City on the Edge: Hong Kong under Chinese rule | LSE IDEAS

so welcome um to this lsc ideas um book launch for professor herrer's book and i'd like to start first by introducing myself i'm professor chris hughes uh professor emeritus in the international relations department here at the lsc and i'm really grateful to lsc ideas for organizing this on the 25th anniversary of the transfer of hong kong to china and whatever your feelings about that transfer and what's happened since and especially last few years and of course most of us have very strong feelings about it but we can all benefit from cool headed objective academic analysis and discussion and the best place to start is definitely professor holm's new book here it is city on the edge hong kong under chinese rule and it's the best place to start but i think probably also the best place to finish because it covers just so much and i won't say any more about it because we've got plenty of time to discuss it and best of all we have professor her himself to present his book to us in person and professor herr is professor in political economy at johns hopkins university he's written very widely on hong kong and mainland china covering a huge range of politics and economics um i won't say more about him because you can see the details on the website and i want to leave as much time as possible for the presentations and discussions we're also lucky to have two excellent discussions with us today the first is tanya branigan and all of us who have followed china over the past few decades will have followed her intrepid reporting from china during seven years as china's correspondent for the guardian as a china correspondent for the guardian and now she's a leader writer for the guardian and i must say they've got some quite good coverage of hong kong in the guardian today so take a look at that too and the other discussion is dr jiang piu who is the director of the center of taiwan studies at sowes and if you're not familiar with the centre of taiwan's studies please do get familiar with it it's an incredibly lively successful i think the only really dedicated center for taiwan studies in the world and hopefully one day we'll have a hong kong center at center for hong kong studies as well somewhere in this country um but professor dr jang is an expert on identity politics nation building cultural politics and theater and so she of course is also well-versed to discuss uh many of the issues in professor hurst book so i won't say any more because i'd like to hand over now to professor herr and he's going to speak for about 15 minutes then the discussants will speak for about seven minutes each which will leave us about half an hour for q and a so you can put questions on the zoom system and we can monitor them as they come in and we'll come back to those after the presentation and the discussion so so uh over to you professor her and thank you very much and welcome to lsc and lsd ideas thank you very much chris and uh thank you very much and lse for organizing this event and i have a lot of uh thank to give definitely that thanks uh cambridge university press and uh for publishing the book and and many of my academic companions uh in and outside hong kong work on hong kong that i benefit from and i cite in the book uh so uh summarizing the book in 15 minutes uh is is a challenge but i try my best to give a kind of a teaser if you haven't read the book yet um so the the um the core idea of the book is to um to try to explain then how and why we get to the uprising in 2019 and and actually that uh when i started writing a book in uh 4 2019 um the national security law uh was not there and then it happened right when i'm writing the book so i also it to to include how how come beijing react to the uprising uh in such a way uh and to put it in a real long historical perspective and for those of you who read the book you know that the book started in the year 1197 which is exactly 800 years before the sovereignty hanover in 1997 what i see is that hong kong has been a vibrant place uh for millennia if not even longer sitting on uh the fault line in between two tectonic plates that is one is the land continental powers which is the different forms of chinese empire from the song empire main chain empire now the reviving chinese empire in the 21st century and the maritime world so 1197 is official uprising against the southern song dynasty and so it uh run against the myth that went against two myths one myth is that before the british came to hong kong hong kong has laughing it's a bearing rock but actually it's not the case uh there's a lot of thing going on um comers uh resistance and and repressions and a lot of action going on before the british came uh and and uh the post 1842 and post 1997 hong kong is basically the continuation of this long very long history and and as uh places sitting on geological fault line um uh usually um encounter recurrent turmoil or earthquake or volcanic eruption but at the same time because of this uh instability that these places are sitting on front line also enjoy fertile soil and agricultural productivity and very lively uh economic activities like in indonesia and japan and many uh hawaii many places that's sitting on the geological front line so i i like to use this metaphor that hong kong is sitting on this geopolitical thought line between tectonic plates on the one hand there's the recurrent instability and turmoil but at the same time this kind of uh in-betweeness characters of hong kong give hong kong the kind of fertile uh cultural and economic uh social soils for a lot of things to happen um my argument is that it's partly pessimistic apparently optimistic in the long run that because that the national security law is not going to be the end of this story uh if we take a longer view on the one hand we see that the election security law is not something ad hoc reaction to the uprising many people now say that with this the radical confrontational protest in 2019 beijing has no choice but to resort to this national security law to crack down on hong kong but if you compare hong kong with macau uh where there were not many protests at all uh if any and and let along this kind of a radical confrontational protest that they still establish full control of macau and wipe out the um the civil society and public sphere free public sphere there which is very small to start with so this national security law style crackdown is has been in the book since the beginning of sovereignty handover they're just waiting for the opportunity to to strike or find excuse the trike and and so uh i am arguing against the view that this kind of election security law is just like uh ad-hoc reaction to the uprising uh for that matter that i compared beijing policy toward hong kong with beijing policy toward tibet in the 1950s which is uh kind of forgotten in recent discussions but in the 1980s i take up tang sao ping and a lot of key chinese leader i actually talked a lot about tibet when they explained the one country to system uh of course in the 1980s that uh beijing uh has been uh we established some kind of communication with dalai lama it seems that dang sao pain is on the way to be optimistically uh get dalai lama back to tibet and and to re-establish some kind of openness in tibet and it didn't end up very well as in the late 1950s that tibet fed up in resistance and uprising again and and the rest is history but in the 1980s that beijing is actually quite open about it to talk about that we did tried um one country to system before in 1950s tibet but we if we we really look at the history of tibet you see actually a lot of parallels that uh in 1951 there is this 17-point agreement um between beijing and the dalai lama government to allow the tibetan elite to continue governing the place so far as they accept chinese sovereignty uh but it is really a kind of a tactic to buy time for beijing to get ready for establishing direct rule um uh when it is not yet ready uh it maintains this kind of a one country two system structure though it was not blamed so um and in the middle that they established these parallel power power structures um parallel with the animal government until the conflict escalated and there was an uprising in 1959 actually it is also it is uh 60 years before the 2019 uprising in hong kong and then it was a fail uprising and then directly was established um so it is a lot of parallel and the playbook is quite similar that uh beijing has been uh trying to incorporate these places that they were a lot confident to establish direct rule to start with and then they use this one can treat the system as a tactic to buy time when they are ready they strike and then establish direct rule and also in many the chinese textbook actually i cited in my book it is very interesting that um they explicitly talk about this uh parallel between this ccp strategy to govern the frontier with the qiang dynasty native chieftain system which is uh when the ching empire expands into a little place with this ethnic non-han minority that they first establish indirect rule allow the local elite to maintain their customs maintain their way of life maintain their power uh but at the same time they send in han migrant to dilute the local population and and and when they are ready militarily and administratively they strike and then uh get rid of the native chieftain and establish direct rule and then in the in the in many chinese plc textbooks about minorities governance they they consciously and explicitly talk about this parallel and then in in many of these textbooks in one that i cite published by the guitar roman press these kind of nationalities governance discussion is about the male area the yale area and in the end that they talk about one country to system talk about hong kong and macau and even taiwan so it showed that beijing has been consciously put this hong kong question and also macau and taiwan question in the framework of this empire's governance of minorities areas and so this this national security is no surprise in this historical perspective but um as i said that it is not the end of hong kong or even the end of the resistance of hong kong as you look at the case of tibet and xinjiang this kind of a local uh oppositional identities uh against the big galatian state or bigger empire once it formed it is very very uh i would say sticky or a lot the persistence and and and it will stay on and uh tibet direct was established in 1959 and it was not as we see now i know now there is not the end of the resistance uh and and the resistance still just turned underground in the area and then far up into open conflict at times over the years and of course a huge tibetan diasporic community is developing uh and and it's becoming more more and more vibrant of course that is the religious factors that is a factor but you look at the case of xinjiang the uyghurs people is the same and even not far away or back in history that after the kmt's suppression of the taiwan uprising in 1947 that the taiwan opposition as we now know after the democratization and a lot of people going back to history and in the 50s and 60s and 70s in the right era there's a lot of study groups and a lot of underground thing going on it's just late uh stay low and when the time comes that they emerge again and at the same time it is kind of implicitly or explicitly connected to the overseas diaspora of taiwanese as well and the same happened after the soviet crackdown of the hungarian uprising and the prank of spain spring or prague in in the 68 so if we take a really long long term history um uh we really can be optimistic that this resistance and identities uh of hong kong and and the young for freedom and liberty uh will will will stay on uh uh we just need to be patient and we just need to be carefully uh looking for signs and watching and and people need to adjust to a little mode of operation or existence in a more subtle and underground way rather than this kind of open street protest at the same time the last point i want to talk about is that another part of the book that is uh the first two substantive chapter of the book is heavy on financial economic i try to point out that why beijing worry about the 2019 uprising and what is so different between the 2019 uprising and the early one that for example the 2014 occupy is that in 20 in 2019 it's not only the radical young people on the streets and and there are enough signs pointing to the fact that there is a lot of elite this uh uh uh content discontent elite discontent among the local hong kong chinese business who are unhappy with the magnetization of the business in hong kong and the deterioration of the business monopoly um so much so that that that beijing need to revamp the legislative council's uh election after the election note uh security law and even the functional constituencies the business sector's influence in the legislative council has been reduced and and so it is this elite discontent and of course they fall in line again under the national security law it's going to stay on in a kind of more subtle way that beijing is not going to be uh very very free of anxiety about their loyalty uh and and beijing will take no chance and it is why that in the latest um uh chief executive uh so-called election that only one candidates is available and then in the past that they at least that they tried to put a kind of a facade of establishment uh uh their candidates competition among themselves uh but this time they take low chance and didn't allow even that and and the chief executive is uh johnny is with a security heavy police security background which is not normal even from a perspective of uh ccp picking provisional provincial leader or city leader that they usually they will pick somebody with a civilian background to do this job and with somebody with a heavy security police background is quite normal and it shows beijing is still very anxious about keeping hong kong under control so to conclude that uh my book conclusion is really kind of open-ended the only definite thing is that story about hong kong the vibrancy and the hong kong resistance is going to continue it's going to stay on then we just need to take a longer will if we only focus on the short term that really it is very depressing it is very pessimistic but if we take it the longer term we really can't see that thing will continue to unfold and and there is still a lot waiting for us thank you thank you and look forward to everyone's comments and questions thank you very much indeed professor her um uh tanya will you go next is that okay yep absolutely fine thank you um so it's always a little bit daunting as a non-academic speaker in a room even a virtual one of academics um i'm very conscious that we're we're always the dilettants but perhaps what we can do is help to put things uh to put academic works into a slightly broader perspective i found this book extremely illuminating and thought-provoking and of course particularly reading it now at a moment where we've seen 2047 essentially arrive 25 26 years ahead of schedule um what's striking is that as we have seen academic journalistic civil society space sort of crushed in hong kong is that we're also seeing a flourishing of hong kong identity and a celebration an embracing of that outside hong kong itself as it becomes less and less possible there it seems to thrive elsewhere with this new imperative really to excavate and to preserve hong kong's culture and spirit and identity that sense of what it was what it is and what it could be perhaps one day so i think for example um of some of the documentaries that we have coming out uh which will be on show in london as elsewhere um or karen lund's memoir impossible city and louisa lim's wonderfully reported book indelible city um they're obviously much more mainstream works and yet i thought lim's book in particular had a locked in common with professor hung's work they're um very engaged books that both i think um address that question of how to be um an independent um observer while still feeling very much engaged in the subject um above all i think they remind us that perhaps we never really saw hong kong even when we thought we did it that we've never really understood it in its own terms uh and in particular there's been a tendency to address the last sort of 100 200 years of its history rather than the centuries as professor hung says that sort of stretch back and which perhaps offer really a better understanding of what the place is um i think inevitably um very understandably the focus has been on china's relationship with hong kong and yet to understand that we also really need to understand the history that's been obscured by the british view and assumptions and um the british rhetoric really when it comes to hong kong as professor hung said this idea of a barren rock when in fact it's very much a liminal place of rebels and outcasts and i think the other sort of thing that comes through all of these works um is that sense of hope the idea that they're not just sort of eulogies um or sort of historical records uh as professor hung says towards the conclusion of the books uh reports of hong kong's death are greatly exaggerated and of course they have been made many times before in the past so where i think the work sort of distinguishes is itself is firstly of course in its academic depth depth of its research as you would expect but also in its breadth in the way it seeks to place hong kong in the context of broader economic and geopolitical shifts as it says underlying the 2019 movement is a major tectonic shift in local society and in the global political economy and without regarding those aspects we can't really hope to understand what has happened um and so whilst uh recognizing and dissecting the unique circumstances and forces at play in hong kong what i also found really helpful was the way that it looked at the way that beijing regards hong kong within that context of broader territorial questions tibet xinjiang as as you've just discussed one day of course taiwan and it's striking to me of how many protesters at the height of the 2019 movement themselves draw drew parallels uh with xinjiang and saw that as being a kind of future for them a kind of parallel for all the many uh huge differences they they saw something to identify with um in what has happened there secondly um i found it very helpful in its sort of broad discussion of the relationship between nation states and cities particularly in a globalized economy where cities have come to play a much more powerful role in some ways and yet are sort of battling these sort of geopolitical forces um and also i think above all the sort of tension between the party's need for um hong kong as a sort of liminal entity with this different economy and legal situation and international status but also the need to politically control it and that of course is something that has become evident as part of a move towards increasing repression we see a party state which has sought to expand and tighten its control um domestically and is increasingly suspicious of and hostile to outside influence and it seems that from for beijing liminality has really tipped from being something which is potentially useful to being something that is inherently perhaps dangerous and threatening and of course a party state which also feels emboldened to be forceful thanks to the decline and chaos it witnesses in the west uh the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of western uh foreign policy and so forth and as all these forces play out um hong kong is really caught within them caught within these perils and these possibilities and i thought perhaps the way that professor hung summed up most beautifully is when he said it's a place that's always on the edge of being annihilated and on the edge of breaking free thank you thank you very much tanya and uh so um be you professor thank you okay fantastic thank you very much okay i'm honored and delighted to be invited to this panel among all these really hong kong experts um i feel a bit of impostor syndrome creeping in so when lucas contacted me and asked me to join i was not really sure that how i could contribute to this discussion however he persuaded me that i could approach this uh from a company's perspective and i'm glad that i did and thank you very much for introducing me to this beautifully written book i have to admit um my idea about hong kong were very basic before reading this book i understand it's important as one of the world's uh financial centers and see it as a place that has a fantastic cultural mix of the east and west um or simply if i may say so a popular shopping destination uh by reading this book i have learned so much about hong kong from its colonial past the precarious part uh present and its difficulties ahead and after finishing the book and i told my colleagues that i was so inspired by the writing style so fluid that uh i would endeavor i said i i would endeavor in the future to write much more fluid less boring clinical academic pieces because it's really you can see the passion of this book as well it's a kite almost like a love letter to his own hometown well at least for me i can see that thank you very much uh professor hong and putting my taiwanese hat on in the new uh in the next uh few minutes i will try to tease out some basic uh argument i i think you have already mentioned quite a lot so i would really float uh reflect on the lessons uh learn from hong kong's experience and ask a few questions really is the question i really more interested to put forward so the book like professor hong said is organized into three parts they actually inter work together into weaving into this kind of different kind of elements about the city uh and also about the people and forming a really powerful discourse about this place they all point to the resilience and uniqueness of hong kong in other words the book not only provides a deep reading of the city the people and its past struggles but also in many ways shows a tender affection for and pays tribute to hong kong so for me the biggest takeaway from reading this book is the analysis of the one country to systems model i found this part most intriguing and extremely useful uh for me um because it's quite uh fascinating to think about how beijing deal with a hong kong and tibet of course so it's a sobering read to learn about the traumatic experience in tibet the seemingly familiar repeat in hong kong and of course the potential threat to taiwan so this book has not only presented a detailed account of the policy implementation i think it's more important to look at how the analysis offered this kind of fascinating uh uh uh inside know-how into beijing's tactics so of course the ccp today is not the same as the ccp and the mao hong kong is not tibet and their local challenges are very different however the implementation of this model in tibet and hong kong follows the same trajectory by offering seemingly preferential treatments to buy time gradually replacing the local elite with beijing supporters and eventually shifting the local autonomy to central control by re-interpreting the concept of one one country two systems the tactic remind me of the so-called preferential treatments that beijing offered to taiwanese businesses especially during the mayan period also it reminds me of the uh re formulation of the one china respective interpretation to bring in the attempt to bring taiwan into its orbit so it is clear if tawa is not vigilant in asserting its sovereignty and safeguarding its autonomy the island might easily fall into the similar track so this book gives us much for thought in some ways the book itself is an embodiment i would say of hong kong resistance it creates a more constructive discourse about hong kong's ability to survive external rigors and challenges the beijing land narrative of hong kong as a chinese subordinate with declining significance and i think this is really amazing achievement by reaching out not just academic circle but also to a general public so in the last decade hong kong has become increasingly relevant to the taiwanese sharing a similar anti-beijing sentiment the majority of taiwanese really supported support hong kong's struggle for democracy the banner with the slogan hong kong today taiwan tomorrow can be found everywhere in taiwan especially in social movements one of my hong kong students told me that he observed a lot of support for hong kong in taiwan however the support uh i wonder whether he's actually in the audience uh but the support remained abstract he said and that means without substance as you can imagine this is because taipei is caught between a rock and a hard place and has to remain ambiguous under the shadow of the chinese threat even so for the majority taiwanese today especially among the younger generation hong kong has become a symbol of resistance against the authoritarian rule although tawa is only remotely referred to in the book the development in hong kong has growing implications for and connections to taiwan's future therefore hong kong issues occupies a special place in the mind of the taiwanese and the hong kongers are regarded as a kind of comrades in arms i would i don't know how much time i've got left i got two questions if i may um oh one question okay um that's about taiwan first i will try to be quick so i'm slightly surprised to find the absence of taiwan in the book and amer asked why that's the case and also what lessons you think taiwan can learn from hong kong's beijing experience if i have more time later i will have plenty of questions thank you very much thank you thank you very much uh bu and um uh thank you also tanya um i mean there are a number of questions that you might want to come back to professor her but i i i think i'd like to guide you a bit from what focusing on one of the things that that professor jang raised which is the political economy side of this which i found to be so important so good in your book and especially the business community in her business elite in hong kong because we all look it's a lot of work on the civil society movement but this business elite is kind of shady and you've shed so much light on that and i think when professor zhang mentioned you know the the issue of taiwan and the um sunflower movement there which was against the trading services agreement and what would have happened if that had gone ahead that agreement on allowing investment in services from the prc into taiwan um surely there's a lot can be learned from the hong kong example but also what really interested me was um what you said about the whole indigenous hong kong business community and how they sided with beijing initially and did quite well out of that but then they got driven out their interests were driven up by this influx from mainland china and then they actually became quite supportive of the civil society movement in 2019 and i just wonder where that's leading now um whether those people are just going to leave hong kong or whether they're going to be a substantial force in this key issue of hong kong's economic situation as the link between china and the world and maybe also so we can let the audience get a saying here so there's a question there i think for you but uh it links in also with the first question that came up which was from the audience do you think independence of hong kong from china in quotation marks is the only answer for hong kong democracy do you think there is any chance for hong kong independence now you may want to say what your own view is but i think more important is what your book says about that relationship between democracy and independence and how the civil society movement has developed in hong kong over since 1997 and that key issue of how do they deal with you know does a democratic hong kong have to be independent or not i mean there are so many interesting things in your book where you look at how they've grappled with this problem of trying to advocate democracy while maybe not advocating independence but then other people saying no we have to have independence so um maybe you'd like to respond to a few of those pick and choose yeah first uh thank you very much for all of your comments and and uh tania professor zhang and chris that uh that i have been following your works i've been admiring your works for a long time so it is really my honor to to to have your comments and and kind words about my books and then to respond to a few of the issues that um come up yes that um um dirt uh hong kong and tibet comparison and hong kong taiwan comparisons uh they are comparable but not the same that we also need to point out the key differences and for example um though beijing consciously used tibet playbook to establish its governance in hong kong and then to to to slowly shift hong kong from in direct route to a direct rule model but one key difference that's uh many of you already point out is that this hong kong financial center uh role that tibet didn't have in in the lighting back in the 1950s in the 1950s it is uh the whole consideration is geopolitical and political and uh in hong kong there is this financial economic consideration that we can already already see the limit of the crackdown in the 2000 in the two years after the national security law in 2021 and and now in 2022 that for example it's very interesting that um after this international response to the electional security law by all these sanctions against hong kong and chinese officials and entities in hong kong and the chinese government also enact a kind of anti-foreign sanction law to basically to ban companies having operation in china to abide by the sanction rules in foreign countries primarily the u.s and in last year that this has a lot of talk uh tough talk from chinese officials and chinese media about to extend this anti-foreign sanction law to hong kong it seems at many points that it is inevitable that it will be applied to hong kong but if it applies to hong kong it will give all business in hong kong including chinese species with global exposure a difficult time because they have to make an impossible choice between abiding by u.s sanctions for example and abiding by chinese law they cannot do both so they have to choose whether you are with the us or with china and then in the end of uh after after it became the long reality that there is a report actually saying that many hong kong business companies including major chinese banks are lobbying uh against the application of the anti-foreign sanctions north of hong kong and then in the end that uh in the last minutes really in the last minute in this last summer 2021 the beijing declared that they are suspending the discussion of applying the anti-foreign sanction north of hong kong apparently yielding to the pressure of the business sector's lobbying so it is the the interesting thing that on the one hand uh mainland really the beijing really suspect that there's some elite in discontent behind the 2019 uprising um and and the foreign financial sectors and foreign financial firms are uh at least they are sympathetic with the protesters so they are going to be cracked down and you read in the news a lot about the hsbc beijing is very unhappy about it in in in in its role in in the indictment of uh joe and every other cases but states still uh uh cannot go in full force in in wiping out the space for this financial autonomy of hong kong and then there's plenty of other examples the kobe control measure that they they didn't go as far as like shanghai that is a whole city-wide lockdown it is really much in the air earlier in the year that uh in the air when the search of covet but in the end that they they didn't do it against uh again because uh of the financial sector lobbying and also uh they even shortened the quarantine period for the overseas travelers um so it at the height of the 2019 protest and uh and after national security law there's a lot of talk about hong kong becoming a leo xinjiang uh that the same kind of uh surveillance and control is going to be in place but in the end that it is shanghai that actually that the new york times has an interesting article called it uh is shanghai xinjiang so they they in the end that shanghai is supposed to be a rifle financial center of hong kong uh uh in the end the subject to this kind of draconian control and hong kong seems to have a been spared out of it so you see this beijing dilemma about cracking down hong kong and but at the same time they're still hesitant to go too far to wipe out the remaining autonomous space at least for the financial sector so this kind of uh hong kong is also financial center is still kind of a thing that china or beijing leaders do not know how to get around because hong kong has its own currency and it's his own custom is a independent custom territory so it is a kind of a um constraint on on beijing and and we we will see a lot of this kind of a back and forth in the years to come the next thing to watch is the internet whether they shut down hong kong internet uh disconnected from facebook twitter youtube and everything on google just like in mainland china it's not yet um so this kind of a financial role of hong kong is still beijing action on hong kong and of course in terms of taiwan that i have more systematic reference to taiwan uh with rebecca the 1950s and 1960s when when mao jadong is floating the one country two system proposal to zhang kaiser but didn't talk a lot about taiwan thereafter and here and there but i should have talked more about if i have more space in the book but actually it's very interesting to look at how the hong kong local identity as i said the hong kong local identity grow in the 1970s as a like cultural identity but it is level of political identity and and political activism even the opposition there they are strongly chinese nationalists uh uh patriotic uh if you may but uh in after 2000's that this this kind of a local political identity start to develop and it is definitely has something to do with the fact that taiwan shifted to a dpp government in the early 2000s and and all these kind of taiwan nationalist discourse start to be taken look in hong kong and i cite um in the kind of ad hoc manner about this kind of a local community protests in the early 2000s they adopt a lot of slogans and and discourse uh from taiwan uh for example to look at hong kong as a kind of a community of the same fate and meng gong and and and it is definitely uh uh come from taiwan and also this kind of a repertoires of protests and and and localist uh identities and political discourse so there's a lot of resonation that definitely taiwan from the uh shift from kmt to dpp rule on the transverse band and later thai england and then the sunflower definitely has a lot to do with um uh incubating the hong kong local identity as a political identity even that you look at the networks of people that uh there's a lot of interchange of activists uh between the taiwan social movement and hong kong social movement so there's a lot uh and a little book waiting to be written and of course that uh already the some taiwan scholar already wrote about the connection between the sunflower movement and the occupy movement in 2014 but definitely there's a lot more uh waiting to be to be to be explored and to the last uh questions about this uh whether independence and democracy go hand in hand uh it is very difficult to predict what is going to happen in the next 10 20 years it all depend on the political development of china uh definitely that one thing that we know for sure which is inevitable is that xi jinping cannot live forever uh that the situation of that uh uh uh there's argument about whether xi jinping is uh upholding this institutionalization of a for ten rule or undoing it and in some way that he's undoing in the sense that and after thanksgiving the secession of leaders are institutionalized and there's a stability of policy and and and uh and everything else so the xi jinping making himself a lifelong uh leaders at uh turning china into a kind of a some some regime ruled by a lifelong dictator has uh has this uh strength uh in terms of upholding the stability of the regime but also it uh instilled new risk because whenever you have this lifelong dictator that usually when the lifelong dictator died and it created kind of a succession crisis unless that he'd make his son or daughter or whatever that to be the successor become a dynasty otherwise then it could be instability so when what the what can come out from this instability when he suddenly failed or died and things like that so it is very unpredictable so it all depends on what um china will become in in 10 20 years times but in terms of the future of hong kong that i won't want to predict whether that it will be fully annihilated become one with it ordinary chinese city or become independent or actually there's a possibility always that if they really couldn't solve the problem of maintaining china at uh hong kong as also financial center uh and and it's so important because they want to internationalize the views of the roman people at the same time they don't want to make ramen be fully convertible and open up trying to find them so border and then the solution is to use hong kong and then if they couldn't solve this problem that they i have it's like a slight lie not on not hope actually but this is like a possibility that they can go back to this one country two system in this original form uh they they they maintain the space for that uh and and and and but again that it all um depends and just like when the british empire dissolved in the mid of the 20th century there's a a lot of forms of continuous sovereignty in in folkland and jupater and there's some place that becomes self-governing but still under the the commonwealth or under the the the rule of the british monarch nominally and there's some for independence so even in this kind of uh 19th 20th century the great empire when they end that there's different forms of independence or autonomies or staying in the empire so there's a lot of possibility and and there's a lot of different paths possible so i don't want to make any prediction but uh when we look back in 50 years we will definitely see that actually this uh the situation is much more fluid than we see it today it seems like everything is that everything is set but actually it's not thank you thank you professor and we've got quite a few questions now and a lot of them are on similar things that you kind of covered on the identity and sauna but there are a couple which are on the broader geopolitics which you do cover in your book too so i think maybe we can address those because we've only got about 10 minutes left so we'll address those first and one of them is i'll read it out professor her rightly referred to parallels between the prc treatment of tibet in the 50s and hong kong in the recent past it's important not to forget tibet and so on but my question is after tibet we saw hong kong's freedoms being crushed and next on prc's target is taiwan do you think that prc will remain satisfied after this or do you see them getting more and more aggressive in the wake of their increasing military economic might and the other question which is similar is how do you think the situation with ukraine and russia's aggression affects the china approach to hong kong and taiwan so you know where is china going after hong kong and taiwan essentially yeah definitely it is very interesting and and some what troubling situation there that uh i have been talking to the people in the media asking me what uh the implication of hong kong crackdown to taiwan again and again over the years and the the sad answer is that in the beginning and the latin late 1990s and early 2000s and beijing when it deal with hong kong they really have taiwan in mind to see hong kong its demonstration effect to the people in taiwan to make them eventually accept one country to system of some kind but over the years i think beijing is not totally out of touch they know that their identity in taiwan opposition in taiwan is very strong and and also the national security risks from the view of beijing in hong kong so grave that when they do the crackdown of national security law in 2019 they really don't bother the thing about taiwan implication anymore and and and they uh if not totally but mostly i think they already give up hope of using hong kong as a kind of example to show the taiwan and they are two the two more and more kind of uh who has the muscles and who will win in the end rather than winning heart and mind and we just uh they they just moving toward more and more the military or at least quasi-military solution to taiwan not necessarily a full-scale invasion but military intimate intimidation that is the sign sowing as as as as as um that the examples of uh putin's uh will on ukraine shows that that really military option uh is a kind of a pathway forward that beijing definitely will observe very carefully um what is happening in in ukraine in the beginning it seems like uh putin is is uh getting a lot of resistance and there's a unification among the world really against this kind of aggression but it all depends on how it plays out in the end in the long run maybe the international solidarity supporting ukraine ukraine might dissolve or at least among europeans and maybe they will stay on that we can't tell for sure right now and uh maybe in the end the ukraine will survive and prevail maybe a lot and so the the the the kind of uh um end game of ukraine which is going to be long grinding uh is going to shape xi jinping's calculation of course that the the good news is that invading taiwan from beijing is much more difficult uh in comparison to to put in invading ukraine that is separated by a land border and then and kind of the taiwan stray is much more difficult to to to get over but the other thing that uh my book talk about hong kong that has some implication a lot of indication actually to taiwan is that this kind of uh ccp infiltration into the hong kong civil society that has been going on since the 1970s to infiltrate the elite and and infiltrate the building united front with with not only the activists and then who are this illusion with colonial but also the many of the allies of the colonial governments and all those all the other elites that they have been laying the groundwork and and developing their networks and then when the time comes these people just will emerge from nowhere and and become very prominent in supporting beijing policies and and shifting opinions uh in in the civil society so this kind of infiltration work has been uh must be going on also in taiwan and in other offices society one interesting thing is that uh uh zhang xi gong that i cite a lot and many people take notice that that he is the number one very important think tank uh person in china regarding hong kong policy and he has been writing about hong kong and that his writing turned to be policy and then recently most recently he wrote a piece saying that uh beijing governors of hong kong uh is a kind of a very important laboratory or experimental ground for beijing to learn how to um how to um control global capitalism actually so it is very interesting that if the tibet playbook makes beijing know how to uh wipe our local government and incorporate the little territory establish direct rule there then hong kong that can offer the beijing is to learn how to uh ride on global campuses expect what he's talking about is this foreign companies local capital and global capital and through the laboratory of hong kong so definitely that he sri jin learned a lot from that uh and and and so that beijing control of hong kong won't end there and then people uh point out uh the taiwan is next but actually not only taiwan and you see that that uh and and zhang singh wrote about that that hong kong is a kind of liberal society with liberal civil society and some political structures and beijing working in there uh enable enable beijing to learn how to navigate and how to eventually take control of this liberal uh democratic representative institutions and and and and society and then you see that they are doing the same you like different works and and infiltrations and and activities in um many has been written about australia new zealand and other liberal societies and and so this is um the thing that the taiwan implication implication of hong kong is great but also the hong kong implication to the rest of the world the liberal democracies is very very very important as well thank you very much i think we've got time for one last question we can just squeeze in um which actually links i'd like to choose one that links in with what you've just finished on which is from um i won't read out the whole question because it's quite long but the interesting part of it is about hong kong people seem to have no problem for abandoning hong kong especially after the launch of bno visa and similar projects that so many people have left does that show that the ccp's tactics are successful i'd like to kind of add to that you know some one issue i found with the book where maybe you should address is the huge number of people that pass through hong kong you know and if you look at the population and how it's changed since early 20th century and the huge number of people have come from mainland china into hong kong despite hong kong's own identity but also that some of the people you mentioned who led the democracy movement were born in hong k in mainland china you know as children and they came to and so this is kind of looking at where people are now and the number of people who are coming we're very lucky and to have them in this country and other countries um are you optimistic about change you know this was another question in there you know um or it does just show actually that this season his strategy works you just get rid of people or is it part of a bigger sort of network that's still has some traction in hong kong i know you do address that in the book so maybe we can finish on that yeah that they they always want to get rid of people but they can never really get rid of people identity and memory is a very long lasting thing that in the short moment of weeks or months or a year that we might uh fret that the limit that is that this identities of memories is lost and people live and have a live life but it will come back and then as we can see in the case of xinjiang and tibet and have been trying to successfully establish a direct rule there for more than half a century but this identity and resistance and and and memories and just definitely stay on and uh let alone the taiwan after 1947 it seems that everything is in place and everything is stable but under the surface we only discover it after the democratic transition we know that so much is going on on the ground actually and and and the same in eastern europe and all these kind of soviet satellite states under the communist rule and definitely many people left uh just as after 1959 and there's a kind of a constant stream of people leaving tibet but this overseas department uh whether they're loyal followers of dilemma a lot or they're secular a lot that they after they go overseas uh if not immediately that they they actually discover and strengthen their identities as tibetans and and these diaspora diasporic identities can be actually even stronger than back home that you don't realize that your distinctiveness until you are in the different cultures and and and definitely that there's a lot of examples of diaspora and nationalism that uh developing all of the diaspora uh the community that end up in the nation building projects and and and the israel is one example and there's many many other examples of there so that i don't think if we take a long longer term perspective that this uh people living hong kong will lead to a dissolution of these identities and memories and resistance and there are a lot of people still in hong kong we don't see a lot of thing on the surface that there's a my my favorite um uh scene of a favorite movie the ten years uh the hong kong movie which is prophetic about uh it was made after the occupying movement in 2014 and then it talked about what hong kong would become in 10 years it became prophetic it actually that many of the predictions realized one the very first scene is that this kind of a draconian ridiculous control that you cannot say the word local and then in the end in that episode that in the end there's a secret library uh that that the kids lead adults to go into a secret library where people keep all these kind of uh forbidden things about hong kong local identity and there's a lot of people there so i think this kind of thing is going to happen that people stay in hong kong choose to stay in hong kong they remain silent uh on the surface but i'm sure that as we know for many historical examples in eastern europe and in taiwan in the right terra and everything everywhere else that this kind of a space is going to continue we just don't easily notice them but when the time comes it will fray up into more open expressions and and change and and the time will come that time i'm sure perfect if it's exactly on time and thank you very much indeed and i i there's a lot of other questions there um and we haven't got time but i can say i've read the questions and the answers are all in professor hong's book so do buy it because it really does answer those all those questions it's an amazing book there's so much in it um and it does also draw attention to the big geostrategic issues that are going on and i would say anything could happen at the moment look what happened with the end of the cold war and so on when you get these massive international changes that we're living through then it's very hard to predict what happens so the more information we have the more objective academic analysis the better is and this is the book to buy but we've run out of time now so let me say thank you very much to professor herr to tanya ranigan and jang bu for this acting as discussions this has been wonderful um and we're all going to be following events in hong kong very very carefully so thank you and i think we have to finish on that note thank you very much thank you everybody thank you

Channel: LSE IDEAS

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Id: Xx8xaa_dXrk

Length: 60min 56sec (3656 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 01 2022