中國之門：香港
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98xE42i425k
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good evening welcome to frontline club my name is vaughn smith um i want to welcome um i i want to welcome
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you all to see to the book launch of the gate in china kelly falconer will be talking to
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michael sheridan and we're incredibly lucky to have them here tonight so on behalf of you i'd like to thank them for coming
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um and please buy the book don't leave without a book thank you very much i'm hannah kelly
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[Applause]
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welcome to the frontline club and thank you for joining us we're online tonight and in person as we
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chat with michael sheridan whose magnum opus the gate to china a new history of
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the people's republic and hong kong seems to have been published with the advice of a crystal ball in terms of
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timing and though i reckon many books on china will retain some relevance for years to come this book should remain the go-to
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so when mario asked me to moderate this talk i leapt at the chance i lived in hong kong for four years from 20 from
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july 2011 to 2015 it was the bank that took me there as a trailing spouse my
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husband worked for hsbc and i was freelancing as an editor for publishers in london soon though editing the asia
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literary review the so-called grant of the east and then i founded my asia literary agency at the tail end of the
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year of the dragon in in january 2013. just before we returned to london i i
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cried in private you know great heaving sobs sitting out on my own one balmy night overlooking victoria harbour
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since then i have returned to hong kong often and represent a chinese novelist who lives there now
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my last visit in november 2019 left me heartbroken seeing this once energetic and
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optimistic place so palpably ghost-like but this book
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look at it 400 pages you know at home and in the meantime i had another talk
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to perfect to prepare for with christine alam and my own authors to turn to including you know an afghan the
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youngest female mayor of afghanistan bidding wars around the world and whose memoir has been you know selling at auctions it's been a really busy time
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but even so michael once i started reading this book from the first page i
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was gripped and i have been talking about it to friends to family my tennis pals my own
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authors including victor mallett a hong kong refugee and the canary in the coal mine here sitting in the audience
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tonight and to frankly anyone and absolutely anyone who'll listen i shall be buying it for everyone i know at
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christmas in the gate to china michael gives us a forensic examination
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of a complex multi-layered history not just of hong kong but as the subtitle says and more to the point of
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china also but this is no dry academic text the gate to china reads like a john le
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carre novel and like in agatha christie paige turner every character he introduces has a part to play
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the tension is always high i quickly began looking forward to reading this and when i reached the last
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chapter i tried to read slowly to make it last longer a bit like counting to 50
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to try to delay orgasm or or is 50 too high a number
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i believe michael but um you should win the pulitzer with this book
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again look i'll say that you know despite the laughter i believe you should win a pulitzer with this book it's just magnificent
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all of you here know who michael is but for posterity's sake and for the sake of the recording i'll mention quickly that
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michael sheridan who read history at jesus college cambridge is was a foreign correspondent who for the last 20 years
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of his career um served as the far east correspondent for the sunday times for which he
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covered the rise of china a handover of hong kong in 1997 and the city's subsequent struggle for democracy i was
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wondering i didn't i saw this cup a picture of you in the back and you're really young i thought oh gosh i know even victor likes to have a really young
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picture of himself at the back of his book and i was like why it's because this is you were the the handover this is you at in hong kong during the
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handover 1997. so michael um thank you so much for joining us
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there are so many ways we could begin this discussion so so many strands of the narrative we could talk about but in
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an hour long chat with 30 minutes from the audience tagged on i would encourage online viewers as well to you know feed
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in questions to this discussion um and i am going to stick to the timeline god how i hate when these
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discussions run over especially as an agent arabella um because i want everyone to buy the books afterwards and
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have a little chat with michael if they can so this will be of i believe the utmost abbreviation we could you know talk for
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you know an entire day about this book over a long dinner with drinks in the end blah blah blah
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so i was thinking about how to manage the time so what i'll do is bypass maybe current
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affairs maybe the audience or the online audience can bring in some current of hairs or if you'd like to bring them in
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um but i will touch on them lightly of course um but i'm going to focus instead initially at least on history i took you
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know comprehensive notes of this book and i've got 10 pages here we'll see how we go
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um so one of the aspects of this book that struck me most was china's long-term strategy
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if the communist party you write knew one thing in chapter 13 you write this when when referring to the olympics
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if the communist party knew one thing it was how to bide its time so its strategy for reim re-emergence
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did not just take in the handing back of hong kong but also the resurgence of the country's power in the world
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as a foreign correspondent who read history at university you have brought to us the history of their planning of
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their understanding of their own potential which once harnessed would give them extraordinary political
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cultural and economic leverage chapter one is indeed a remarkable if
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potted history of china setting the scene for what follows in the book and indeed in history and you conclude by
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telling us that hong kong was a problem left over from history this is a bit of a long-winded question but would you
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comment on their long-term vision well xiaoping famously said that china
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should hide its strength and buy its time whether or not the present
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rulers of china are following that faithfully we can debate later on but yes they
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display a remarkable ability to calculate for the long term and you can
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see this even in the throes of revolution in 1949 and into the 1950s
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when mao and his lieutenants are grappling with the extraordinary problems of rebuilding this vast country
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that has been shattered by foreign invasion and war and civil war and yet
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they have a compartment for hong kong and they have a clear long-term view from the 1950s through
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till really the end of the 70s that hong kong was useful to the people's republic it
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was a window it was a bridge it was a gate and it gave them
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a way to go out and it gave the outside world a highly controlled way to go in
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so they did not want to spoil that and they calculated
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very impressively and they were patient one thing that
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all the rulers of communist china have shown is patience and
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that has paid off for them normal normally
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they also had great continuity of people you go back through the documents
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the same people are handling the hong kong dossier and policy making over a span of 20 30 years
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whereas their western interlocutors are changing administrations and governments all the time so that gave them a great kind of
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bedrock uh very traditional in fact we'll talk about the documents from
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china later i mean that's another aspect of this book which is extraordinary but let's tell tell me a little bit more
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about china as hong kong is a gate to china you're right um it is was like
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taiwan for which the the one country two systems phrase was um invented
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hong kong was an arc of chinese civilization how so well after 1949 there was an enormous
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outflow of people and institutions from china it didn't happen immediately but bit by bit
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chairman mao talked about setting up a new kitchen it's a peasant phrase
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and bit by bit the symbols of foreign influence banks institutions
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educational establishments churches of course all vanished from
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chinese life and most of them ended up migrating to hong kong many of the shanghai wealthy families
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took their fortunes to hong kong and rebuilt the industrial base there and eventually expanded back into mainland
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china when it opened up so it functioned as a gate in that way
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but also it was a an arc in the sense that it was a repository of things that were banned in
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china during the cultural revolution the red guards went on the rampage and they destroyed the old things the four olds
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i've been to cities for example along the yangtze where you just see shattered temples the
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remains of ancient houses museums that were ransacked it's an absolute tragedy it all went the
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bits that survived were in the forbidden city in beijing in the national museum in taipei and in
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hong kong sometimes in the dodgy antique shops um
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so um but of course the the the things that were that are in the national museum in taipei were the things that
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were kind of taken they were taken from the imperial city right and and
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kind of a bit like the elgin margo's marbles the chinese might say
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well the dispute over legacy is is one that is still dividing china the prc and
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taiwan uh no doubt chiang kai-shek ransacked the
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country they took the treasure they took the foreign reserves they took as much as they could to taipei because remember
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they were going to wage a war of liberation to reconquer the chinese mainland so the mentality half a century ago was very
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different but one thing that is constant and i try to evoke it
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is that this is a battle over culture and history as much as it is a battle over territory because
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who has ownership of china who has the narrative is it traditional culture is it the
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communist party is it one supreme ruler today or is it a more general developing
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discourse inside chinese civilization itself um that's interesting maybe we'll touch
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on that later i mean the thing is with before china you know under mao had it was it was a desperate country disparate
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sort of areas like a bit like italy right where and and it wasn't cantonese the the primary language and then they
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voted to install mandarin to take everything to be the official language so i guess there is this sort of uh they
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wanted a sort of hegemony of chinese culture but what exactly which chinese culture right because it was so
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disparate and and still is in many ways well linguistics in china is very treacherous territory so remember that
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the qing empire was bilingual it was a manchu dynasty and there were two official languages
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but it does bring us to a very sharp point today which is the
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chinese insistence on unity the unity of the nation is is fundamental to them and i think all
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chinese virtually agree on this and do remember that the japanese militarists explicitly sought
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to dismember china the more extreme militarists of the 30s wanted to break it up into smaller and
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less threatening countries so there's this very understandable and powerful sense comes down the decades comes
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through the documents you see it you read it in deng xiaoping's words to mrs thatcher that china will not be broken
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up and i think it's very hard for us in the west who haven't experienced the traumas that the chinese people did in
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the last 200 years to grasp just how that important is to them
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i mean as a former linguist i i i've always said that um you can't know a country unless you know it's language
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you can't really know it and i and what i saw in hong kong when i was there and then you know subsequently returning is
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the way that the the chinese um the mainland chinese government was trying to wipe out cantonese um in in hong kong
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and you know more and more the taxi drivers the airport i mean i knew sort of potted you know i knew um taxi
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cantonese turn left turn right how much too much and more and more i couldn't communicate and and they're trying to
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kind of wash over the kind of hong kong culture by you know using language in part to install um their own
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ideas about chinese nurse but let's move on um as china you talk let's talk about how
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as china grew richer and partly using hong kong right um it's it's marxist leaders you say in
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the beginning um in your overview began to focus on the contradictions in their prize um leading to a struggle over
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political power wealth identity data freedom and conformity indeed much later
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in the book in chapter 14 you know that foreigners who said with glib assurance that that communist party had no
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principles anymore were wrong it stood for a phrase we all know now today socialism with chinese characteristics
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which restored the state to a paramount role and put the party back in command with xi as people's leader but there
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were inconsistencies what were these well the inconsistencies are that
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on the one hand the chinese leaders are marxists uh i think we've forgotten that i sat
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through endless business conferences and corporate summits in the 90s and early
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90s where executives held forth on the fact that well they weren't really
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communists and it was just a facade and the ideology meant nothing well i'm afraid they hadn't studied their marx
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and lenin they certainly hadn't studied deng xiaoping because
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the chinese communist party as indeed it has just reaffirmed
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is a marxist party yes it is more leninist than marxist xi
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jinping explicitly borrows from stalin which is something that they do not
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highlight in their messages to the outside world and i think we have been intellectually lazy we have not been
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rigorous enough in actually taking them at their word so think xi jinping and think
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uh strong chinese patriotic tradition but also think karl marx now
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of course karl mart is a german he's a foreign influence so you have a
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party ruling china that explicitly adopts an ideology developed in 19th century europe
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those are the kind of contradictions i'm talking about yes you say here there were inconsistencies of course one paradox
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was the contrast between the new regime's brittle nationalism and its own reliance on doctrines borrowed from
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abroad it was all very well to denounce um people like joshua wong who worshipped as his lord and savior jesus
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christ a preacher in active in first century palestine but she himself upheld the doctrine of a philosopher born in
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germany karl marx whose theories owed much to revolutionary paris and whose later works were composed in victorian
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england all such contradictions were blotted out by shrill slogans there was often scant logic to the propaganda
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which did not prevent its worrisome repetition well it is pretty wearisome isn't it i mean they go on and on and on and they
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they they have the weapon of repetition is is one of their most uh effective tactics uh it's why reading
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chinese official statements and following newsletters is mind-deadening and best done before 11 o'clock in the
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morning so um on on a serious note um
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they have turned more and more to this old line about
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foreign equals bad dark influences in hong kong black hands
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from taiwan and elsewhere unnamed enemies conspiring to do down
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the chinese nation this is quite new we didn't hear this 20 years ago and what's remarkable going
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back is even after tiananmen square june 1989
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you went back to china there was a sense of guarded optimism and you there was no hostility to
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foreigners i arrived in shanghai with a photographer the day after the chennamen square massacre and we were escorted
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through the streets by thousands of people praising foreign journalists i personally never encountered any
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hostility in 20 years of covering china but this has now been confected and
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whipped up and used to bolster and fortify the particular
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character of leadership that has emerged under xi jinping in particular over the last five years especially i'd say in
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reaction to trump's you know fighting back against the chinese as well um so what what does one of the things
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that makes this book unique moving on a bit and perhaps so noteworthy if not groundbreaking
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is the fact that you tell the story of hong kong and as i said before more broadly of hong kong in the context of
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modern china is that you tell the story from both the chinese side and from the side of the
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west and here's where we talk about the documents that you you've been able to access and more to the point as you noted in
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your email to me this is not just a book about just just about the brits um only four of the 15 chapters you you
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wrote deal directly with the sino-british negotiations and the characters who populate this
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book include the familiar you know thatcher dang mao patton craddock wilson
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but you include a raft of others usually chinese who were so influential to the strategic
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rise of modern china tell us for example about pl i don't speak mandarin tell us for example about um lao chong zhi or
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about duan young little known in the west but without whom reform and opening up
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might not have been the success it was how did you gain access to this information
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well in the acknowledgements uh i say at the end that my greatest debt is to the researchers translators
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state journalists and some officials in china i can't say more than that right now but
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i freely acknowledge my utter debt to them some remarkable work was done on my
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behalf we found for example that all the players on the chinese side of
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the hong kong negotiations wrote their own memoirs or they participated in oral
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history programs the recovery of hong kong was a triumph for china they wanted to get their story
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out there they were very happy at confounding the brits so there's a lot of material it's just that people hadn't
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found it or we'd moved on we weren't interested and that was that in addition
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um as as you know very dedicated historians like frank decatur of hong kong university have found the
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provincial archives in china are by and large open scholars
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and so a chinese researcher is able to access the guangdong provincial archives in
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which there is a treasure trove of stuff from the 70s and the early 80s
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they don't have a formal 30-year rule in china but these early documents are uncontroversial
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and they are accessible one of the things you find is uh the blueprint for
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globalization the first chinese high-level documents outlining
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their strategy to turn southern china into this industrial powerhouse to create an
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export economy bring in the revenue and transform the southern half of the country it's all there and it's all
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there in a speech by xi jinping's father we'll talk about that later um i want to touch on this i mean great one of the
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another great part of this book is you know how you talk talk about the economics the macro and the micro and how they've influenced you know the way
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china has emerged today and you know using hong kong and other um special economic zones or special administrative
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regions to experiment with them and and find out what works and what doesn't and and what they can do economically
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and socially you know to to the people and etc so just quick kind
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of um silly question the subtitle when was it was it you're always your vision to
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write this book the way you have or i mean were you wanting only i mean you might have said oh i want to write a
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book about hong kong and then you realize oh my gosh there's so much more to write about than just hong kong how did this emerge i mean arabella well um
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when my publisher very wisely commissioned this book uh three or four years ago
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the ending was not apparent i envisaged a book that would
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focus on hong kong as the fulcrum of globalization and would talk a great deal more about trade
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and about the extraordinary if slow-moving world-changing process that we saw
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unfolding in china through the prism of hong kong and then as the writing and research
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went on we were caught up in events so uh i like you was in hong kong doing
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my last interviews for the book in late 2019 we saw what happened it turned into
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a much more dramatic story but i don't want the really big story to get lost in the
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drama because the really big story is that china changed the world it has changed
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everything we do from the price you pay to buy a face mask to the electronics and the air you
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breathe and all of that that's why i'm really trying to keep the
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brit component no larger than it needed to be you can't ignore it britain was the sovereign
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power for half the time covered by the book but the really big story which we shouldn't forget in the day-to-day stuff
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is this extraordinary global change i mean what we're struggling with now and
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supply chain issues i have i have a a book that has sold out now and the
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publishers are struggling to find paper to print it and pick the price of paper has gone up by 75 percent which you know
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plenty of paper here so um
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later in the book we we meet um i want to talk quickly before we go on to globalization
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um we we meet patton of course joshua wong and others so familiar to us in the west
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but um one name i want you to comment comment on speaking of the brits is sir percy
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craddock whom you write about in a fitting eulogy that is chapter nine
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you which is titled a mandarin for all seasons it's a bit of a con that chapter title
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but anyway oh come on i mean this chapter craddock was a fortune teller of sorts um what he understood about the
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soviet threat you know my god we were you know um it was such foresight about the issue
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of refugees from hong kong um in many ways craddock himself was playing the long game you know a great sinologist
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right and urging his compatriots to do so also i mean this chapter it was so moving
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it's a short chapter kind of interlude but i could feel you know the heat of craddock's anger and the energy of his
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despair as he watched what unfolded subsequently and after years of dedicating his life
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to the cause well those are your words not not mine but yes uh there's a tragic quality to percy
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crowder um i hate to say that i never interviewed him uh in person i found in my diary that i
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had a long phone call with him uh just before i went to hong kong in 1996
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when he was a public critic of chris patton but alas we we never met after
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that and the the patton team were very clever at sidelining him and making him a problem left over from history as well
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um but you've got to grasp just how
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important this man was he was ambassador to china
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then he became mrs thatcher's foreign policy advisor her closest advisor on
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those matters he transitioned to the john major government
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in ciralia he was the chairman of the joint intelligence committee therefore the spymaster he was
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at the heart of the establishment and he had an extraordinary mind very
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rigorous mind i found in mrs thatcher's papers a handwritten note
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to his widow saying that his intellectual rigor could sometimes be frightening now coming from
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mrs thatcher that's quite strong but i think the
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eureka moment in in the book research which made me dedicate a whole chapter to him
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was that i was led to his papers which are in his old cambridge college no sitting very pleasant morning in the old
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library at st john's college and in a loose folder
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among which there were for example photographs from his time in beijing and handwritten
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notes from chinese dignitaries i found these two photocopied letters
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one of them is to john major the other one is to a senior civil servant called john coles
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the first letter outlines craddock's brilliant analysis
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of what the chinese would do in hong kong if we pushed for more democracy and it
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has to be said that he was entirely correct he said if you push for more democracy they will simply reverse it
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and it will be worse and he argues it out a brilliant length in six pages but the second letter
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is frankly sensational because in it he admits
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to meeting with the chinese ambassador staying for lunch
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not reporting the conversation to the authorities as he was supposed to in retirement
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and allowing himself to be drawn into discussions by the chinese ambassador about britain's negotiating strategy
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not a grasp just how damaging that was to british interests imagine that
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the head of the chinese national security organization waltzed into the british embassy in
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beijing sat down and had a long chat over lunch about what he thought xi jinping was doing wrong he's
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inconceivable so um it really was an extraordinary moment i
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was asking myself why was it that a man whose life was
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devoted to secrecy and was the model of discretion had left these two letters
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he died in 2010 we don't know
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any more about the papers that are you know perhaps sealed they're in government custody but these are private letters
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they're not government documents you have to conclude that he wanted them
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to be found one day because this is his explanation of both his uh
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brilliant achievement how he saw it being dismantled and his frank admission that he had made
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a mistake in going and gossiping to the chinese and his reputation inside whitehall
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alas never recovered maybe it was sort of fit of peak and he was so you know
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annoyed i mean so and annoyed by what maybe he could have in subconsciously you know knew what he was doing i don't
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know who knows well this is a flaw in in british foreign policymaking because
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he was allowed to make policy on china with a very small group of people in conclave
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for the best part of a decade and a half thankfully we've got a much more robust debate on china now and you've got the
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house of commons foreign affairs committee taking a strong line and the days when
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policy towards big countries could just be cooked up in secret by a group of mandarins should really be in the past
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i mean this is the kind of the sad thing about hong kong isn't it has always been a sort of pawn in in a bigger game and
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you know they were no they never had democracy they never had the freedom first you know they were they had the british ruling over them and giving them
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a kind of taste of democracy which was the seed that stirred you know all the protests later
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um and then they had of course the the the the mandarins in china you know talking about their fate as victor said
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in his review that the hong kong the hong kongers were never consulted well they had freedom but they didn't
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have democracy and they tried to have democracy and freedom and they are ending up with neither
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um the fault for there being no democracy lies squarely with the british but it doesn't lie with recent governments it
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lies back in the paternalistic 1950s and 60s when colonial administrators
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took a sort of benign and sort of a lofty view of their subjects
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uh and we were also at fault in not progressing faster towards democracy in the 70s and
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80s but this is a very hard calculation there's
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a wonderful memo i quote where mrs thatcher puts them on the spot
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in 1983 i think and she said well why can't we progress to more democracy and the governor says oh if there was more
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democracy there might be political parties and then there would be opposition
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so let's move on from democracy and talk a little bit about chinese ideas of experimenting with economic and social
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policy i guess that's power democracy with the chinese seeing how far they could push things in some cases and
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seeing how to do so with the the special economic zones which are were one such experiment but
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hong kong latterly too was in particular for the way social reforms were introduced
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um for better or for worse badly i think if it was also i want you to talk about to us hong kong as a living chess piece
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on page 60 i don't know if you want to read this and there's a short paragraph shall i do
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do you need reading glasses i think it's a great paragraph that would would um
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hong kong as a living chess piece i've got a hair marked short paragraph
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this is from uh uh an official chinese uh account of uh deng xiaoping making an
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appearance when the hong kong football team were playing in beijing and explains why hong kong has become a
31:57
living chess piece for the modernization drive international relations and the reunification of the motherland
32:03
in the context of deng xiaoping's vision the issue of hong kong is a paramount one so i say well these gestures one
32:11
easy applause but the chinese leadership faced a raft of huge fundamental policy
32:16
decisions far exceeding the importance of a single coastal city under colonial
32:22
rule but it was notable that in a far-sighted way the chinese leaders integrated their
32:28
policy on hong kong into the politics of reform and made it a talisman of patriotic integrity
32:35
that also served as a signal that china would be more open to the world and it's difficult today to understand the
32:42
profound nature of that change to tens of millions of chinese people so
32:49
hong kong was a chess piece really uh on two boards one
32:54
the game of chinese reform how far could you push it uh
32:59
quite interesting digging back in the documents uh to the 1980s
33:05
the carters who beijing posted to hong kong were pretty liberal they wanted to experiment so
33:12
how far could you go in southern china could you introduce shareholding could you bring in corporate structures could
33:18
you imitate the legal structure of hong kong and give investors confidence they experimented with all those things
33:25
there was a bigger chess board which is why did
33:31
mrs thatcher make a deal with china and give back hong kong she did so because
33:38
xiao ping threatened to take hong kong back by force it's in the memorandum he
33:44
the language was blunt so they faced a choice
33:49
did they do nothing or did they try to get china to take hong kong back
33:57
through a legal negotiated treaty which is the joint declaration so
34:03
in other words rather than having the law of the jungle you would preserve the international
34:08
order and that was a very important point because if china had simply marched in and taken hong kong very
34:15
little we could do about it but it would have been a terrible blow to global confidence strategy and so on
34:22
the people who are missing in all this are the people of hong kong who are never consulted
34:28
by either side about either of these very very big changes uh and they are the missing voices in
34:35
the 70s and 80s but at the same time you know we uh that well the uk had come out of the falklands they had no appetite for war
34:42
correct and and and and you know that no i think it's the contrary i think mrs thatcher came out of the falklands
34:49
uh strengthened and one of the things that comes through in
34:55
her very tough meeting with deng xiaoping
35:01
is that the chinese got the message that you couldn't underestimate this woman because she had sent a task force to the
35:07
far side of the ocean to reclaim a very small island and
35:13
like richard nixon she was quite good at playing the the crazy factor um now
35:18
obviously she is no longer here to discuss it with us and dung has gone to meet marx but i did find the young
35:24
diplomat who was in the room and took the notes a guy called bob pierce who ended up working with chris patton
35:31
and it was really fascinating because he said although the record
35:38
is comparatively polite there was no doubt that the chinese got the message from mrs thatcher
35:44
i just got the sense from the way you wrote it that she was a bit kind of astonished by his intransigence and that
35:50
you know he said if you don't you know if you don't negotiate if you don't sign the bottom line we'll just take it and he meant it
35:56
yeah and and you know there's a lot of manufactured quotes about china uh some of them apocryphal um some of them
36:01
manufactured uh he evidently never said those words
36:07
precisely in chinese but his meaning was clear mrs thatcher however happily borrowed them and turned them into a
36:13
sound bite later on so she was quite capable of dramatizing for effect
36:19
i mean on this page also you i love how you you you start writing um in kind of
36:24
liturgical language you talk about ordinations apostles priesthoods etc almost like to signal kind of evangelism
36:31
from the chinese as well about their way forward i mean well the chinese
36:37
don't like to talk in religious terms but they um the language they used about hong kong
36:43
and indeed the later language they used about chris patton was pretty biblical um
36:49
among the many things that uh the epithets they bestowed on him was that he was
36:54
a sinner for three generations um and the one i liked most of all was they called he patton was asked about the
37:01
negotiations and said well it takes two to tango so the official media then denounced him as a tango dancer
37:08
[Music] there are other epithets used as well um
37:14
so you you say here talking about deng xiaoping um i just want those where is
37:19
it there was the chapter on on the iron lady v the steel factory um this did remind me some
37:26
i mean i'm not british obviously for my accent i'm i'm american but um well it reminded me of some of the arrogance of
37:33
the british you know despite so many of those signologists they just still believed in their own sense of right and wrong and and and there's a scrape
37:39
there's this great um she and percy craddock had arranged this fantastic dinner although on a budget right and
37:45
yes snubbed her for another party with um kim il-sung
37:52
and so she and cried this you know dry dinner you know talk about fear of missing out
37:58
um so with a kind of lesser official just tragic and she'd flown all that way and all this expense and then he just said
38:04
oh god i've got to meet kimmel's son smoke some cigars with him well i think they were actually humbled
38:11
by that time because uh one of the things you find in thatcher papers she kept everything by the way
38:18
she even kept her menu cards and you find this is a wonderful thing about doing archive work that's not on the
38:24
internet and you know can't be found through google is you have in your hands
38:30
the cards which she took into the bank was at the great hall of the people and only her scribbled notes always in blue ink
38:38
about say this underline that and so on uh they realized that they had been played
38:45
and deng xiaoping merely delivered the message bluntly they also knew despite all their uh
38:53
aristocratic sinologists and and all the rest of it that the americans had far more
38:58
experience they turned to the americans for a fantastic intelligence briefing on
39:03
how to negotiate with the chinese which we quote and that's a textbook you could use today it
39:10
still is yesterday isn't it it wasn't used recently um or was we know it's a
39:15
document called china's negotiating style and it was handed over to the brits um between 1982 and 84. i can't
39:22
remember exactly when uh by two officials one was john holdridge and the other was a certain
39:28
paul wolfowitz who gave them this briefing and it described
39:33
from more than 10 years of american top level negotiations with joe and lai and mao
39:39
and the rest of them this is what they're likely to do this is how they will behave
39:45
it's a textbook and they are still playing the same textbook
39:50
one of the things they make the points they make in this is they leave the big decision to the last
39:56
minute well that's what they did a couple of weeks ago at cop26 they turned around at
40:02
the very last minute they got the indians on board and delivered this line that coal would be
40:10
phased out or managed out uh you do wonder whether alok sharma and
40:15
these other diplomats might have benefited from reading the state department's memo from 40 years ago i
40:21
think a lot but i think a lot of some mergers and acquisitions um you know happen this way where you know you're negotiating around around around the
40:27
clock you know sometimes for weeks on end as you call them struggle sessions and um then at the you know it's sort of
40:33
3 30 in the morning and people have been up for 48 hours and you just like okay you know agree or but the thing is the
40:38
chinese knew that people would be at their weakest then and then they would you know totally you know uh took
40:44
advantage of that but frankly we should be learning a bit more from them because
40:49
they make out that their continuity and non-regime change is a great strength
40:54
it's also a weakness because they replicate themselves and you see the same technique the
41:01
night before they signed the wto deal with america the culmination of more than five years
41:09
of detailed bitter negotiations they did not take that decision until a midnight
41:14
meeting of the state council the day before signatory so like all you say all known chinese
41:21
sources are clear on on one point that seems to we'll talk a little bit we're going to move into talking about globalization as as
41:28
xi might say global cooperation um all known chinese sources are clear
41:34
on one point that seems to evade foreign commentators you say this is early on in the book but it's it's played out you
41:39
know throughout dongjo ping and the leaders of the communist party of china took the steps they did reform and
41:44
opening up because they were marxist leninists you talked about this a little bit earlier tonight and not because they
41:51
were closet capitalists quietly subverting within or geriatric ditherers who knew the game was up
41:58
would you expand i mean you say that they were allowing capitalism to flourish to benefit china's rapid
42:04
industrialization well victor said this in his review they were allowing capitalism to flourish to benefit
42:09
china's rapid industrialization well i'm going to say something nice about the communist party which is that
42:15
in the 1970s and 80s there was a strong carder of officials and and managers who wanted
42:22
china to get better they wanted to make people's lives better and let's face it
42:27
they succeeded they raised hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and even if you read the memoirs of
42:34
zauzy yang who was the reformist premier general secretary of the party later
42:39
purged by dung after chiang mai square he talks about a journey it's a journey
42:45
from traditional marxist leninism soviet model imported learned and recycled 100
42:53
times to realizing that governing a big complicated country demands more but it
42:59
did proceed from a communist marxist view
43:04
that you were going to make the lives of the workers and peasants better so
43:10
they didn't do this because they thought well this is all a charade and a facade we know it's all nonsense really they did it because they believed you could
43:17
convert marxist leninism into a an ideology with chinese characteristics and make it work
43:23
for china and so far they have not been disproved no i mean i i agree with you i think what they've achieved is um is
43:31
is admirable in its own way and i mean and you were writing later in the book that the hong kongers were looking to
43:38
china were becoming a little bit jealous because in hong kong how many people here have been to hong kong
43:45
okay good so we all know kind of what you know it's a kind of like mind but in hong kong you know those the the people
43:51
driving um rolls royces that are you know colored like a banana we know and and that there's this great disparity
43:57
between the rich and the poor but the and the so in hong kong as you write those at the bottom and who were going
44:04
backwards were looking to their chinese cousins as it were and becoming a little bit
44:09
unsettled if not jealous that the the wealth distribution was more equal
44:14
yeah well when i first went across the border from hong kong in china in 1985
44:20
it was going from one world to another shenzhen was a a small town you
44:26
there were rice fields and bullocks and and carts and uh
44:32
then over 20 or 30 years it turned into a gleaming new technopolis which is actually better
44:38
than hong kong in terms of infrastructure and roads and space and apartments
44:43
so but you also saw more complexity because for example
44:49
even according to the official statistics about 1 million people have moved from
44:55
mainland china to hong kong since the handover in 1997. so that's increased the population is
45:02
offset net immigration and it's changed the character of the city somewhat uh and
45:08
clearly hong kong is being absorbed slowly into what they call the greater bay area
45:15
and that's why i think these questions of identity and
45:21
economic growth versus economic equality uh these these questions all get sharpened
45:28
and politicized in fact the inequality in china has soared yeah i mean it's interesting when i
45:34
lived in in hong kong and you know went back subsequently i could see shenzhen you know becoming you know
45:40
bigger and bigger and more and more glitzy and of course they've built the bridge now and i realized that and also
45:46
shenzhen and and hong kong were complete the harbors were competing with each other so china's strategy was to you
45:51
know make something make hong kong almost um redundant because it was absorbed into
45:58
the greater you know pearl river delta right so i mean they've kind of largely achieved that i mean um
46:03
to some degree well they've sketched out an infrastructure vision so the whole delta is being knitted
46:10
together with highways bridges airports cargo terminals and so on
46:15
what they have also done is they have now accelerated the political and social process
46:21
i imagine that what they want is hong kong to be a obedient chinese city
46:27
with some international characteristics and a strong finance sector so it will be distinct from the other
46:34
cities of the region but it will be drained of any kind of political threat
46:39
and it will not be a laboratory for democratic ideas uh hopefully social and
46:45
religious freedoms will continue uh and you know social freedom has
46:50
improved in many ways in in the rest of china so it might level out
46:56
i mean arabella's used your editor at hopper collins the publisher hopper collins william collins and uh we have an author
47:03
in common as well hyun so lee the north korean defector who who escaped to china and hid in plain sight for many years
47:09
and i took her back to china in to beijing in i think 2017
47:15
it was the first time she'd been back in about 15 years and we went out into the street and in um
47:23
um you know the kind of business district which was all glitzy and high rises one of which had been built since the last time i'd been now you know a
47:29
year before the intercontinental you know was built in a year like james king china shapes the world so yonza was
47:35
there and she came out of the of the hotel and
47:40
she just looked around and she couldn't she couldn't speak i said to him so what's wrong and she said
47:46
people are rich she just you know and they were they had
47:52
you know let's see mobile phones dogs they were walking on you know uh swarovski studied leads i mean it was
47:58
you know i saw it myself over the last you know since i was first then in 2011. it's just astonishing things
48:08
[Music] um we at the sunday time sent a chinese
48:14
freelance journalist to north korea to report for us uh he did so very
48:20
skillfully and and discreetly uh with no uh harm to himself um
48:26
chinese people could enter north korea as tourists they were relatively free to travel around they had long language in
48:31
common so he came back across the border uh and i rendezvoused with him and i said
48:37
well what was it like oh he said it was just like china 30 years ago yeah exactly
48:43
so like i wanted to i mean i know you want to focus on globalization so do i and then we're gonna sort of open the
48:48
questions because we've been going for about an hour and and i know that you all have a lot of questions yourself and
48:53
that's a very sudden thing to say you all um i think this last the question we were talking about before can help us
48:59
segue into the idea of globalization or in your words china's idea of global cooperation here you take us in this
49:05
book contextually through the last 40 years of sort of boom bust um including the loads of money 1980s and the go-go
49:11
iconic economies of southeast asia you know one of the great one another great thing about this book is that you
49:16
position hong kong and china you do you give us readers touch points what's happening in in um the rest of the world
49:22
in south east asia in in in europe and et cetera so one of the chap designs of nail
49:28
biting as there's a couple of them um is is event in 1983 and the volatility of
49:34
the hong kong dollar at this time this kind of leads into globalization and government intervention and also let's
49:40
talk a little bit about how how hard china fought to gain access to the wto
49:46
um and and how and why it was so keen to attain most favored nation status and
49:51
how today we are affected by what happened then um as we're talking about you know supply chain issues you know
49:56
hong kong was the third world's third largest port accounted for over 18 of china's ddp gdp hong kong had during the
50:04
market turbulence set about by the asian financial crisis on the heels of the handover the third largest currency
50:10
reserves in the world and you give us this you know breathtaking edge of your seat nail biting account of the short
50:16
sellers bid to collapse the hong kong dollar and what and what happened during that time
50:23
it was great to be able to talk to two people who were who were in the room at these two extraordinary financial crises
50:30
one was the run on the hong kong dollar in the early early 1980s which they
50:35
fought by fixing the hong kong dollar to the u.s dollar with a peg demanding
50:41
confidence in the currency markets it almost failed uh and willie purvis who was uh eventually the head of hsbc was
50:49
in the room as hundreds of millions of dollars went out and they sat there from monday to friday
50:57
wondering whether there would be a bank at the end of the week uh there was but it was one of those moments which made
51:03
the chinese very suspicious of capitalism uh then in 1998 donald sung then
51:10
financial secretary fought the hedge funds and the traders uh in the trenches
51:15
of the currency markets they then devised a strategy to head off soros and co as he called them
51:23
uh by buying up huge chunks of the hong kong stock market so that this laissez-faire
51:29
non-interventionist government became one of the biggest shareholders in the hong kong market and again amazing to
51:35
have somebody take you through the hour by hour uh minute by minute um i i loved donald
51:42
sung's uh rather ruffle um uh acknowledgement he said all we had to
51:47
turn to all the chinese stock broking houses to place all the small orders because we didn't trust the big boys and
51:53
all the best traders were women yeah and he sounded mystified by this um
51:59
but those two things made china suspicious of capitalism obviously boom
52:04
and bust but the dedication to getting into wto was extraordinary and there's been
52:11
a bit of myth making by the trump people and the the american right about it was a
52:17
conspiracy they were all waved in it was so easy it really wasn't you know i went i went through the papers in geneva uh i
52:24
met the remarkable man called stuart harbinson who was the hong kong representative at wto was there
52:30
throughout it was tough they were put through weeks and months of negotiation i think
52:36
the final agreement weighs 13 kilos and they made an awful lot of commitments
52:42
the problem was they didn't keep them you also say that the chinese and i've kind of experienced some of this myself
52:48
with well you know what do you say uh you mentioned that at the chinese regard a signature to an agreement only the
52:54
beginning of negotiations everybody who's done a deal in china will tell you that yeah we're all
52:59
friends here they say oh we're all friends here um we want to remain friends with you while we you know disregard what we've
53:05
just agreed um so look i mean we've been talking for about an hour you know as i said
53:11
we've admitted a lot in this discussion we've only seen us sort of talked about three quarters of you know i've only
53:16
kind of made my way i mean i've read the entire book with copious notes but um
53:21
we haven't you know finished talking about the rest of this book and you you talk about joshua wong and the democrat
53:28
movement you talk about patton and his involvement in the handover and you know we're talking about you know freedoms
53:34
and the restriction of freedoms and the disregard for the basic law et cetera et cetera et cetera this is a
53:40
modern ultra-modern history so i thought we we might open that to the audience and maybe you guys will you know raise
53:46
the questions related to that or would you like to add something michael before we open to the audience no let's go to the audience
53:54
thank you [Laughter]
54:01
it's a really great book i mean i was i was really impressed uh you know i we don't know each other that well but we
54:07
obviously acquainted and uh i was truly impressed it was a wonderful wonderful read wonderful history book i
54:13
just had a question which is about contemporary matters and hong kong um well fairly contemporary matters i just
54:20
wonder whether the chinese communist party could have simply left hong kong alone could it
54:26
have done nothing um at least until 2047. i was very much
54:31
struck in hong kong in recent years by how all the really big demonstrations were not sort of spontaneous uprisings
54:37
for freedom or democracy there were really reactions to things that were done by china or by its surrogates in
54:45
the hong kong government so you know why didn't they leave hong kong alone
54:50
uh if that's what happened well the answer is yes they could have left hong kong alone but xi jinping
54:58
ushered in a new style of government in china uh very
55:03
intolerant of descent of any kind uh hong kong was a you know again a chess
55:08
piece do remember they saw the peaceful protests of of 2014
55:16
as a real threat because young people in particular
55:21
frighteningly articulate well-informed multi-lingual outward-looking educated were
55:29
undeniably chinese undeniably full of
55:34
vigor and enthusiasm for governing their own city and running their own way of life
55:40
and that was definitely seen as a bad example by xi jinping and the people
55:46
around him uh his chief ideologue is a man called wang
55:51
who has spent his life as a kind of pocket version of steve bannon trying to
55:58
counter the indeed exploit the samuel huntington thesis of a clash of civilizations
56:04
and what they saw in hong kong and there are plenty of quotes on these lines from
56:10
the establishment in hong kong is they saw this as a threat they saw it as a threat to chinese values to xi jinping
56:16
thought to the great rejuvenation of the chinese nation and i noticed only the other day
56:22
the secretary for education in hong kong defined the mission
56:28
of uh tertiary education as inculcating a spirit of patriotism and
56:34
the sense of belonging to the chinese race which is language that would be
56:40
extraordinary it was used in a western country so we again have had perhaps a too
56:46
lazy western perspective on the way they see things
56:52
another question could you announce who you are
56:59
because this is being recorded so it's it's good to uh know who you are if you if you wouldn't mind yeah sure uh charles scanlon
57:06
michael you talked earlier about the um the great patience that the chinese um
57:12
had over hong kong all those um decades the 50s and 670s it was a sort of long game
57:18
and that patience um as you were just saying ran out in the last few years
57:23
did you have any thoughts about how this relates to taiwan whether the
57:29
the patience towards taiwan is running out or is it still the long game are we still looking at
57:35
mid-century i think it's still the long game because
57:42
the uh enormity of a decision to try and take
57:47
taiwan whether peacefully or militarily is really sort of
57:53
it's such a big decision that they would not take it unless they were forced to i mean i have a theory
57:59
that the risk to taiwan increases with the risk to xi jinping
58:05
if the xi jinping regime feels secure then it can go on
58:11
raising and lowering the temperature over taiwan as it has done as china has done for 20 or 30 years
58:18
if however for reasons which we cannot fathom the
58:23
xi jinping regime felt seriously under threat
58:28
they could resort to an adventure and i think that's the risk this is because you know chinese politics is a black box
58:36
we don't really know maybe somebody in langley virginia knows but but we certainly don't uh
58:43
what we do know is that the rhetoric is is is up and up um
58:49
but the risk would be very high uh what i would say most chinese people do not want war they
58:56
do not want adventurism and aggression they want to get on with their lives
59:01
raise their families do their work educate their children and build a better future they do not want foreign
59:08
adventures at the whim of a dictator so a war over taiwan is definitely not in
59:15
china's interests the problem is that one day it might be in xi jinping's interests
59:20
i mean you say here that in the shanghai communique of 1972 all belongs to china
59:26
yeah the the language in in that communique and and the endless negotiations freeing kissinger in this
59:32
and nixon and and the chinese world that there there is one china and all chinese
59:38
on both sides of the taiwan strait recognize that that is so it's a bit like the joint declaration in
59:44
hong kong you know ambiguity is beautiful until you test it
59:49
so i mean speaking of xi jinping you wrote this masterful piece um in the sunday times magazine like a long form
59:55
piece um a kind of little biography of xi jinping for the general public
1:00:01
um um i think i'm unlikely to be invited back to chinatown yeah
1:00:07
this enigmatic man um and who who as you say who holds the fate um who holds our
1:00:13
fate in his hands but when he was at school as a young boy in the school for the princelings
1:00:19
um he was a little peacemaker well
1:00:25
we know very little in real detail about the private lives of chinese leaders
1:00:32
that comes from a very informative wikileaks telegram which the americans circulated i think in 2009 they found an
1:00:39
informant who had grown up with xi jinping and then lived in the united states uh
1:00:46
you know you're it's a jigsaw you're piecing these bits together what one did hear quite openly from
1:00:53
elite chinese uh friends and acquaintances in hong kong financial circles and indeed in state media in
1:00:59
beijing was that a lot of people thought that xi jinping wasn't very
1:01:04
bright and he didn't have a first class education no fault of his own and that he was not an intellectual
1:01:11
to which the answer is well he's not doing badly so far
1:01:16
but he's a strategist is he a strategist i think you know all governments react day-to-day look at how
1:01:23
they're playing out one issue after another uh it's it's a tennis match the ball comes over the net and you hit it back
1:01:32
can i just say something really mundane i mean he's quite he's quite tall and i mean do you
1:01:39
i mean i think the thing is i mean he's he looks you know strong and powerful
1:01:44
and in china there's a there's a lot to be said for somebody who has that kind of physicality who can you know project
1:01:50
themselves like you know trump tried to do as this great you know you know leader i mean there is something to be said for that and the
1:01:56
chinese are very you know into that kind of you know as a reporter i always believe in trying to get into the room
1:02:02
and just seeing these people for real even if they're across the room with their entourage what's their facial
1:02:08
expression how do they react all that kind of thing so we would go to summits as journalists and sometimes you only
1:02:14
see these mighty folk for a few minutes but you learn something by seeing them so i sat for
1:02:21
must have been three hours in the great hall of the people watching him through binoculars and he hardly moved i have to
1:02:27
say he may have had a more comfortable chair than me but they're all drilled
1:02:33
they're disciplined you know they sit through endless party meetings and rhetoric and
1:02:41
and uh repetitive recitations of dogma uh most
1:02:46
of it pre-scripted uh you get a lot of mental discipline from that
1:02:51
uh what you could see and this is more than mere psychological
1:02:57
suggestion was that he had a commanding presence he was the center of that room even if
1:03:03
there were a thousand people in the room partly that's theater but you can't just
1:03:09
make that up and people i met who and talked to who met deng xiaoping said
1:03:14
the same thing don xiaoping was physically tiny but he absolutely radiated power and and menace
1:03:22
i was trying to get out you also said that he had an iron bladder to be able to sit through you know these endless
1:03:27
seemingly endless meetings right well they circulate with tea all the time
1:03:33
um here's another question oh let's go to the back hi um getting back to taiwan i wonder
1:03:40
whether you think that what just happened in afghanistan might have sent a message to beijing to
1:03:47
see to the um ccp that the west
1:03:53
america its allies are not really that committed to um
1:03:59
the uh commitments that they have made to
1:04:04
uh other government you know can taiwan really be uh confident that
1:04:10
should there be any uh move from beijing towards a takeover
1:04:15
that um america would really stand up for them what do you think about that does that bring the timetable a little
1:04:21
bit more forward than your long-term uh assessment that you just mentioned
1:04:28
we know from the chinese state media that they already think the west doesn't live up to its commitments and is weak
1:04:34
and can be divided and will fold if put under sufficient pressure they say that
1:04:39
all the times there's no secret about that uh i suspect afghanistan is a lot more
1:04:44
complex uh geopolitically than we have quite grasped we focused on the
1:04:52
terrible human drama of the end and the exit there was clearly a lot of talk between
1:04:57
the chinese the indians the the americans and the other players uh china wants a stable afghanistan that's for
1:05:04
sure does it change the calculus on taiwan it might if you're
1:05:09
a strategist in beijing and you're a real hawk a wolf warrior you might think
1:05:14
that this is the moment to do something rash it poses a real dilemma for the united
1:05:21
states because the whole policy is founded on ambiguity there is no absolute treaty commitment by the united
1:05:28
states to defend taiwan it's not like japan or the philippines or south korea
1:05:35
so so much depends on perception and confidence and and personality
1:05:41
and of course the risk would be that if a conflict broke out china attempted a landing and it was
1:05:48
militarily opposed would the americans fight i suspect if they didn't fight it would
1:05:54
all be over
1:06:00
oh thanks hi my name's richard cockett um thanks michael for a fascinating talk
1:06:06
i just wanted to press you a bit on um xi jinping from what you're saying i mean you seem
1:06:12
to suggest to me that xi jinping represents an enormous disjuncture in modern
1:06:18
chinese history um you know in terms of what you'll see being it's already come
1:06:24
up that people in hong kong the rights of the process they were reacting against
1:06:29
what was coming from china these were not spontaneous outpourings of democratic um longings um and and also
1:06:37
in terms of the change of style and the change of ambition in china do you think um you know
1:06:44
this could all have been foreseen was this all inevitable or has ji jinping and the people around
1:06:49
him made an enormous difference which the west just missed did not anticipate
1:06:55
and have misjudged i think everybody uh misread xi jinping
1:07:02
early on uh in the protest in 2014 in hong kong you'd go down in the streets and they had cartoons of xi jinping as
1:07:09
winnie the pooh you know a globular bear a fairly affectionate
1:07:15
kind of portrait well nobody's showing those anymore
1:07:20
when he took power there was a sense of relief in establishment circles and certainly
1:07:27
among the diplomats and the business people because he he is the continuity
1:07:33
candidate you know his father uh was a very important official who opened up
1:07:38
southern china and was a leading reformer he belongs to that circle of elite
1:07:43
families who are the descendants of the founders of the revolution people felt comfortable with him not
1:07:51
least because his rival beau shalai and the people around him were a real bunch of rogues and would undoubtedly have
1:07:57
been worse um you know we're groping in the dark
1:08:02
and the piece i wrote for the sunday times magazine at the weekend does virtually tell you everything we know because there ain't very much it's
1:08:09
quite extraordinary really um what we don't know is
1:08:16
what's inside his head we don't know much about the people around him there are pen portraits of the standing committee it's
1:08:23
only seven men uh the pollock bureau i guess the americans have got great data on all of them
1:08:31
you have no idea about the interplay or the policy discussions or what is ordained and we we talk from the outside
1:08:37
about splits and cabals and so on a lot of it is shooting in the dark
1:08:43
in chapter 15 the hunger games with the titles the hunger games you talk about the disappeared
1:08:48
um which we might get to soon talk about the guangdong action
1:08:53
plan censorship and the jail of alleged dissidence
1:08:59
and you you say that the ascent of xi jinping is is a return to hard dictatorship which
1:09:06
ended the dreams of a more liberal intern internationalist outlook in china
1:09:11
under the benign influence of trade globalization is no longer inevitable
1:09:17
that he's put in place or china has put in place illegal and bureaucratic furniture typical of efficient
1:09:22
dictatorships um with military expansion and strengthening of course the belt and
1:09:28
road initiative um and and etc so um
1:09:33
yeah that that was very interesting do you want to expand on that a little bit well xi jinping went to davos in 2017 at
1:09:40
a time when everybody was tearing their hair out over donald trump and he was fated as an apostle of globalization and
1:09:47
good management and responsible governance about climate change and so on and at the same time he was dismantling
1:09:54
many of the things that had been put in place in china that facilitated trade and
1:10:00
globalization they have shifted strategy explicitly to what they call dual circulation and they have rediscovered
1:10:08
something i talk about in the book was 2008 to the pivotal point of the successful olympics in china and the
1:10:15
financial crisis in the west the chinese economy is huge it can function
1:10:21
by itself demand and is such that with investment and state direction they
1:10:28
can keep the boat afloat and that's something that was lost on us we
1:10:33
a lot of western policy makers thought well they depend on exports and so they're going to depend on us they don't
1:10:38
depend on exports exports are good and they have to have them but they could go
1:10:44
back to a more inward-looking economy on their own terms
1:10:50
without suffering sufficient enormous damage to growth i mean they've been rapacious in trying to um hoover up
1:10:58
resources to allow them to um you know uh uh well have they been more rapacious
1:11:04
than western powers were in the past i don't know we don't want to get into what about ism
1:11:09
you know they have a case and what we should be doing is making our case more forcefully
1:11:15
and instead of just rolling over and saying nice things to them you know you push back and you say yes you make these
1:11:21
points they make a very good point about the climate the industrialized democracies were the principal beneficiaries of of industrialization
1:11:29
and and the wealth created by it and now they say they're being asked to pay for it okay
1:11:34
legitimate argument let's hear the arguments against it so let's let's talk about now um the the
1:11:41
disappeared um well which of the many exactly um the
1:11:48
most recent being well that we know of uh most famously the tennis player yeah uh well um
1:11:55
i fear for the tennis player uh we've seen these staged uh
1:12:01
appearances by her let me sketch a
1:12:07
quick outline of why i think this is quite serious the man against whom she has made
1:12:12
allegations is an extremely senior politician he was very close to xi jinping's father
1:12:19
he worked for xi jinping's father in southern china when he was a a young official
1:12:25
he rose up and he was elevated as xi jinping came to power he's family
1:12:31
so he is close to the leader and the clique around him
1:12:36
they are not going to jettison this guy so we don't know why she was bold enough to
1:12:43
make those allegations what we do see is the chinese state
1:12:49
resorting to its usual playbook and i would predict that they will be dragged
1:12:54
kicking and screaming bit by bit and scene by scene to do the minimum
1:13:00
which will allow the international olympic committee shamefully to go ahead with their
1:13:05
commitments and after the chinese have had a successful olympics they will then punish this young lady and her family
1:13:13
there's a way to test it the australian open tennis is in january
1:13:20
she should be invited let them all come and let her talk then and let her play if necessary
1:13:27
um we have a question from um speaking of the disappeared um
1:13:32
i was wondering if somebody were going to raise this um this is from somebody online they're they're a long way from
1:13:38
hong kong but we cannot ignore the treatment of the uyghurs um what happens next what do we learn
1:13:46
from from the situation in the chinese treatment of the uyghurs
1:13:52
uh well we'll keep the old hack stories for afterwards but i i
1:13:58
went around xinjiang four times from sunday times over a period of
1:14:03
15 years it was tough you know it was a hard semi-colonialist
1:14:09
regime it was exceptionally racist and
1:14:15
there was a sort of de facto discrimination that in many other societies would be labeled as such
1:14:22
the uyghurs really do not deserve what has happened to them
1:14:29
what i find very troubling is that what is happening now is on an
1:14:36
organized scale and a systematic scale that we haven't seen before it
1:14:43
wasn't like this even 10 years ago we went to uh
1:14:48
uramucci and there had been riots that had been terrorism against ethnic chinese uh
1:14:56
there'd been violence on both sides uh but it was it was not organized i mean we were able to through the
1:15:02
snow to the muslim cemetery and count the fresh graves without being interfered with i mean you couldn't
1:15:08
possibly do that now so you've got this very troubling
1:15:14
systematic mass incarceration and what i take seriously
1:15:19
is somebody sober and level-headed like anthony blinken the secretary of state
1:15:26
going before congress and saying yes we believe these things are happening
1:15:32
so if he says that let's face it there's no diplomatic upside in being nasty to
1:15:37
china about xinjiang what's in it for the united states or anybody else i believe they know more than they're
1:15:43
saying and i think it's it's it's really worrying because
1:15:49
if grave crimes are being committed then the rest of the world will have no
1:15:54
choice but but to react to them well i believe we're going to hear from a a few weakers about this there's at
1:16:00
least one book coming out by um by owie who you know kind of give us testimony i mean what they've been doing
1:16:06
you know forced sterilization and you know et cetera yeah well these are crimes against humanity under the rome
1:16:12
statute i mean you could argue about the term genocide but there's no question that the rome statute establishes forced
1:16:18
civilization as a crime against humanity that's just one and then there's plenty more coming afterwards
1:16:25
do we have any more questions about the late young lady in green
1:16:31
and then okay thank you um so i think you may have answered it earlier just briefly when we
1:16:36
talked about so i work in corporate finance and we have been astonished at the fact that
1:16:43
sorry the fact that recently uh the china has decided to ban private education it's taken a hit on the stock
1:16:50
market it's really it doesn't seem to care about what the impact that it's had on banning a
1:16:57
lot of private enterprise or making it more difficult and i suppose that's very difficult for
1:17:02
a western mindset to understand as to why they would take such an extreme react to generate such an extreme
1:17:08
reaction such a negative thing but you said obviously that china had is self-reliant and so maybe that's why
1:17:15
they see it as as not a problem and then my second question was regarding the one child policy um it seems that that's
1:17:22
been proven to be a failure that the the birth rate has is decreased to such a level now that
1:17:29
they will have a big problem when people come to pensionable age um
1:17:34
what's your opinion on that i just saw today that the the latest statistics were uh the fertility
1:17:40
statistics in china were just out there's been a sharp drop in births uh
1:17:46
dropping marriages as well the fertility rate was calculated at 1.3
1:17:52
and the replacement rate is 2.1 so china is looking at long medium to long-term aging society
1:17:59
the one child policy was cruel and capricious and and awful
1:18:05
they haven't walked back from it without apology of course uh but it actually it's an example of
1:18:12
the other things you're talking about this is an authoritarian government it does what it wants and it has got a lot
1:18:19
better at doing it i would have said 20 years ago that going into china and working and
1:18:24
covering stories was a bit like dealing with the ottoman empire that it was cruel but it was ramshackle and it
1:18:30
didn't work very well well now it works very well indeed and they've got very good at technology and surveillance and
1:18:37
tying all the knots together and if they want to shut down an industry they can do it so anyone
1:18:44
working in china investing in china doing business in china absolutely we should do all those things
1:18:50
but you need to have your eyes open alan
1:18:57
um this is sort of like a final question um michael you've um uh my name's alan
1:19:03
phelps you've worked for reuters with hourly deadlines independent daily deadlines and then the sunday times
1:19:10
living in fear of friday has it been um working uh on a project which it lasts
1:19:16
for four years uh it's been great and i recommend it
1:19:22
i i don't regret leaving the news cycle at all it's been liberating i wanted to
1:19:27
do it for a long time i enjoyed the research more than the writing
1:19:33
just to be able to go and spend weeks in the archives in cambridge and
1:19:39
go to hong kong and interview people at length and sit down with david wilson the
1:19:46
second the second last governor and have the time to go into things you just can't do
1:19:52
in the news business and then time to think about it and uh very graciously a publisher who was bold enough to publish
1:19:59
a book of this length so yeah i want to recommend it to any recovering journalists in the audience
1:20:07
honestly i think any uh only a seasoned journalist and with all you know that you know
1:20:12
about hong kong and china you know even though you took four years to me as an
1:20:18
editor a former editor and an agent now i think that that's an incredibly short amount of time that i know that you were
1:20:23
helped with you know with your research and also that you know you were informed as i said by your previous life as a
1:20:29
foreign correspondent but um i think everything that you know in your career has led up to to this book
1:20:36
and and only seasoned journalists could produce a book that would take anybody else 20 years to write and and make it
1:20:44
happen in four years so brilliantly um you know deserves as i said the pulitzer well i i borrowed a tip from the late
1:20:51
robert fisk which was i never threw away a notebook so i was able to pull out from the boxes
1:20:57
all my notes from 20 odd years ago and transcripts of interviews and things like that so it wasn't
1:21:03
quite as intense as that but yeah thank you so i think i think we're going to wrap
1:21:08
up here um because i know we want you to buy books there at the back and michael will um sign copies for
1:21:15
you and chat with you a bit more i cannot recommend this book highly enough really as i said it reads like you know
1:21:21
reads like a thriller but you know you learn so much almost you know as an aside about china modern china and and
1:21:27
hong kong as well and so thank you everybody everybody for joining us thank you michael thank you to the frontline
1:21:33
club well we know yay let's drink and eat
1:21:47
you
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