in a similar manner, without oceans of blood.
	So the question, of course, is why was this occurring?
	Well, it's not that hard to whip up resentments.
	The terrifying ease at which these resentments can be whipped from grudges to rage to outright slaughter and confiscation is terrifying.
	And this is why power, those who've studied history who know how thin this tiny line is between civilization And slaughter.
	It's a tiny, thin, red line.
	Those of us who know, who've studied this history, who understand just how dangerous these words can be.
	Well, this is why we fight so hard in the realm of free speech.
	This is why we fight so hard against this ideology.
	There is only one tiny little letter between words and swords.
	It's the same letter that the word sophistry starts from.
	So what happened? After the Communists did their work, in one village alone, out of a population of about 773 people were murdered by the mob.
	In Jing County alone, over 2,000 people were killed, including 250 elderly people and 25 children.
	And before they were murdered, they were often tortured.
	The children were called Little Landlords.
	It's the power of this kind of language.
	And one of the reasons why These slaughters were so widespread as the villages literally profited from these murders because they would kill the local wealthy people or wealthier people.
	It's hard to say wealthy, but wealthier than they were.
	And then they would go in and they would take their possessions.
	One man who slaughtered half a family was later asked what he got.
	And he got For his murder is one chicken.
	That's the thin line between civilization and the worst kind of barbarity.
	In one region, an anonymous tip about subversive actions in a school resulted in a hundred children being dragged out of the school and tortured.
	And there were these concentric rings of murders, because of fears of retribution.
	In one place in Western Anhui, the various, quote, landlords were hated, and so the mob rose up and killed the landlords.
	But then you see they feared reprisals from the extended family of the landlords, so they hunted down and chased and killed that extended family, those extended family members.
	But then they feared reprisals from even further, so these concentric rings of violence Would go out where entire bloodlines could be wiped out in a matter of days or weeks.
	By 1948, about 160 million people were under communist control.
	On paper, the communist leadership determined that at least 10% of the population were called landlords or rich peasants.
	And on the grounds of this, sometimes 20 to 30% of the villagers were persecuted.
	Many tortured, many killed.
	It is impossible to know the death count.
	With any reasonable accuracy, estimates range between 500,000 to a million people in this time period were killed or committed suicide.
	This, of course, was another great grim reaper that accompanied the red tide.
	Because, imagine...
	That you are slightly wealthier than the people you've lived cheek by jowl with for hundreds of years.
	And you recognize that they have been tipped over into a satanic lust of covetousness and bloodshed and you know that they're coming for you.
	Would you wait for them to show up?
	Would you sit by the door as the growling mob gathered its way towards your door?
	Would you wait for them to gouge out your eyes or cut off your tongue or cut off your genitals as happened quite frequently?
	Would you wait to see your children strangled or decapitated in front of you?
	Or would you take a slightly easier route out of the living hell your world had become?
	And this happened quite frequently That individuals, entire families, knowing what was coming, would simply commit suicide.
	In Shanghai, after the persecutions of the business people began, in Shanghai, in a relatively short period of time, 600 businessmen killed themselves.
	Because you know what is coming.
	You know what is coming.
	And we think of the murders, and they're appalling enough.
	But don't forget the endless state of suicides.
	The means by which the Communists took over were often incredibly brutal.
	Changchung, which is the middle of the vast Manchurian plain north of the Great Wall of China, was blockaded for five months in 1948.
	Lingbao, the Communists in charge of the troops, ordered that the entire city be turned into what he called a city of death.
	He placed sentries every 50 meters around the perimeter of the city and prohibited the starving civilians from leaving.
	Because he wanted them to eat their grain reserves dry.
	People, as they did later in the collectivization of the farmland, they tried to survive by eating tree bark, insects, and you could actually buy human flesh for $1.20 a pound on the black market.
	They were shelled day and night, resulting in a death count in the city over five months of 160,000 souls.
	And you can look up this guy on Wikipedia and there is no mention of the civilians that he slaughtered in pursuit of the communist utopia.
	There are chilling descriptions of the desperate civilians, the refugees trying to get out of the city to food and safety.
	They would kneel in front of the guards around the city and beg to be let through.
	Some would leave their babies in front of the guards and just run away.
	Others would hang themselves in trees in full sight of the sentry posts.
	And the soldiers, many of whom poor conscripted themselves, hated this.
	And they would fall to their knees weeping before the people who were killing themselves saying, we are but following orders.
	And then they, of course, would be beaten until they beat others, their fellow countrymen.
	And this is known, of course, in Hong Kong, how quickly those in uniform can turn against their civilians.
	And the starvation, the bodies piling in the streets, the endless shelling, the consumption of human flesh.
	As It's so often the case in history.
	The fantasy, of course, is that you are simply one more murder away from paradise.
	There was a lieutenant in the People's Liberation Army who characterized the slaughter of this city to the nuclear attack on Hiroshima.
	He said the body count was about the same.
	Hiroshima took seven seconds.
	The city took five months.
	When people slaughtered Their elders, and the slightly wealthier among them, or just neighbors that they had grudges against perhaps for generations, when they slaughtered these people, they became bound in a pact of blood with the Communist Party.
	In other words, if you have murdered people on the instigation of the Communists, then should Communism ever be overthrown, you will be dragged out, tried, and killed.
	It is like the death or murder initiation into a criminal gang.
	And it is a terrifying and terrible way to buy loyalty.
	Because should the regime fall, the retribution against those who had birthed it through blood would be both savage and verified.
	The End
	It truly pains me to say this, but for once in my life, I have come across some sacred cows, and I will leave them alone.
	The End So we're standing here in front of a Buddhist temple, representing the old China.
	The China of immense technological and administrative advancements, of great culture, deep learning, deep discipline, great mathematics, philosophy.
	The China that had endured for thousands of years.
	A China that at the dawn of the modern era had grown complacent and stagnant, vainglorious, And then encountered the modern world in a flash that virtually undid all of this.
	The Confucianism, the Buddhism, the philosophy that had sustained and maintained China for thousands of years, was shattered.
	And a truly alien mindset came in from the West, that of communism, which has torn China apart, both geographically and morally, emotionally and physically, since 1949.
	In the past, China, like Europe, like Asia as a whole, had been riven and controlled by roving bands of warlords and kings and aristocrats and so on.
	But this was not murder for the sake of murder.
	The warlords that rampaged back and forth across China, the occasional civil wars, the overthrows of dynasties, these were all to maintain control over a productive population.
	A warlord would take over a particular area with farmers.
	He wouldn't kill all the farmers any more than you buy a farm and slaughter all the cattle.
	He would keep them alive. He may scare, he may frighten, he may kill a few to keep the others in line.
	But the purpose was control and productivity.
	Immoral. But the purpose was not murder for the sake of murder.
	That changed. Under communism, as it always has.
	Chairman Mao, after he took power, about a year after he took power, instituted the Great Terror, wherein he handed down quotas for his local party cadres to wipe out any resistance to the party.
	The quotas were to kill at least one person for every thousand people under your control.
	These murders escalated in many regions to many multiples of one per thousand.
	And of course, the promises that Mao made, that the party made to the Chinese population as a whole.
	Private property protections, contract protections for businessmen, freedom of thought for the intellectuals, protection of land for the farmers.
	All of these promises that were made were never fulfilled.
	In fact, quite the opposite occurred.
	The promises are made so that the murder may continue.
	Murder does not serve the revolution.
	The revolution serves murder.
	Mao took deep delight in the killings that he instituted.
	Joseph Stalin himself warned Mao to slow down and not be so harsh in his slaughters of his countrymen.
	And when someone like Joseph Stalin is saying, you've gone too far, you've really gone too far.
	And the frustrating thing The murder has never produced the utopia that is promised.
	What is delivered is the murder of the conscience, the murder of the community, the murder of good relations, the murder of amicability and goodwill of man to man.
	In the Soviet Union, it was the state that did the murders.
	The NKBD, the secret police, did the murders.
	In China, it was very different. Mao wanted to eliminate the village elders as potential competitors to the Communist Party.
	Mao wanted the locals to do the murders themselves.
	He did not want members of the state to do it.
	And by the time The murders rolled out.
	In the ten years following the institution of communism in China, the death toll mounted north of five million people, many of whom were murdered in stadiums, in public, but many, of course, were murdered in private, in a deep canyon somewhere, deep in the woods, by a stream under a waterfall.
	And there are tragic tales of family members Trying to find the bodies of their loved ones who had been killed in the middle of nowhere for a proper burial.
	The frustrating thing is that there are no large movements in history.
	You need to understand this, my friends.
	There is no such thing as a large movement, a tide that carries us along.
	It all comes down to each person's individual decisions about how they're going to live their life.
	When someone comes to you, as they often do in this world, on the internet, in person, in the media, if someone comes to you and says, this group is evil, this person is far right, this person is a Nazi, this person is a white supremacist, that is a teaser.
	That is a feeler to see if the smoky squid fingers of evil can wend their way through the cracks of your integrity and resolution into your soul to turn you to demonic ends.
	How could the revolution have been stopped?
	How could the tens of millions of people murdered under communism, how could that have been prevented?
	It could have been prevented at the very beginning, when the communists came to each village, each community, each household, and tried to turn man against man, brother against brother.
	Countryman against countryman.
	If the people had said no, I am not poor because someone else is rich.
	I am not less because someone else has more.
	I will not be tempted by covetousness.
	I will not covet my neighbor's property, my neighbor's land, my neighbor's wife, my neighbor's possessions.
	I reject the call to murder for the sake of materialism.
	If that integrity had been present, or more present, then the tides of blood that washed China from end to end would never have come to pass.
	The Tides of the United
	States who suffered enormously under the communists.
	And they know what they're facing or might be facing if they're swallowed up by the Leviathan of China in a few short years.
	And they're aware of every single encroachment onto their liberties from the Chinese government.
	Freedom. With a basic human right.
	A lot of these are students at Hong Kong universities out here protesting communism, protesting Marxism, singing a song that they adopted from a Christian hymn, Glory to Hong Kong.
	More words, more songs, I don't know the words to, just as in Poland. - Stay quick, come home!
	But my question is, and it's always been, Where was our energy when the Marxists were taking over our universities?
	Where were our energies when the Marxists were taking over our media?
	Why does it have to come to this every single time?
	That is a desperate fight of ideology versus tyranny.
	This energy we need to protest where we are so it does not come to this.
	This is a desperate fight.
	And the courage Of people facing down this Leviathan can scarcely be exaggerated.
	I'm over 60. I escaped from the Chinese.
	So you saw in China what they did?
	In China, what they did, I saw...
	How did you escape? Yeah.
	I am the, what do you say, the landlord.
	Yeah. The landlord, they shoot the landlord, 2.5 million.
	I just did a speech on this today.
	So they shot the landlord. That happened in mainland China, but I experienced...
	What did you see? What did you see?
	We're a villager. In fact, they let some people involve you in your villager.
	And they let you people fight against you people.
	I am the leader.
	Staying outside. Yeah, that's the communist tactics.
	Yeah, they come in and they say to everyone, oh, the rich people, they've stolen from you, and then everybody gets violent, and it's terrifying.
	I came to Hong Kong 60 years ago.
	I'm now 70. I came to Hong Kong at the age of six.
	At the age of six? I'm an old man now, so I experienced Did you come with your family?
	You had to flee because you were in great danger.
	And now you see them coming again?
	Secretly. Yeah. And openly.
	Yeah. Because the PLA leader go to America and say, the PLA won't go to Hong Kong.
	If they go to Hong Kong, there's one country, two system finished.
	So they won't go. They won't send PLA army to Hong Kong.
	But they send secret police.
	And there's no way to run now, right?
	You've got to stand and fight.
	So there we see it.
	We just did the speech in the gondola.
	About how when the communists got into power, the landlords, or those who were called landlords, who even knows what they were, that the landlords, he said, millions murdered.
	He escaped at the age of six with his family to escape to Hong Kong to freedom.
	And now, now that he's in a sanctuary created by the British, sustained by the Hong Kong people, he's got security, he's got freedom, he's got opportunity.
	And what happens? Over time, the communists Catching up.
	In the beginning, it was good.
	During the early years of the handover, there was little interference in Beijing, but it grew more and more.
	Under the Joint Declaration, we were promised and actually given this high degree of autonomy.
	But five years ago, In June 2014, they published a white paper.
	The Chinese government published what they call a white paper in seven different languages claiming that the central government has comprehensive jurisdiction over Hong Kong.
	So how does it sit with a high degree of autonomy?
	What does comprehensive mean in this context?
	That means everything. In other words, they have complete jurisdiction over Hong Kong.
	Because now our courts, even the final court of appeal, have interpreted the basic law on the basis that the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress has the power and right to interpret every article of the basic law, even when there is no appeal.
	So even then, even when there is no case before the court, the standing committee can just, if it so desires, interpret any article in the basic law in any way it likes.
	So it's not even reliant on precedent.
	It's not reliant on there being a court.
	They basically have an eraser and can rewrite the law as they see fit with no due process or control of the legislature or the judges or a case.
	Indeed. Recently, They claim, in fact, the Hong Kong government claims that they don't actually need to interpret the basic law.
	They could actually, the same standing committee of the National People's Congress, can actually make a decision which is not involving, which does not involve the interpretation of the basic law at all, but they can make any interpretation, sorry, they can make any decision Regarding Hong Kong, and our courts must give effect to that.
	So they could actually make a decision formally, which is not in the nature of interpretation of the bestial law at all, and that decision will be binding in Hong Kong.
	In other words, even the judges will have to listen to them.
	So effectively, they could decide a legal issue for the Hong Kong courts.
	So they make it worse and worse.
	But was there supposed to be any...
	Because this is always confusing to me, looking from the outside.
	So 1997, there's the one country, two systems.
	But then there's supposed to be, of course, 2047, there is the merging, right?
	The full merging. What was the path to try and bring these two systems closer together so that the merging could happen?
	And is this part of that process or is this separate?
	It didn't happen like that.
	When Deng Xiaoping sat down with Margaret Thatcher, On the 19th of December, 1984 in Beijing, they had a meeting.
	That was an important day because on that day they actually initialed the Sino-British Joint Declaration.
	And there was a conversation between the two, which was minuted by the British government, kept a secret for 30 years, but finally released.
	In 2014, in December.
	And Deng Xiaoping was explaining to Margaret Thatcher at that meeting that she need not worry about Hong Kong because China needs 15 years so that this economy can grow So that they could reach power with the leading economies of the world.
	So he said to her, don't worry.
	But when we come to the end of the 50th year, you have even less reason to worry.
	Because by then, China and the world's leading economies would depend on one another.
	So that was the assurance.
	My theory was that Deng Xiaoping Already decided not to follow Soviet Russia in continuing with the socialist policies under a socialist system.
	I believe he was already trying to move away from that and he would rather go down the capitalism.
	But he couldn't say that, and there was no need for him to say that.
	And then all he said was, China would have socialism, but with Chinese characteristics.
	Now that's what he said.
	That's what the Chinese leaders do, continue to use those words.
	So socialism with Chinese characteristics means what?
	I mean, you've been to China. It means capitalism.
	With some degree of state control.
	And they even claimed to practice this market economy.
	So now in those days, things were going well.
	Deng Xiaoping obviously had been looking at Hong Kong, which is a capitalist system, with a Chinese community, with the rule of law, with freedoms.
	And so he liked that.
	And I'm sure he liked China.
	To go down that Hong Kong way.
	What is Hong Kong anyway? Well, in the eyes of Beijing, at least, is the international financial sector.
	It's one of the few in the world that China mainland still fails to replicate.
	And just so people know, you've got New York number one.
	It used to be London higher, but New York number one, Hong Kong number two, and of course for Asia number one.
	And this is enormous.
	You can see the buildings and that's impressive, but the financial side of this, the stock market, the financial banking, the deal, it is absolutely enormous and is central to Asia and the world.
	And we cannot take it for granted.
	No. This international financial center status is not suddenly boom from nowhere, right?
	Then what are the essential elements to sustain this IFC? Freedom of speech, or free flow of information, freedom of movement, free flow of capital, and the rule of law.
	Yes, contracts and the rule of law, absolutely essential.
	And these four essential elements are the backbones to sustain this IFC. So if China, I'm sure Beijing has all wisdom to understand this, and if they wish to make sure that Hong Kong continues to function as an IFC,
	I mean, regardless of the people's freedom, even if they don't care, if they wish to make sure that Hong Kong's IFC status would not be lost in any sense, then they have to make sure that these four essential elements could be preserved and protected.
	Yeah. And by way of protecting these four essential elements, people in Hong Kong would enjoy the freedom.
	It seems like if they're going to try and grab Hong Kong, they will break Hong Kong, which will break the East Asian economies, which will have massive ripple effects throughout the entire world economy.
	So Hong Kong to me is here.
	There's good guys and bad guys.
	Maybe it's too simple, but this is the way I see it.
	Hong Kong is here. China is here as far as development goes.
	The goal, as you say, was for China to reach some level of Hong Kong.
	And then you have equilibrium and you can maybe have one system.
	And right now my concern is what I see is China is not rising, but China is pulling down.
	China is rising when it comes to money.
	That's the world's second largest economy.
	But then what are the core values in the Chinese community back in China?
	One, money.
	But you know, a country cannot just have money as its only core value.
	That's a problem. And that's why the Hong Kong students are fighting so hard and sometimes even they're prepared to risk their lives.
	Why? To defend the city as they want it to continue to be.
	Well, as the old saying says, man cannot live by bread alone.
	Indeed. And I think in China, the deal from the government to the people is, we will let you get rich as long as you do not ask for freedom.
	And I think here in Hong Kong, the freedoms...
	Are more important than the wealth, as I believe they should be.
	The values, the philosophical values that we live by are more important than the material things that we can have.
	And I think this focus on freedom as opposed to just the focus on money is a fundamental tension and it's hard to say which way it will go.
	Indeed. And our kids have experience in mainland China.
	They have shut out from the internet, right?
	I mean, whatever they don't want you to have access to, then you don't get it.
	And then there's a lot of brainwashing.
	So the kids know only too well, and they don't like that.
	Over the past 22 years, our younger generation, they have witnessed a number of incidents of losing liberty, freedom, to name a few examples.
	You elected somebody to represent you to LegCo, and that person got disqualified.
	That's right. They just said, hey, you can't run.
	Yeah. Or simply, you're barred from running.
	Or even if you manage to win an election, you could get disqualified afterwards.
	So how on earth are you going to convince a high school student that, hey, don't worry, you have a bright future.
	Hong Kong is perfectly fine for you.
	How are you going to say that?
	Look in the eye of the youngsters and say, don't worry.
	How on earth are they going to merge if it's one country, two systems?
	Many of the laws are in opposition.
	The freedoms are in opposition. The sense of democracy, the spirit of capitalism is all in opposition.
	How on earth is this going to merge in 2047?
	I cannot understand.
	This is one of the reasons, or maybe the biggest reasons, why a lot of youngsters, they are so frustrated.
	They are worried. Because by 2047...
	It will be the golden era.
	It will be the middle age.
	And they will be the major force of this society.
	They will be the one who will be taking up all these important positions.
	And they will be so frustrated.
	This is why they are so frustrated.
	Because they cannot foresee a bright future.
	No. They are feeling that this one country, two system is fading out.
	It's not happening. And more importantly, they worry that by 2047, there will be no one country, two systems.
	It will be only one country and one system.
	And that is not the right system.
	It's the communist system.
	What do you think about what's going to go on in the 2040s regarding China?
	2040s? When Hong Kong reverts, supposedly...
	If we can't make it right now, We are doomed.
	You can't make it right later, right?
	Yeah, we can't. So we have to make it right right now or we're doomed.
	I mean, if you know what has been going on in Hong Kong over the past few years, you cannot give that youngster confidence.
	And so they are taking up themselves.
	They are taking to the streets.
	They are bearing these responsibilities.
	Tell me what's going on today.
	What does the world need to know?
	We're supposed to have a demonstration, but the police refuse to give us a permit.
	There's no permit, right? No permit.
	But we just come here for window shopping.
	Just a nice stroll.
	It's Sunday, it's nice out.
	What is going on that you want the world to know about?
	We're fighting for five demands.
	Five demands.
	Yes. They're saying of their five demands for liberty, they will take not one list.
	First of all, the extradition war.
	Yeah. Because China is asking the Hong Kong government to pose extradition law to Hong Kong in order to let the prisoner can be judged back to China, which we strongly oppose.
	Right now the system is we do not send any suspects or criminals to China for trial because they do not have a rule of law, they do not have fair trial, they don't have new process.
	And Hong Kong government, Carrie Lam, basically said, we have to change that.
	And earlier this year, she introduced a change of law, tried to amend the extradition bill and allow Hong Kong standing criminals to China for trial.
	We say, hey, hang on, this is wrong.
	Over the past 20 something years, nobody has talked about it.
	And is we okay with that?
	And it could be a political weapon.
	Exactly. So I mean, there's this real concern that you're going to wake up in a truck heading to China and good luck finding a lawyer and good luck finding the rule of law.
	Precisely. And so on the 9th of June, 1 million people took to the street and say, we do not want this bill.
	On the 15th, Terry Lamb looked into the camera and said, I'll suspend.
	Not cancel. Not cancel.
	But pause. Well, I'll just hold on to that.
	And people went, hey, hang on.
	It took us one million people to the street and it took the students...
	Their efforts to stop this bill, and there were police brutality on the 12th of June.
	They fired tear gas, they fired rubber bullets to the students, and said, it took us all this for you to suspend this bill?
	It's wrong. So on the 16th of June, 2 million people took the speech.
	And imagine, we have only 7 million people here.
	And so on the 16th, we have five demands.
	Formerly withdrawn them.
	Number two.
	We need a commission of inquiry, an independent commission of inquiry to look into police brutality.
	All the police brutality, that's really getting to me.
	I mean, I came out for the anti-extradition once, and then obviously that's been withdrawn.
	But it's just how the police have been treating people, how the police have been treating young people, and absolutely abusing their right of power.
	Teenagers are being arrested, and some of them I should say without any reason.
	And that's the reason why most people in Hong Kong are still angry, really angry.
	So someone was saying that they're grabbing people from bus shelters and for no reason, no pretense.
	Yeah, they're just searching people randomly.
	And they're also checking people's phones, which is actually legal because you need a warrant to do so.
	So they just say, unlock your phone, and then they just go through it.
	And then obviously some people don't know any better, right?
	Yeah, they'll just do it, right? Yeah, exactly.
	And I've also heard that police brutality has also escalated into fears of torture, actual torture, beatings.
	There's a detention center near the border where they're holding a lot of protesters, and then a lot of rumors coming out of there.
	People coming out of there with broken bones, bruises, marks, everything.
	So we want the police to be investigated by an independent committee.
	That's true. It's very important.
	Number three, we want the government to stop prosecuting or arresting people of what happened from the movement.
	I would like to see a general amnesty of the demonstrators and also of the police.
	You cannot give it to one another, so let them all be forgotten.
	And forgive me. And go forward.
	And number four, we want the government to formally withdraw labeling of what happened on the 12th of June.
	Because Carrie Lam first came to the camera and said, hey, it's rioting.
	We say, no, it's not.
	It's hurting. And number five, most importantly, universal suffrage.
	Wrong, bohem go! Wrong, bohem go!
	We want to be able to elect our own leaders.
	Right. Which is something we have no power in.
	Which is one of the big ones.
	We need constitution. That's the big one.
	The other ones they can kind of give, you know, grudgingly, maybe.
	But that one, isn't that just going to change the whole city?
	It changes the whole city. Legislature.
	And without political reform, without universal suffrage, without choosing your own chief executive and legislature, we cannot guarantee that nothing would happen again.
	Of course. So we need a proper check and balance.
	We need proper representation in the government.
	And again, I have to remind the audience, these are not something so unreasonable.
	We are simply asking...
	Universal suffrage has been around forever in the West and...
	And that was promised in the Basic Law.
	The Basic Law says that the ultimate aim is to have universal suffrage for the election of both the chief executive and all members of the legislature.
	But the ultimate aim could not be achieved during the first 10 years after the handover.
	So we were all waiting for 2007.
	But this is now our 23rd year.
	And we haven't got universal suffrage yet.
	Nowhere in sight, even.
	If Beijing could stick to the original intention, the genuine spirit of one country, two systems, that is to give Hong Kong a freedom to choose, to choose our leaders, to choose a system, then it would be alright.
	But over the past 22 years, we have witnessed That Beijing of course is not holding up the promises and in fact further encroaching to this part of the system.
	So we say it's not genuinely implementing one country two system right now.
	This is the communist way of dealing with Hong Kong all these years.
	Tighter control.
	So if this is the way forward, Hong Kong will very soon, if not immediately, become just another China city.
	Now that we are part of China, we want Hong Kong and China to advance together.
	that.
	And not to step back together.
	Certainly people here, they don't want to be just another city in China.
	You'll hear that a lot, the just another city in China.
	Yeah, that's right, that's right. And that phrase is used a lot because Hong Kong is special.
	And it is special because of everything that's been set up here over the last, you know, over 100 years.
	It won't be Hong Kong. It won't be Hong Kong.
	It won't be, I mean, in name only, but it will not be Hong Kong if it's reabsorbed into China.
	That seems to me fundamental.
	Absolutely. And that's why people are out there every weekend, you know, protesting on the streets because they appreciate what they have here.
	You know, they can surf the internet and type in Tiananmen Square and it actually comes up.
	And if you do that 30 minutes away, catch a bus in Shenzhen, you type that in, nothing will happen.
	Google doesn't work. Well, something will happen.
	Well, hey, you typed in that, so you'll get a visit, but just not from data.
	Oh, definitely, yeah. So people really appreciate that, and that's why they want to return to those values, which really got Hong Kong going.
	So we must keep our core values high, And that's what we're trying to do.
	Keep them as high as possible for as long as possible and hoping China will catch up with us sooner rather than later.
	But if we allow ourselves to be dragged down, then this conversion at a low level cannot benefit either mainland China or Hong Kong.
	I really hope that the present leader, Xi Jinping, would have the wisdom, courage and conviction to trust Hong Kong people and let us Choose our leaders by democratic elections and allow us to run this place as we know how.
	That is, in other words, this is the blueprint for Hong Kong's future by Deng Xiaoping.
	And then everything will work.
	There's no problem about it.
	Logically, we do need the one country, two systems.
	We do not have our own water.
	We have our own power, but we need a lot of resources.
	We get a lot of food and stuff from China.
	So one country, two systems can be sustainable.
	It's just the Chinese government, the CCP, needs to be able to respect that.
	And right now they're not, they're encroaching upon us.
	I guess I'm fairly ambivalent as to whether every revolution actually needs more cowbells.
	It's hard to say. What are you doing?
	What are these for?
	A shield?
	Oh, that's the cutest shield I've ever seen in my life.
	Okay, so they're making shields.
	They're making shields in case they end up in a confrontation with the police.
	Extremely cute shields.
	Let's find out where we're heading.
	So these are makeshift barriers or barricades that have been put together to try and keep the police This may be set up by the Hong Kong police.
	Why? Why would they do this?
	So that they have a bad image on the protesters.
	Police admit they pretend to be protesters.
	In Victoria Park, they admit they pretend to be protesters.
	And they shoot a gun when the police are discovered by the protesters.
	The protesters want to beat up the police.
	And then they shoot the gun.
	The police pretending to be the shooting gun.
	To fear away those protesters.
	That's a fact. Because one of the things that's going on in the world is everybody's looking and saying, oh, this is violent, this is aggressive.
	But it's not. No policeman.
	Peaceful. You see?
	It's peaceful. Everything.
	I've seen no violence. If there are policemen, riot.
	No policeman. Two million.
	Two million. Peacefully.
	Two million people out, no violence.
	Has anyone seen any violence?
	I'm sorry, sir. Well, apparently the police is the one who provoked the violence act.
	When? Where? Every time.
	The police do it? Every time.
	By pretending to be protesters?
	Yes. So will the police throw stuff at the police?
	You know the fuel bombs?
	Okay. Yeah, yeah. You see this on the media all the time, these bombs.
	Yeah, that is the tactic of the communists.
	The communists, the tactic.
	They send not P-R-L-A, no.
	They send the police, the secret police, and join with the Hong Kong police.
	They wear masks. No shoulder number.
	That is a rioter, not us.
	Right, right. I've seen no violence here.
	And that gives a bad reputation to the world, right?
	Wait, wait, speaking of...
	It's okay, they keep going, we'll talk.
	All these are organized, not by us.
	This is the police putting this up.
	They let you, some of the youngest are maybe very angry, so they let the youngest pick up the stone, you know?
	So they give you a chance to make a riot.
	That is a tactic of the Communists that are coming to China.
	It's not all violence.
	What you tend to see is violence on the news, because obviously radicalism sells.
	It's sensationalism. Yeah, exactly.
	But, I mean, there's things like every night at 10pm, people will chant encouragement from building to building to each other.
	And obviously you have old ladies walking the streets giving you chocolate.
	Not everyone is violent.
	It's been peaceful. Everything I've seen is peaceful.
	Exactly. Obviously, at the beginning, the peaceful protests didn't work.
	And it was only once the violence escalated that we...
	We've kind of got one of the five demands.
	But that doesn't necessarily mean that everything needs to be violent.
	We need to be able to show people that we are peaceful.
	That we're not radicals.
	We're just normal people.
	And this is a hot, sunny, beautiful Sunday here in Hong Kong.
	And they're not home watching Netflix.
	They're not out at the park.
	They're not at the beach. They're not playing video games.
	They're out here making their will, their presence, and their thirst for freedom known to each other, to the government, to the Chinese, and to the world.
	Get off your fucking couch, people.
	Do something to save all the liberties we have had handed to us.
	take some inspiration.
	So, you know, you can look at the parade path here and people have had, you know, lots of waters and so on And here, underneath the Pepe sign, you've got a place where you can recycle your water to keep the streets tidy.
	I mean, it's astounding what a clean place this is and how conscientious and responsible the Hong Kong people are.
	There you go. Okay, so the reports are from people, not official sources, but the reports are that tear gas has already...
	I think I can smell it now.
	Tear gas has already been fired further down the road, which means, of course, that there could be a stampede coming back at this point.
	People are putting on their tear gas masks, and the air is smelling just a little bit acrid at the moment, and I guess we'll find out what happens from here.
	This is the state. This is what they do.
	And you can see here that the majority of people, it was about 50-50, now it's about 70-30, people coming out of this area versus going in.
	And in this case, I'm tempted to go with the majority as to why people might be leaving the area up ahead, but we'll see.
	You'll see. Technically, the march should have ended at a central, and the charter got it.
	How far down is that?
	I think that is around one kilometer or two.
	Did people get that far, do you know?
	Yeah, there's a lot of people that did get that far, and it sounds like something's already happening.
	Well, well, what's happening? I'd advise you to...
	Okay, let's go! So, things have suddenly just broken.
	Everybody's falling back.
	And we are seeing what's going on.
	We've got everybody just suddenly started falling back.
	And now we're holding.
	We're holding position.
	As far as that goes.
	First time here? Yeah.
	It's lovely. It's beautiful.
	But you don't have any gear, any miles.
	I am surrounded by courage and foolishness.
	No, no. As soon as it gets hot, we'll back off.
	They are moving up some barriers.
	Desperately bringing up more barriers or barricades.
	I'll tell you this, man.
	It is nice to see some people clad in black who were actually anti-fascists.
	The crowd has really thinned out here in Hong Kong because I assume that they're expecting some sort of confrontation to be coming out soon.
	As you can see, they're putting bricks on the road and they are attempting to slow down whatever vehicular movement may be occurring on the part of the state.
	I think that the Pacific march, it's over.
	Now they're preparing there for some trouble.
	Oh, you think they're going to be real trouble?
	They already destroyed the MTR station.
	They have done what? They destroyed the MTR station.
	Yeah, yeah. Admiral T station over there, it's destroyed.
	What do you mean by destroyed?
	They broke all the windows, all the glass over there.
	Police came, they threw some tear gas, and there is the police over there.
	Yeah. And they're just waiting until the thing is going to clash at the end, I think.
	Oh, yeah, yeah. You can see it going down there.
	Let's go. Let's go. I can feel that.
	That is strong. Oh, look at that.
	The blue is flying. The blue is flying.
	I don't know what that is. You should tag the protesters to later arrest them.
	So those are the trucks that they're trying to stop with the barriers, right?
	Right. John, we've got to fall back a little here, brother.
	Fall back a little here. Whoa!
	Okay, let's get out of here.
	Time to run. Look, they're disabling the tear gas here.
	He's got it. He's throwing it back.
	Yeah, well, that'll do it.
	Sorry, he just got a full facial there.
	Wow, that's strong. Holy shit.
	Alright, time to rinse it. I like cleverly just wandering straight into it.
	Like a rube, like an amateur.
	Kind of intense. Okay, so...
	What we saw back there, of course, was the police vehicles.
	Now, they're trying to stop the police vehicles with these bricks and these barriers.
	The police were firing tear gas, and they were also spraying the blue gas or liquid in order to attack the protesters.
	But you can see how incredibly quickly these protesters move.
	It's remarkable. First aid is here, of course, for any emergencies.
	Close your eyes. Close your eyes.
	Close your eyes. Okay. Thank you.
	Okay. Thank you.
	Alright, we're going to move back a little bit here.
	Everybody's saying to fall back.
	I think the police are getting in closer.
	Oh, there comes one. It's right here, right here.
	Look at them all swarming in to neutralize it.
	Okay, we've got to move out, man.
	Yeah, we go. We're running.
	Ah, shit. I got hit again.
	Oops, sorry. Are you okay?
	You alright? Alright.
	Grace, under pressure, baby.
	Oh, shit. Nothing more fun than running with burning lungs and burning eyes.
	I think we're going to have to stop now.
	Okay, so we're good.
	I think we're out of harm's way.
	You alright? Got some more eyewash.
	It's still burning, but it's not quite as bad.
	And it looks like everyone's bugging out.
	And it also looks like they're lowering the barriers more for the trucks.
	Let's see. Someone got really injured.
	Do you know where George is?
	No, I don't.
	Okay. We've lost our producer, but I'm sure we'll find him again soon.
	And we are falling back along with everyone else.
	People are saying, don't go to the mountain.
	I don't know what that means. But we're not going to the mountain, whatever that is.
	Oh no, there's more down there.
	Okay, thank you. Which is the best way up here?
	Okay. All right, we gotta go up this way.
	Yeah, see you up ahead. There's more tear gas.
	And we're gonna head up this way.
	How are you doing? I'm doing all right.
	Yeah. Got a little emotional there.
	Yeah, yeah. Quite passionate.
	Alright, so...
	Sorry to interrupt.
	This is the police coming.
	I guess they got over the barriers.
	This, of course, is the nature of the state coming down the street.
	This was...
	People say a banned march, but it was a march without the necessary paperwork.
	And here you can see the tsunami of the state coming down the road.
	And since I don't have any illusions about the nature and power of the state, it's time to go.
	So this is the police presence now.
	We're trying to find a way back to our hotel that doesn't involve crossing a police line.
	As you can see, police presence is, well, enough to give you some sort of epileptic attack if you're that way inclined, but it's a little tricky to find your way back to a hotel at this point.
	So the streets have been cleared.
	We managed to dart off into a side road.
	We chatted with some people.
	It looks fairly safe.
	We're going to try and find a way to get back to our hotel at the moment.
	And I actually didn't really want to do much of a post-mortem.
	I think that footage speaks for itself.
	But when we're walking here, you can see this.
	We shall never surrender.
	Hundreds of thousands of people came out today to stand up against the state that would not let them march, that would not let them speak, that silenced their voice.
	I saw great courage today, great ingenuity, great speed, great solidarity.
	Everybody helping each other when we staggered out of the haze of tear gas.
	People were on hand to help wash their eyes.
	Ask if we were okay. Make sure we were okay.
	And we had support all the way through.
	Everybody was supporting each other.
	This is Churchill.
	More importantly, more vividly, more presently, this is Hong Kong.
	Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. - Oh! - So if we could, just at the end here, this is the camera that's going to get yours.
	Forget about me. Just what would you like to say to the world as a whole and perhaps even to the Chinese who may end up watching this about what you want and what your greatest desire is for peace and security moving forward?
	I think the vast majority of Hong Kong people do not want independence because they know this is not possible.
	Unless China agrees to give independence to Hong Kong, and of course China will not.
	But the vast majority of Hong Kong people want China to honor its promises, which are contained in the Sino-British Joint Declaration, and then repeated in our basic law, our constitution.
	And so that means Hong Kong people would have a high degree of autonomy, we'll be masters of our own house, we choose our own leaders by democratic elections, and China will not interfere in how Hong Kong runs its internal affairs.
	So that is what I'm for.
	And the outside world We, of course, should understand that we are not asking you to help us to fight for independence, because that's entirely up to China, which is the sovereign.
	But we do want you to talk with the Chinese leaders that what they promised to Hong Kong and to the international community In this Sino-British Joint Declaration, which China has asked so many countries to support, and they still support it, then they owe Hong Kong people that moral obligation to speak up for us when something is going wrong, in breach of promises by China.
	Hong Kong is fighting for freedom, and we cannot be doing it alone.
	We need the rest of the world to continue paying attention to what's happening here.
	And without your support, without your attention, we might lose.
	This is a battle not only against, not between Hong Kong people and the Chinese government.
	It's not merely a domestic issue.
	This is a fight between the authoritarian regime and liberty.
	And if you are with us, please continue to pay attention to Hong Kong and please continue to support Hong Kong.
	We need you. Your Honour,
	ladies and gentlemen of the jury, Court of World's Public Opinion and in the visible sight, hearts and minds of all thinking people in the world, the question before the Court of Public Opinion today is what is the validity of the handover of Hong Kong to China in 2047?
	This is a complex and deep issue and I'm going to focus on the first contract Which was, in effect, from the end of the 19th century to 1997.
	If that contract is not valid, questions of the validity of the later contract become irrelevant.
	If the foundations cannot stand, the top floor comes down of its own accord.
	So the question is, is the first contract valid wherein Hong Kong was transferred from the British To China from the late 19th century occurring in 1997.
	To answer that question, we must first ask ourselves, what is the nature of a valid contract?
	Now, a social contract, a government contract, a state contract lies in a different moral sphere to some degree than a personal contract, but some of the same principles still apply.
	and I will elucidate those here and eviscerate the case for Hong Kong returning to China.
	The communists who took over China in the late 1940s had a particular relationship to contract law.
	And that relationship to contract law is that it could be shredded upon the will and whim of those in power.
	Under the communists, starting in the late 1940s, Within a relatively short period of time, 40% of the land in China had changed hands through violence, through the tearing up of existing contracts, some of which had lasted for hundreds of years.
	If some entity wishes to say That contracts between governments and contracts between citizens are valid, which is the basis of the case as to why Hong Kong should be handed over to China, then that entity must themselves have respected contracts.
	Did the communists' government Respect contracts for land, for private property, for corporations between employer and employee?
	Absolutely not. In fact, the entire purpose of the revolution was to tear up existing contracts, usually through force.
	So, I must say, when it comes to world-class hypocrisy for the Chinese Communist Party To suddenly say, ah, but you see, we must respect contracts when the entire foundation of their power was on the tearing up of contracts and the murdering of millions of people.
	Well, let's just say it's a rather staggering feat of hypocrisy that if it had physical manifestation, would cause the earth to buckle and physics to reverse itself.
	Has the Chinese Communist Party ever said, well, the way in which we gain power and the way in which we transferred and tore up property and contracts, that was unjust and we owe reparations.
	No. They have resolutely stood by the tearing up of contracts.
	By what moral right can they claim that they Should now enjoy the benefits of contracts.
	There is a term in the law called interstate.
	Interstate is a situation of property that occurs when a person dies with no will.
	The property in general reverts to the state.
	the state looks for any next of kin.
	That is what happens when a person dies.
	Thank you.
	All existing contracts are invalidated.
	They don't have to pay their debts.
	They don't have to fulfill their contracts.
	The cars they lease must be returned.
	The cell phones they borrowed must be returned.
	All the contracts, when an individual dies, are voided.
	The British did not make a contract with geography.
	The British did not dig up a pile of dirt and negotiate with that.
	The British made a contract with a dynasty, the Qing dynasty.
	When an individual dies, his contracts are voided.
	What happens when a government itself dies?
	What happens when a government itself dies?
	Well, the Communists have already answered that question for us.
	In fact, when they murder a government, they void and destroy all of its contracts, as we see with land reform, which was wholesale slaughter and theft.
	So, the Communists have already told us what happens when a government dies.
	So, how is it possible that the Communists can now claim a contract That was signed by the Qing dynasty, which then transformed into a republic, which then transformed or was murdered by the communists and transformed into a communist dictatorship, a socialist dictatorship, and now is in its fourth iteration since the signing of that contract.
	Said fourth iteration is the mostly fascistic system that characterizes the existing Method of government in China.
	Originally the government owned all the means of production property, were socialized, profits were largely forbidden.
	This changed over the last few decades to the point where now private enterprise is encouraged in many areas, profits are allowed, corporations are permitted.
	Which means you have a significant degree of public ownership with private incentives for profit.
	Public ownership No profit, socialism, communism.
	Public ownership, private profit is fascism.
	So we have gone from a dynasty to a republic, to communism, to fascism, and yet like a immortal vampire, like a superhero immune to the bullets of time, morality, reason and evidence, the contract has maintained itself.
	It lives.
	It continues. It cannot be killed.
	Why? Well, because the communists will rip up contracts when it profits them, and the communists will maintain contracts when it profits them.
	The profit, not in a free market sense, but in a totalitarian sense, is the one constant.
	Let us look. At a dynasty.
	Because the British signed a contract with a dynasty.
	Now, putting aside free market considerations of contracts, let us ask this question.
	Can a man who signs a century-long, a virtually century-long contract, can he then bequeath that contract to his son?
	Well, of course. I have a daughter.
	If I go and rent a piece of property for 99 years, I can choose in my will to bequeath that contract to my daughter.
	She can choose to fulfill it or abrogate it as she sees fit.
	The British made a contract with the dynasty wherein a continuation of the line was expected, and therefore the contract could be transferred down through the generations in at least a conceptually just manner, according to the law of the time.
	But the dynasty has no power and has not had power for a long, long time.
	Thank you.
	Here is another consideration.
	When you sign a contract, there is an expectation of a continuance of the conditions under which you sign that contract.
	If you sign a contract to lease a car for $500 a month, The car company cannot say, oh no, we're changing that to $2,000 a month.
	There is a reasonable expectation of the continuance of the services for which you contract.
	If those services change, the contract is null and void.
	Imagine this. Imagine that you sign up for a charity that opposes abortion.
	You send them $50 a month and you sign this in perpetuity.
	Now let us say that that charity is taken over by a pro-abortion group and now wishes to use your money not to oppose abortion but to subsidize and promote abortion.
	Would you be justified in cancelling your contract if there had been a complete reversal of the terms of that contract?
	Well, of course you would be. Of course you would be justified in terminating that contract.
	If we don't have that right as individuals, then contracts can be unilaterally rewritten to be anything, to be the opposite of what you initially signed up for.
	And therefore, there would be no such thing as contract.
	Would you sign a contract to enter into a 25-year mortgage where the bank could choose at any time To change the terms of payment, to transfer the deed, to jack up the price with no prior warning and no prior contractual limitation?
	Of course not. There is no contract if contracts can be unilaterally rewritten.
	There is no contract if there is no continuity of services.
	So then we must ask ourselves, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, in the court of public opinion, when the British signed the contract, What was their expectation?
	That the freedoms would continue.
	That the freedoms would continue.
	They had every reason to believe that the dynastic rule in China, which had lasted for thousands of years, would continue.
	As the old joke goes, nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, and I think it was reasonable to say at the end of the 19th century that nobody expected the Communist Revolution.
	You will also note that it is somehow considered unjust that the British took over Hong Kong.
	Why? Why is that unjust?
	Why is the right of conquest accorded to every single race, color, and creed except the whites?
	Hong Kong was not initially part of China.
	Hong Kong was taken over A few centuries B.C. by China.
	Ah, you see, but that made it part of China.
	Why? Because the land touches?
	That's crazy. That's like saying you own your neighbor's property because you have a fence bordering it.
	There was no rioting when the British took over Hong Kong.
	There was no sabotage, there was no terrorism, there were no bombings.
	There was, I dare say, a fairly deep inhalation and exhalation of an enormous sigh of relief as Hong Kong was transferred from a mercantilist, state-controlled, semi-fascistic, tax-gouging monstrosity of pretend trade to an actual free port with virtually no taxation.
	Freedom. The mind and the body and the soul yearn for freedom.
	We grow towards it like a plant towards the air.
	Freedom is a consummation devoutly to be wished.
	That transfer from China to the British Empire made people in Hong Kong far more free.
	It was to the benefit of Hong Kongers.
	Which is why there were no riots.
	Why the appalling scenes that we saw last night?
	Tear gas, paramilitary maneuvers in the streets, cannons of blue liquid designed to mark people for later arrest and detention, hundreds of thousands of people marching in a desperate bid to push back The iron curtain of totalitarianism that is slowly surrounding and choking off their civilization.
	None of that occurred. When a corporation signs a contract, if that corporation goes defunct, the contract is also null and void.
	And what is human progress, my friends?
	What is human progress other than the tearing up?
	Of old contracts, if they are replaced by more just and fair ones.
	The institution of slavery is as old as humanity itself.
	In every country save America, slavery was ended with the stroke of a pen.
	Only America had a civil war, well, arguably related to slavery.
	All other countries ended slavery simply by disallowing the government to continue the enforcement of slave contracts.
	You see, those contracts were torn up.
	Those contracts were destroyed and humanity, significant portions, swaths of humanity breathed free air for the first time in their existence.
	The tearing up of contracts in the pursuit of liberty It's God's grace or reason's gift to the world.
	The communists accept this, though they use it for evil.
	In the Middle Ages, the relationship between the aristocrats and the serfs was explicitly or implicitly contractual.
	The progress of the agricultural revolution, of the enclosure movement, was the tearing up of existing contracts in the pursuit of private property Free markets and profits.
	Those contracts were torn up and we became free as a result, or freer.
	There is a contract that stipulates one country, two systems, and the complete handover of Hong Kong and its related territories to China in 2047.
	One aspect of that contract has already been torn up.
	The British was supposed to hold Hong Kong Island in perpetuity.
	Already been torn up.
	Already the terms of the conditions have changed.
	So, there is nothing that mere rhetoric can do to change the brutal realities of real politics.
	China is extraordinarily well armed.
	Hong Kong is not. Hong Kong It's immersed in freedom and surrounded by water.
	It has no nuclear weapons.
	It has no armies to speak of.
	And it already has a garrison of Chinese troops embedded in its heart.
	The words that I speak to you today can do nothing to alter the brutal realities of political power.
	But that political power relies upon a certain moral justification.
	Ah, we must fulfill the contract!
	Say the Communists. This contract that has stretched for so long must be honored, must be fulfilled.
	Nobody can take the claims of a Communist to respect long-term contracts seriously when they only gain power by slaughtering not just the contracts, but significant portions of the population who held them.
	So my words can do nothing.
	To stop one bullet, move one troop.
	But... The inverted pyramid of power rests upon moral justifications.
	This is why totalitarian powers, those who would hold unjust authority over free human souls, this is why they continually justify what they do with appeals to moral standards.
	Those moral standards, in this case, hold no water whatsoever The progress of humanity rests upon the tearing up of unjust contracts and the maintenance and continuity of just contracts from your cell phone,
	to your car, to your apartment, to your house, to the social contract with virtue that is supposed to guarantee our human rights and freedoms.
	Morally speaking, the contract to hand back Hong Kong to the totalitarians is not only invalid, it is unjust, immoral, and evil.
	Let it be torn up.
	For the progress not just of Hong Kong, but of justice, freedom, humanity itself.
	free Hong Kong We take a step forward all of us through example To being more free ourselves
	There it is Hong Kong fight for freedom Please, my friends, please share this information as widely as humanly possible.
	There is a common humanity that binds all of us together who love and worship and treasure the human freedoms that make life worthwhile, that give life its only capacity.
	For virtue, choice, and meaning in the world.
	So please help out Hong Kong.
	Help out those who are opposing Hong Kong.
	Tyrannies by sharing this information.
	I also do want to say very, very deeply and passionately, thank you, thank you, thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to pursue this kind of work.
	This stuff is very expensive, right?
	The flights, hotel, camera equipment, salaries, security, post-production costs.
	It's all very expensive, but I think it is all absolutely necessary.
	For the world, for the future, for everything that we treasure and how to maintain it.
	This has been a truly brutal year for philosophy, for freedom and for me.
	It's been the toughest year since I started doing this show 15 or so years ago.
	As I get closer to the core of the issues that stand between us and a free future, the blowback, the pushback has become more intense.
	I, of course, having seen the effects of failing to push back against tyranny in Hong Kong Fight for Freedom, I'm not going to stop.
	Of course not. But in order to continue, I do need your help.
	I have a list of projects, documentaries that I wish to pursue, five to ten pages long.
	I really do need your help to pursue these projects in the world to keep bringing the light of reason and evidence and liberty to the world.
	So please, my friends, please help out for the costs of this documentary, for the costs of running the show, for the costs of the projects to come at freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	That's freedomain.com forward slash donate.
	I hope you know that I treasure every scrap of support that I get from you and I aim to put myself out there to take Sensible, I hope, risks in order to bring the truth to the world, and I will use your resources to pursue the greatest and most powerful projects, not just to push back against encroaching tyranny, but to expand our existing liberties.
	I really, really do need your help.
	And I really, really do ask you to go to freedomain.com forward slash donate to help me do this most essential work in the world.
	And thank you again so much, my friends, for the honor of pursuing this work now and in the years and decades to come.

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