Conquered into Compliance: Hong Kong signals a looming peril?
SD METRO Associate Editor Douglas Page interviewed Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. Clifford spent nearly 30 years in Hong Kong as a reporter and editor, becoming the top editor of The Standard and, later, the South China Morning Post, Hong Kong’s English-language daily newspapers. After leaving journalism, he was the executive director of the Asia Business Council in Hong Kong, which promotes economic growth in the region. He was on the board of directors of Next Digital, which published Apple Daily, a pro-democracy newspaper in Hong Kong that was raided and closed by the territory’s government in 2021. Next Digital’s CEO, Jimmy Lai, a critic of Hong Kong’s government since Beijing’s takeover of the territory, was jailed in December 2020. The Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation seeks the release of Hong Kong’s 1,800 political prisoners. Clifford recently wrote a book, entitled Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow The World: What China’s Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans To End Freedom Everywhere. This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.
SD METRO: Hong Kong and its territories associated with the former British colony consist of nearly 430 square miles and about 7.4 million people. Given its size, why should anyone in the United States and the Western world care about how Beijing rules Hong Kong?
Mark: Hong Kong (HKG) was one of the freest places in the world, both economically and, in some sense, politically for over a hundred years. As goes HKG, I worry, so goes much of the world. If Beijing imposes its will on HKG and destroys freedoms there, with no real opposition from the rest of the world, then Taiwan is next. And after that, who knows? South Korea, Japan, the Philippines are looking at China’s increasing assertiveness, aggressiveness, and willingness to try to stifle free speech.
It doesn’t end in the Pacific. I’m seeing colleagues here, Chinese and Hong Kong colleagues in the United States and in London, where we also have an office, under pressure. I have a colleague who has $130,000 bounty on her head. She’s living in the United States, where she has asylum. Her parents have been detained in HKG, and the HKG government says they’ll hunt her and others like street rats for the rest of their lives. I think there’s a pretty good reason to be concerned that what started in HKG is not going to end with HKG.
SD METRO: This $130,000 bounty is being provided by Beijing?
Mark: The HKG government. They’re seeking to arrest and prosecute 13 different overseas activists. The $130,000 bounty they’re offering in is HK$1 million for each one of them. They’re living in Australia, the U.S., and in Great Britain.
SD METRO: So, HK$13 million is what the HKG government is prepared to pay?
Mark: Yes. Their families in HKG and around the world are being harassed because they were trying to exercise their political rights. None of them have been accused of any violent crime. Several are former legislators. Beijing or its minions in HKG don’t respect freedom, even in free countries like the United States, Canada, Australia, and the U.K.
SD METRO: The people living in the United States with a bounty on their head, how do they get around without HKG operatives knocking on their door? Are they living incognito, under an alias?
Mark: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and others who’ve helped her out have let it be known to Chinese authorities and others not to mess around with her. And I think that those of the 13 who are living in the U.S. feel pretty good. I’m not sure that the people living in Great Britain and Australia feel that they’ve gotten the same kind of support from their host governments.
Editor’s Note: SD METRO asked the FBI about this and received the following statement: “We’re increasingly conducting outreach in order to raise awareness of how some countries’ governments harass and intimidate their own citizens living in the United States. This violates U.S. law and individual rights and freedoms and will not be tolerated.”
SD METRO also asked the People’s Republic of China’s Embassy in Washington for comment. While the Embassy wouldn’t confirm the bounty, spokesman Liu Pengyu sent this statement: “The destabilizing elements engage in acts that endanger national security under the pretext of democracy and human rights. The Hong Kong police issued arrest warrants for the anti-China rioters who have fled overseas in accordance with the law. This is a necessary and legitimate act that is in line with international law and customary practice.”
SD METRO: When you talk about Chinese students in the United States being coerced, what is going on?
Mark: The Beijing government is very assertive. They’ve used what they call a “united front” strategy, where a variety of different organizations, which don’t necessarily look like government organizations, to monitor students and use other students to monitor other students, sometimes with a monetary inducement but, more likely, with a promise that their careers will benefit, or their families back home will be helped or hurt if they don’t play ball.
It’s a level of control only a totalitarian government could or would exercise. They aren’t free to go to meetings and seminars, let alone to speak out or go to events.
SD METRO: How long has your organization been around and what are you trying to accomplish?
Mark: We were set up about 18 months ago. We’re focused on trying to get political prisoners out of jail in HKG. According to the Hong Kong Democracy Council which tracks this, there are about 1,800 political prisoners in HKG.
Some of them I know. I was on the board of directors of the company that published the main pro-democracy newspaper, Apple Daily. Seven of my colleagues are in jail just for practicing journalism. One of them, Jimmy Lai, who was the chairman and owned 70% of the company, is on trial for something that could see him put away for life. He is being tried under the National Security Law (NSL), which has a 100% conviction rate. He’s a 75-year-old man in solitary confinement. He’s been in jail for over three years.
A group of us who lived in HKG for the most part, chaired by the former U.S. Consul General in HKG, James Cunningham, founded this organization to try to give a voice to the HKG people at a time when the political situation in their home made it impossible. We think they’re in jail for non-indictable offenses.
We’re using every way we can to put pressure on our governments and on the HKG and Beijing governments to live up to the promises they made to the people of HKG when China took over in 1997 from Great Britain. China promised that HKG would be able to enjoy their own way of life. They’d have freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly, all the freedoms that you and I have, and then some. They were going to have universal suffrage, to elect their own mayor, their own city council. It hasn’t worked out that way. The lies the Chinese government told about HKG, and the crackdown they’ve engendered, is a tragedy. There’s a lot at stake. Taiwan is the focus of the next place we’re afraid China might move.
SD METRO: How is your group funded?
Mark: We have private donations. We don’t have any government funding.
SD METRO: What sort of impact is your organization having?
Mark: It’s hard to measure. I remind people we’d love to be out of a job, but we need to get people out of prison before we can be out of a job. And we’re not doing a very good job so far. Things are moving in the wrong direction. On the other hand, we have a tremendous amount of support in Washington and London, and we get attacked by the HKG government. I guess it’s a backhanded compliment.
SD METRO: Do you have people in HKG who can talk to the government?
Mark: Impossible. People like my colleague Frances Hui are here. She has asylum in the U.S., and the HKG government is pursuing her with its HK$1 million bounty. Most of the people we work with would be at risk of arrest in HKG, and I certainly would be afraid to go back. The company that I was on the board of, Next Digital, all the directors ended up in jail for a time. I was the only director not in custody. It’s not a very comfortable position when you have governments that want to lock you up just because they don’t like what you’re saying.
SD METRO: Can you shed some light on what HKG’s NSL means? There are stories it’s causing worry within the business community in HKG.
Mark: It’s a vague and sweeping law that came about at the end of June 2020. It essentially criminalizes dissent. People have been tried. Jimmy Lai, the newspaper owner I mentioned, is being tried on collusion with foreign forces. It’s a lengthy trial and there’s a lot of smoke. He believed in democracy and was willing to put his money where his mouth was and was practicing journalism, and they wanted to lock him up for the rest of his life.
He’s got six other colleagues who are in jail, and they’ve all pled guilty, but they’re being held hostage while he’s being tried. So that’s an example of the kinds of things that people are being thrown in jail for. Whenever the government doesn’t like you, and you’re effective, you’re a target of the NSL. Jimmy Lai’s offense seems to have been that he met with U.S. officials a few years ago, like Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, and National Security Advisor John Bolton when they were in office. Scores of people are in jail on NSL charges.
And I think what you might’ve been referring to in terms of the concern of the business community is a new kind of parallel or companion law under Article 23 of the mini constitution that governs HKG. It passed on March 19, 2024.
It seems to broaden the number of offenses for what’s already a vague catchall of opposing the government. People have been jailed for holding up blank pieces of paper, for having posters, for singing songs. The HKG government has asked Google and YouTube to take down songs that they don’t like. Stuff you and I would regard as the most innocuous form of political participation, hardly worthy of mention, let alone arrest, is something they’re throwing people in jail for.
Businesses in HKG wonder if it’s Jimmy Lai today, is it going to be me tomorrow? Where does this stop? Nobody knows. Under this new Article 23, the boundary between acceptable and unacceptable behavior that’s going to land someone in jail is further blurred.
It’s important to remember HKG was one of the great business centers of the world. It was the financial capital of Asia. Now, it’s going nowhere economically. I just looked recently at the Hang Seng Index, which is like the Standard & Poor’s Index for Hong Kong. In January, it was basically right where it was when the British left in 1997. So, basically, stocks on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange have flat lined over a period of more than 25 years. In comparison, the S&P has gone up more than nine times.
SD METRO: Has there been a lot of immigration out of HKG?
Mark: Several hundred thousand people have left. Some of the best and the brightest. A lot of expats have left, but I think, sadly, a lot of Hong Kongers — people in their thirties and forties often with children — left because they don’t want their kids growing up under a Communist regime.
SD METRO: How hard is it for a HKG native to leave and immigrate?
Mark: Thankfully not that hard, especially to Great Britain. It has a special category of citizenship that makes it easy. There’s a special visa that makes it easy for people to go to the U.K. and then within, I think, five years, apply for citizenship. The HKG government has made it harder to leave because it won’t let people take their pension savings when they take advantage of this British visa. Nearly 200,000 people have gone to Britain, and quite a few have gone to Australia and Canada.
SD METRO: You mentioned that Great Britain, prior to handing over HKG to Beijing, negotiated with the People’s Republic over the NSL.
Mark: They negotiated over what became a treaty called the Sino-British Declaration. And that did have some national security clauses in it, but it basically worked to get the Chinese to promise that they would leave HKG alone for 50 years. HKG could, and it still does, have its own currency, its own tax system, its own government administration.
It was supposed to develop its own path to democracy, and those talks included a promise by Beijing that HKG would embark on a path to universal suffrage. And although there are elections in HKG, they were constrained. There wasn’t a direct election for the mayor, for example. That was supposed to happen. The legislative council, which is a kind of city council, was also supposed to be fairer and more representative. And that hasn’t happened.
The talks revolved around Britain trying to ensure that HKG would remain free for 50 years. And I think it’s really quite an extraordinary promise by the Chinese. It’s a shame they couldn’t live up to it.
SD METRO: What is Great Britain’s legacy in HKG?
Mark: Fair government, fair administration, rule of law, and economic liberty. There’s an aspirational sense among Hong Kongers of trying to live up to these ideals. Jimmy Lai is in jail because he really believed in what he would call Western values, but he means the values that Britain brought in terms of free economy, and freedom of speech and worship. Jimmy is a devout Catholic, as are several hundred thousand people in HKG. The HKG Christian community is robust. Most are very proud of being Chinese, but they want to be free Chinese, a different kind of Chinese, not Communist Chinese. And so it’s the battle between that Communist reality today versus the legacy of the free Chinese – that Britain instilled – that’s at the heart of it.
SD METRO: You mentioned that many in the West in the 1990s were looking at China and seeing all this economic freedom and figured 50 years after taking over HKG, the People’s Republic would be similar to the West. Was everyone fooled?
Mark: I count myself guilty. I co-authored a book with the incoming World Trade Organization director at the time, Supachai Panitchpakdi, and we were very optimistic that more economic freedom and liberalization would lead to more political and social freedom. I had earlier lived in South Korea and I’d seen that transition take place. I don’t know that we were all fooled. I work with a lot of people who are very opposed to basically giving China free pass on the WTO entry and some other issues. But yeah, I spent decades working for engagement and really believing that more trade would equal more political, social, and economic liberalization and that hasn’t worked out.
SD METRO: China, if I’m understanding everything I’ve read, had a legal right to get HKG back. Am I right or wrong about that?
Mark: You’re about 90% right. HKG was taken in three tranches by the British. The first was during the first Opium War, and they signed a treaty into perpetuity. The Chinese would say it was an unequal treaty, and they didn’t really regard it as valid. But from a strictly narrow legal standpoint, Britain had the right to hold the island of Hong Kong forever.
In the second Opium war in the 1850s, it took a little tranche of mainland China, the Kowloon Peninsula, up to Boundary Street, and that was also supposed to be into perpetuity.
In 1898, they took a much bigger territory and signed a 99-year lease. And the end of that lease in 1997 is what prompted the Chinese to say, “Not only are we taking back the New Territories, but we’re also taking it all back.” And (British Prime Minister Margaret) Thatcher’s like, “No, we have the right to keep it (Hong Kong Island and Kowloon) forever.”
There’s no way the British could have held out. The water comes from China. Most of the food comes from China. British territory was indefensible in the case of a blockade. But legally, China did not have the right to take back Hong Kong Island. There are people who just feel Thatcher wasn’t tough enough. I think that’s a little too facile.
SD METRO: Why was HKG so important to Beijing?
Mark: Parts of China (in the 19th century) had been occupied by foreign countries. Something like 80 bits of China were taken up by colonial powers and run as extraterritorial enclaves. China wanted them back. They symbolized humiliation, weakness, and defeat of China. Beijing was determined to rewrite what they saw as historical injustice, a historical wrong.
SD METRO: Does this spur on the Beijing government to be superior in technology to stand up to the United States and other Western countries?
Mark: That’s part of the spur. China is run by the same kind of unitary administrative system it has been for a long time. The size of the territory has changed and grown dramatically, but it’s been ruled by a similar kind of government for a couple of thousand years. That’s how the Chinese think about it. There’s obviously been a lot of change of dynasties, revolutions, et cetera, but there’s a long, proud cultural, administrative, governmental, and economic history. China was the largest economy in the world until the early 19th century, and it let itself be lapped by little England. The humiliations and suffering in the 19th century were useful spurs for Communist governments.
We can understand the pride of nationalism. But what’s troubling is that there’s a sense of victimhood by the Beijing government and of injustice that they’ve been wronged. There were a lot of bad things about colonialism, but here we are, the better part of 200 years on, and about 75 years since the Communist Chinese took over, and Beijing is still talking about things that happened 150 years ago.
China has 1.4 billion people. They’re the world’s second-largest economy. Why are they talking like they’re the underdog, that they’ve been so wronged and need to lash out at HKG or Taiwan, where there are between 20 to 25 million people and a Democratic China? They threaten the Philippines and Vietnam. How do we draw the line between a legitimate nationalist spur in the sense of aggrieved and victimhood that becomes very, very aggressive and worrying? Xi Jinping’s (president of the People’s Republic) China has gone too far.
SD METRO: John Toland, in his book, The Rising Sun, suggested the war between Japan and the United States in the 1940s was marked by racism, certainly at the front lines. Is there a racial issue that prevents Beijing from trusting the United States and vice-versa, or is it more of a cultural one?
Mark: There’s a strong economic and strategic battle going on here that is more powerful than the racial aspect. I don’t think we’re destined for war, but we’re not on a good trajectory.
Chris – Here’s Halfway point in the transcript (stop here for the printed edition. Please place the entire transcript on the website. Thank you. Doug
SD METRO: President Nixon reopened diplomatic relations with Beijing. Considering what’s going on today, was it a mistake?
Mark: Absolutely not. I think few people other than Nixon could have done it. He was absolutely right to do it. He was quite clear headed about it. He had great affection for China but recognized this was a matter of interest, not friendship. It is in the U.S. interest to have diplomatic relations with all countries, but above all with the most populous country in the world.
SD METRO: What sort of restrictions are on HKG media outlets? Is the South China Morning Post censored?
Mark: I don’t know if it’s censored because I don’t work there anymore, but its coverage certainly is much narrower than previously. The first restriction is that a lot of them have been closed. Either closed because the government put them out of business, as it did with Apple Daily, when they sent 500 police in and treated our newsroom like it was a crime scene and incarcerated seven of the senior staff. That gave the rest of the media a message and a number of them shut down. The rest of them are very cautious.
Both the South China Morning Post and The Standard have a much narrower range of coverage. They’re less likely to do enterprise reporting and go out and interview people. But they will react to things, like when the government attacks the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation. They’ll report that. But if we came out with a statement, they won’t report it. Is that censorship? Yeah, it is. Is some guy in Beijing saying, “Do this, don’t do that?” No, it’s a lot more subtle.
SD METRO: Who’s Jimmy Lai?
Mark: A remarkable guy from a wealthy family that lost everything during the Communist Revolution. Jimmy came to HKG alone as a penniless 12-year-old and worked his way up from the factory floor to owning a factory and started not one, not two, but three really successful businesses.
He revolutionized fashion, selling to The Limited, JCPenney, Polo and air shipping things at a time when others were sending them on boats. Innovative forms of manufacturing and dyeing that dramatically shrunk shipment times.
Then he got bored with manufacturing. He set up a retailer and became kind of the father of fast fashion. Jimmy taught a whole generation of fashion and retail people how to do things. Very, very innovative, creative entrepreneur, one of the best of his generation.
After the Tiananmen killings in June 1989, when Chinese authorities killed hundreds, maybe thousands of students and protestors in Beijing and around the country, Jimmy was very upset. He believed in China. He was so proud to be Chinese, so happy to see the economic reforms that were coming in China.
So, you take a guy who’s an unbelievably creative, successful entrepreneur who’d come up from absolutely nothing, and you put his energy into media. And he initially was very much an anti-corruption, pro-democracy. It was a mixture of titillating, tabloid style journalism with much harder hitting, more crusading journalism. And as the years went on, he became more and more a leader for the pro-democracy movement in HKG. The HKG government couldn’t take it anymore and shut the newspaper and threw him in jail.
SD METRO: How big was his profile in HKG?
Mark: You just had to say Jimmy and people knew who he was. Even Chinese people would just say Jimmy. He was pretty much one of the most famous people in HKG and throughout Asia.
His Catholicism is one of the things that made him so strong and free even in prison. He personally donated, as far as I can tell, well over a $100 million, probably closer to $150 million on pro-democracy causes. So, he was substantially financing a lot of the pro-democracy movement in HKG from his own funds, not from corporate funds. He’s a larger-than-life figure.
SD METRO: You mentioned Beijing couldn’t control Jimmy Lai. Explain.
Mark: Well, most people would’ve gotten the message that if the Chinese Foreign Ministry is attacking you by name, as they did after he met with Vice President Pence and Secretary of State Pompeo, and they’re calling you a black hand, which is a slur in Chinese political terms, that they’re calling you the leader of a new Gang of Four, there’s a problem. It’s very ironic because Mao’s wife, during the Cultural Revolution, was locking people up. She was part of the original Gang of Four. When the Chinese government is attacking you, you’re in trouble, if you care about your freedom.
Jimmy could have left before this started. He was a billionaire, according to Forbes. But he just kept going, saying, “I’m a troublemaker.” That’s what he’s told me. After the NSL came in 2020, he started a series of weekly fireside chats with HKG people. He wouldn’t shut up. He knew where it was going. “’I’d rather be hanging from a lamppost in Central (HKG’s business district), than give the Communists the satisfaction of saying I ran away,’” he told associates who tried to get him to leave.
It’s his character against Xi Jinping’s character. Now, Xi Jinping wasn’t on the scene when Jimmy started these publications, but we could see the collision of these two strong personalities, and one of them has a state with a powerful security apparatus behind it. They can throw somebody it doesn’t like in jail. The tragedy is that Jimmy’s character led him to confront Xi Jinping.
I don’t think Jimmy’s rotting in jail. He’s probably freer than he’s ever been from what I hear. He has an enormous faith and spends his time praying, drawing religious pictures, reading theological texts, and doing forced prison labor. But he feels free. He feels like he knows why he is there. Nathan Sharansky, the former Soviet refusenik, who spent nine years in a Soviet prison, spoke with Jimmy before he went to jail. I talked with Sharansky. Jimmy asked him, “How do I become the best political prisoner I can be?” They had a few other conversations, and Sharansky said, “It is remarkable.” He’s never met somebody who embraced his fate.
SD METRO: It sounds like Jimmy Lai egged on the Chinese state to put him in jail.
Mark: I would think of it in a more positive sense. People deserve to be free. All people deserve to be free. The Chinese promised HKG freedom. I don’t think it’s egging on. They couldn’t shut him up. So, is that egging on or is that exercising the freedoms you were promised? He’s very blunt and outspoken, but I don’t think there’s anything personal where he is egging on Xi Jinping or the Chinese and saying, “Come arrest me.” He’s just saying, “I am who I am and I’m not going to change.”
SD METRO: Does Xi Jinping have any personal interest in making sure Jimmy Lai is imprisoned?
Mark: Most decisions tend to go to the top in China these days. That’s according to The Wall Street Journal, when they did an analysis of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, the two Canadians who were held. They were kidnapped after a Chinese executive from Huawei (a China-based consumer electronics and telecommunications company), Meng Wanzhou (the chief financial officer and daughter of Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei) was detained in Canada. Xi Jinping apparently gave instructions on almost a hundred different occasions about the negotiations to get Meng back to China and both Spavor and Kovrig back to Canada. Jimmy Lai’s freedom could run through Xi Jinping’s office. Does Xi Jinping personally have anything against Jimmy? I don’t know. There are a lot of people Xi has jailed, so I don’t know if it’s personal in every case.
SD METRO: If Western media leaves HKG, will it impact it as a financial center?
Mark: Financial centers rely on a free flow of information. For price discovery, you need to know what’s going on. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal are still in HKG, but if their sources won’t talk to them, there’s a problem. I was at an event this morning where a guy from the International Energy Agency said how difficult it is to get what used to be very routine data about natural gas oil, energy use and consumption out of China. If HKG looks like it’s going the way of China, and continues to crimp information, then that’s bad for its future as a financial center or an engine of economic growth.
SD METRO: Can Singapore and Japan compete for the types of financial businesses that are in HKG?
Mark: It’s the $64 trillion question. It seems like Japan is kind of on the way back as an economy. Is it an international center in the way that HKG was? I don’t think it ever will be. HKG, given the English language ability and the legacy of rule of law, common law, British style administration and government had advantages that almost nowhere else in the region has, except for Singapore. Singapore doesn’t seem to have gotten the traction as a place to raise international capital the way HKG had. It has had a lot of success with wealth management, in terms of getting wealthy families to set up their offices in Singapore.
Singapore has become very Chinese, and that’s for better and for worse. There’s a huge money laundering scandal going on right now. There’s a lot of mainland money coming in, but it doesn’t seem to be in the capital raising aspect that we saw in HKG.
If we’re decoupling (from China) – and that’s a loaded phrase – if we’re not as economically engaged, is there the same need to raise money? Are Chinese companies going to raise money on the international capital markets? I think that’s perhaps the way to think of the question, rather than, oh, are Singapore and Tokyo going to take over? I wonder if there’s actually just going to be less growth and maybe even shrinkage.
SD METRO: For Chinese companies?
Mark: They’re being discouraged. They used to raise money on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, or they would raise money in HKG to get international capital. They’ve pulled back, and I think it’s partly reluctance on the part of international investors. And some of these issues in HKG obviously play into it, but I think it’s more that they’re being discouraged by their own government from going abroad to raise money. For example, there was a ride-sharing company kind of like Uber called DiDi. DiDi raised money in New York and immediately got slapped. Well, it defied warnings by regulators in China, raised the money anyway, got slapped down and had to de-list from its U.S. Exchange. So that was a pretty clear warning.
Chinese companies are just going to be more internally focused for their capital needs as well as for their business activities. And so that’s just bad news for anybody in international capital markets who was counting on a flood of Chinese companies coming that they could IPO or raise capital or bonds for.
SD METRO: Isn’t that worse for Chinese companies?
Mark: I don’t think the Chinese government cares. They’ve wrecked their tech companies. They’ve destroyed educational companies. We used to think that they were quite pragmatic, and they’ve shown again and again that everything takes second place to national security. We used to think they wanted economic growth to bring people out of poverty. And yet they’ve shown that national security trumps all.
This gets back to one of your earlier questions about their sense of shame or humiliation or what they suffered in the 19th century. As I said, there’s going to be a positive side to that, but I think we’re seeing the negative side now, which is they see enemies everywhere. They see the world out to keep them down. That was the farthest thing from U.S. policymakers’ minds in the late 20th century, the 1990s, probably until at least 2008.
SD METRO: What’s your thought about TikTok?
Mark: It’s really bad for somebody who’s that popular and pervasive in our country to be controlled by a foreign government, to have an algorithm, which is, as researchers have shown, steering us in different directions. It’s being weaponized.
For example, if you use TikTok to talk about HKG freedom issues, you’re not going to get very far. If you use TikTok to talk about Uyghur issues, where the incarceration camps in the Xinjiang region of China with Muslims, that’s almost absent on TikTok. The algorithm squelches areas the Chinese don’t want discussed and dials up areas it does.
We’ve seen how this was weaponized in the last couple of weeks when TikTok told its creators to flood Washington with calls. And I think that shows you the way that this technology can be weaponized.
There’s a legitimate debate. A lot of people say, “Yeah, TikTok, but what about Facebook or others?” One is controlled by an adversarial government and the others are not. It’s a big difference.
SD METRO: Should TikTok be illegal in the United States?
Mark: I don’t think it should be illegal. I think it should be divested, and it shouldn’t be owned or controlled by the Chinese government.
SD METRO: That’s probably not going to happen, right?
Mark: The question is would the Chinese government allow that to happen? And if it wouldn’t, well that tells you something. It tells you they control it.
SD METRO: If China takes over Taiwan, what happens? Executions?
Mark: It’s obviously going to be very bad. There are going to be dead people. Are they going to be shot through the head or die some other way? I don’t know. But I think it would be a bad sign for freedom everywhere. We’ve seen Putin’s aggression. I think Xi Jinping and Putin are on parallel tracks. We had a great heyday of democracy 30 years ago when the Berlin Wall fell. We saw an incredible expansion of freedom, and now we’re seeing the tide move the other way. It’s important for us to stand with the people of HKG and Taiwan.
We have to remember deterrence has worked. We discussed Richard Nixon and his legacy, and one legacy was that when normalization between the United States and the People’s Republic of China came in 1979, the U.S. administration sort of washed its hands of Taiwan. And it was Congress that insisted the U.S. continue to defend Taiwan. That deterrence has been remarkable. We must continue that deterrence, and we need to continue to see that Taiwan has the means to defend themselves. We must let Beijing know it’s just going to be a very, very, very high cost if they try to take the island.
SD METRO: Is it critical Taiwan remain outside of Beijing’s grasp?
Mark: Well, I think there are a couple ways of answering that. One way would be strategically, and I do think it is important as an American and for America, for people who love freedom, that Taiwan stays free. I feel the same way about the people of Taiwan. They fought against an authoritarian government. After the Civil War in China, the nationalists retreated to Taiwan.
They weren’t really nice people. There were really, really a tough couple of decades. And Taiwan, it matters for those 20, 25 million people for their sense of freedom, their autonomy, their moral right, to be free. It also has larger strategic consequences. As I said, with HKG, you started off, why should we care about a little place with 7.5 million people? If a totalitarian government can roll up HKG and then Taiwan, who’s next? That’s why Japan is rearming.
SD METRO: What does it signal to the world if Beijing takes Taiwan?
Mark: It would be just a dark day for democracy. It would basically show freedom on the retreat. It would show that a totalitarian and resurgent China could start imposing its will on the rest of the world with incalculable consequences in terms of the loss of freedom, the loss of all of us to just live our lives freely. I think it would be just a terrible, terrible tragedy and a betrayal of all the people, especially the people in Taiwan who fought for democracy and freedom.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that China’s going to take over Taiwan. I think it’s not out of the realm of possibility that there’s a freer, more open China.
I’m not predicting that. I’m a historian. I don’t predict, but there are enormous weaknesses within China, within the society, within the political structure and, above all, the economy that may see things play out quite differently. The story is not over yet.
SD METRO: You mentioned the economic issues in China. Real estate has been a big part of that story. The reading between the lines seems to be that Xi Jinping has a lot of things to think about, including an economy that might go south and that either helps him maintain the peace or he goes to war. How do you see that?
Mark: I don’t think that a weakening economy is going to provoke Xi Jinping to go to war. When China is weak, it usually tends to focus, historically, more internally. I think China’s gone through a very, very unusual 75 years. It does go through expansionary periods. The Chinese state is vastly larger than it was 2,000 years ago. It tends to expand more than it contracts. The economy is weakening. Not only are the days of 10% growth over, I think the days of 6% growth are over. I think China’s going to be growing at 2 or 3% a year over the next 10 or 15 years. Demographically and in many other ways, productivity, the amount of output they’re getting from each additional dollar they invest, all the signs are pointing to a weakening of the Chinese economy. They have their hands full at home.
If we keep up the deterrence, ensure that Xi Jinping knows he’s going to pay a very, very high price, that may result in the end of the Chinese Communist Party if he invades Taiwan, he’s going to think twice. We don’t know what’s going to happen, but I don’t think war is inevitable. I don’t think it’s imminent. I’m very much in sync with the thinking of the Biden administration. You need to keep making the Chinese understand the resolve in the free world, including Japan, is very, very high to defend any kind of assault on Taiwan.
SD METRO: Is Xi Jinping vulnerable to being replaced if the Chinese economy goes south?
Mark: We don’t see any signs of that right now. Anything is theoretically possible in an authoritarian government. I suppose if he had a health issue, he could be sidelined. But all signs suggest he’s at least as strong as any leader since Mao, and maybe in some ways more capable and stronger than Mao in terms of wielding power and control over the government and over society.
SD METRO: Thank you, Mark.
Page can be reached at dpage@sandiegometro.com
