China: The Anaconda on the Ceiling, Data is the New Oil

 

SD METRO Associate Editor Doug Page interviewed Mark Clifford just before the holidays about his new book about Hong Kong entrepreneur Jimmy Lai and the state of affairs in the territory and in Asia. Clifford spent more than 30 years working in Hong Kong and Asia as a reporter and editor. During this interview, he talks about China, Xi Jinping, Japan, the Philippines, Taiwan, TikTok, and what Donald Trump will face after being inaugurated as President of the United States on Jan. 20, 2025.

SDMETRO: Jimmy Lai is one of the great entrepreneurs of Hong Kong, possibly the world. Tell us how he came to Hong Kong and the success he had before being jailed.

Clifford: I’ve known Jimmy since 1993 and was on the board of directors of his media company, but I didn’t appreciate the way in which he was forged in fires that you and I can only imagine.

His family was ripped apart by the Maoist takeover in China. He was two when that happened. His father left Hong Kong, leaving his mother, Jimmy, his twin sister and a slightly older, disabled sister to fend for themselves. The authorities ripped away his mother, sent her to a labor camp. Jimmy’s hustling, doing black market stuff, selling and buying scrap metal, tobacco that he’s finding on the streets and re-rolling. And he’s 6 or 8 years old.

At 12, he gets permission from his mother and wrangles a one-way permit to go to Macau, the Portuguese colony on the west side of the Pearl River Delta. His mother let him go because the country was in the midst of a famine that killed as many as 45 million people – all because Mao Zedong too boneheaded to do anything about it.

He makes his way to Macau, and then becomes a stowaway on a smuggler’s boat into Hong Kong, becoming an illegal immigrant there at a time when millions of refugees were fleeing the horrors of China to get into Hong Kong. He finds an aunt and uncle, and their place is so tiny, there’s not enough room for him to sleep on the floor.

She takes him to an industrial district, where she knows somebody in a factory. He sleeps in the factory. During the course of 15 years, he goes from being a factory hand, a child laborer in a factory, to owning a factory. Pretty soon that factory is producing more sweaters than any factory in China, maybe in Hong Kong, maybe in Asia, and selling its goods to places like The Limited and J.C. Penney.

He becomes bored making sweaters, deciding to set up a retail chain, Asia’s first region-wide clothing store. He is considered the kind of leading exponent of fast fashion. Jimmy basically invented it. He was ready to go into fast food, and then the Tiananmen Square killings in Beijing in 1989 came when the government slaughtered hundreds, maybe thousands, of pro-democracy protesters in Beijing. So, Jimmy went into media. That’s when I met him. He had one of the most powerful and prominent, independent Chinese language media operations in the world. At its peak, we employed about 4,000 people, mostly in Taiwan and Hong Kong.

SDMETRO: There are likely a lot of Americans and other people around the globe who wonder, despite the great story, why should anybody care about Jimmy? What is it that he symbolizes? And what is it that Hong Kong symbolizes?

Clifford: Jimmy embodies, symbolizes and exemplifies Hong Kong’s rise from dirt poor, mud poor, shanty town to this prosperous and free first world city. Five years ago, Hong Kong was ranked up with London, and New York as one of the great financial centers of the world. It certainly was the leading international financial center for Asia.

Jimmy took advantage of the freedoms in Hong Kong. First the freedom just to work, to be able to afford a bowl of rice the next day. Then he exemplified the freedom to own his own business and become wealthy and prosperous, and then the freedom to express himself through media, with the magazines and newspapers he owned.

He wanted to hold China to its promises. Now Britain colonized Hong Kong in 1841, and for 156 years it was a British colony. There are all the issues that come with being a colony. But it was also a place that had rule of law and civil freedom. It didn’t have a democracy. The last few years it was getting there. But it was a free place.

China, when it took over in 1997 from Britain, promised all the freedoms and the capitalist free way of life would continue in Hong Kong for the following 50 years. Jimmy wanted to hold China to those promises. China’s signed an agreement, 40 years ago in December, with the United Kingdom that codified the handover.

It’s an international treaty. It’s in the United Nations. China’s turned its back on it; tore it up, saying it’s not valid anymore. China promulgated a kind of constitutional basic law for Hong Kong. It’s not obeying that at all. So Jimmy decided he would give up his life as a wealthy man, as a free man, his life of travel, his houses in Kyoto, Taipei, apartments in Paris and London. He’d give all that up to stay in Hong Kong, even though it almost certainly meant arrest.

SDMETRO: You describe how Jimmy could look at a piece of clothing, come up with a new idea or a different idea or something that might match it and be competitive. In all your time of working with Jimmy, did you sense you were working with an artist?

Clifford: He has an extraordinary eye for color but paired with an entrepreneurial vision. Sometimes he saw too far over the horizon, but he could take things, like a piece of cloth and figure out how to make it better or to make it with different fabric that would allow it to legally skirt U.S. and other textile quotas, so he could sell it cheaply. He was always looking ahead.

SDMETRO: You point out that most freedom fighters tend to be lawyers, and here’s Jimmy, a businessman. There’s something about him that’s different.

Clifford: Well, he’s got a bedrock of principle. As he would say, he’s a troublemaker. It’s his description of himself from one of our last interviews before he went to prison. He calls himself a troublemaker, but he probably also describes himself as stubborn.

There are three elements that are important to understanding him, which drive the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) insane because he’s public enemy number one for them. First, he’s rich so he can hire great lawyers; and he traveled around. Second, he met the Vice President of the United States, the U.S. Secretary of State, and the U.S. National Security adviser. He could go to Washington or wherever he wanted, and he did. He built a powerful network.

Third, he had a platform. He had a megaphone in the form of these very popular newspapers and magazines, very pro-democracy and unabashedly pro-democracy in Hong Kong and in Taiwan. He converted to Catholicism in 1997, just a week after the Chinese Communists took over Hong Kong. His wife, Theresa, who’s also Catholic, said he knew trouble was coming and figured he would need help from a higher power. And she doesn’t mean that facetiously.

So, the fact that he has principles, money, and he had a media empire – any one of these would unsettle the masters in Beijing. The combination of all three of them, especially the wealth and the fact that a businessman was willing to stand up to Beijing is something that in 75 years of Communist Chinese rule, we’ve never seen.

He has a core of doing what he thinks is right no matter what the personal cost. And I think this comes out of these fires he was forged in. And what he went through when he was a kid, I think he believes, I can survive it. You knock me down, I’ll get back up. You take away my money, I’ll make more money. You take away my freedom; okay, I can be free in my head.

That’s what he’s doing now in prison, in solitary confinement, a 77-year-old man, no natural daylight, with diabetes, at Coven Prison. He had a cataract operation that didn’t go too well in prison. But he says, I’m going to live freely in my own mind. You decide when I’ll be physically free. Xi Jinping, the leader of China, decides when my captors will release me, but I’m going to be free in my mind. And that’s what he’s done.

He’s living like a Benedictine monk. It’s very structured. It’s not the life of a wild-eyed prophet in the desert. It’s the life of a guy who doesn’t decide when the lights come on. He doesn’t have a clock. He eats when his captors tell him to. He obviously has no choice about what he’s going to eat or when he’s going to eat, but he spends much of his time drawing. He’s actually a remarkable artist, not just in making clothes, but in drawing.

And that’s another thing that came out in the book. I knew he had a great eye for color. I didn’t know he spent months in Amsterdam at the studio of Walasse Ting, one of the top Chinese-American artists of the 20th century. So he’s drawing a lot. He’s reading scripture, theology, praying. And he’s doing prison labor. He makes 600 envelopes a week at a penny an envelope.

SDMETRO: He holds a British passport. What has been the involvement of the U.K. government with regards to Jimmy?

Clifford: Well, it’s increasing. But the U.K. government has not been quite as assertive as we would like them to be. The Chinese claim Jimmy’s a Chinese national. There don’t seem to be any legal grounds for this. But that doesn’t usually stop the CCP from doing what it wants. They haven’t given consular access to the U.K. Consul General or Hong Kong staff, as they’re obligated to under international treaties.

We had a hard time even getting the British government to say Jimmy’s name publicly. We’ve had fantastic Parliamentary support. I say we, I mean the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, which is advocating not only for Jimmy’s release, but also for the release of the 1900 or so political prisoners in Hong Kong, an incredible number when you think there was nothing five years ago.

The last Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak, has been grilling the current Prime Minister, Keir Starmer, about what he’s going to do about Jimmy. He didn’t seem quite as interested in the case when he was in 10 Downing Street. But we’ll take progress where we can. Starmer brought up Jimmy with Communist Party General Secretary Xi Jinping at the G20 meeting in Peru in November in front of TV cameras.

They have a policy of not negotiating for hostages, which is essentially what Jimmy is. They also have a lot of concern about the British economy, especially post-Brexit. They need friends wherever they can get them, and they think China’s an important economic partner, one that’s too big to risk angering. So, it’s not clear that they think Jimmy is important enough to go to the mat for.

SDMETRO: When he started the Apple Daily newspaper in Hong Kong, you say it did something special for Hong Kong. Tell us what it did.

Clifford: It broke up the old, cozy relationships between journalists, businesspeople and politicians. Jimmy started with Next Magazine, which came out in March 1990, nine months after Tiananmen Square, which galvanized Jimmy to get into media. Next hired a team of investigative reporters and put them to work, exposing a lot of the secrets of Hong Kong’s power elite.

And so that investigative strand of the DNA, which was powerful throughout the 30-something years that Next and Apple Daily were part of the Hong Kong media scene was completely innovative, but also this very feisty, pro-democracy slant was very important. Because at a time when people were nervously looking over their shoulder to see the guys from Beijing as they got closer and closer to the 1997 hand over from British colonial rule to China, most publishers were backing off from democracy. Jimmy realized he had a market. Most Hong Kong people were pro-democracy.

The first territory-wide elections were held in 1991. Six out of 10 people voted for the pro-democracy candidates. When I first met Jimmy in 1993, I thought it was a little crazy to be starting a newspaper. I mean, it’s hard enough in any environment.

SDMETRO: And were these in English or Cantonese?

Clifford: They were in Cantonese. Cantonese is a very vernacular, very slangy, very verbal language, and they used characters and made it actually so Mainlanders couldn’t read the Apple Daily. They could read most of the other Hong Kong newspapers.

He also brought starlets and paparazzi and some tawdry stuff. And he did it all with state-of-the-art printing presses. Jimmy always, always, whether it was he was making sweaters or shirts or newspapers, always had a commitment to the highest quality. And that’s true to his staff. And he paid his staff well above the market rates.

SDMETRO: What impact does Tiananmen Square have on Jimmy? What kind of impact do you think it has on the average person in Hong Kong?

Clifford: Fear for the average person. For Jimmy, heartbreak. He fled China and he made his fortune in Hong Kong. Hong Kong was all about freedom. And he’d seen the economic reforms in China under Deng Xiaoping.

With Deng, Jimmy thought China was going to realize its potential. It’s going to leave the madness of the Mao period behind. He’s such a Chinese patriot, which is why it’s such an irony to see him on trial right now for trying to undermine the Chinese State. Yes, he hates the CCP, but he loves China.

And so he saw these economic reforms of the ’80s, and then he saw the students out there in the spring of 1989, bravely marching or sitting in and demonstrating for democracy. And then he watched the tanks roll in and kill hundreds, maybe thousands, of people. And he said, I’ve got to do something.

CNN had just started in the early 1980s. The Tiananmen killings was one of the first times we saw, as Americans, an international event halfway around the world pretty much in real time. And Jimmy just realized there were technological possibilities.

He realized technology allowed media companies to do something, to shine a spotlight on bad events. He’d seen Taiwan, South Korea, other places become more liberal politically and socially as they developed economically. He thought that was going to happen in China.

He sold T-shirts to raise money for the students in Beijing and sent them tents. He was watching from Hong Kong, so was the entire colony.

SDMETRO: Jimmy is the first high-profile individual in Hong Kong to be arrested for violating China’s National Security Law. Can you describe the law?

Clifford: It has technical provisions like subversion, collusion with foreigners. It’s very vague. It’s kind of whatever the government wants it to be. I follow his trial, which has been going on for over a year now. It started in mid-December 2023, and it’s been four years since he was jailed. And I’m really struggling. There are two counts of collusion with foreigners, and it seems he’s guilty of practicing journalism. There was some meetings he had, I alluded to them before with Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, National Security Advisor John Bolton. They’re obviously long gone from those positions.

He met them a year before the National Security Law came into effect, and yet the prosecution has spent an inordinate amount of time in a trial that’s gone on over 110 days and has no signs of reaching a conclusion. Spent an inordinate amount of time talking about his meetings with these three officials, and did he ask the U.S. to impose sanctions on Hong Kong human rights violators or not? Jimmy did not. It’s pretty clear that he didn’t. The Wall Street Journal’s Bill McGurn has written extensively on this. He’s gone back and contacted all of them. At least some of those officials have gone and looked at… Maybe all of them, gone and looked at the readouts of those meetings. There’s nothing about sanctions.

My group, the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, is working to put sanctions on more Hong Kong officials. I guess that means I shouldn’t go back to Hong Kong, because I would be immediately – well, maybe not immediately – pronounced guilty.

The net effect is Hong Kong, which five years ago was a city more or less as free as New York, San Francisco, London or Paris, is a place where if you wear a T-shirt that authorities don’t like, they throw you in jail, which they’ve done. If you don’t look respectful enough when the Chinese national anthem is being played or you face the other direction, they throw you in jail. These are thought crimes.

This is a law in search of victims. Did they put Jimmy in jail to make an example? Absolutely. But he’s more than just a random person. They see him as this black hand, this mastermind of Hong Kong protests. There were 2 million people repeatedly out in the streets of Hong Kong in 2019. Was Jimmy Lai responsible for getting all those people out? I don’t think so.

Every single election from that first one in 1991 until the last reelection in 2019, we’ve had 6 out of 10 people voting for the pro-democracy campaign in Hong Kong. Hong Kong people want freedom. They want democracy. They want the right to elect their mayor and their city council. China can’t tolerate this mild expression of autonomy, despite having promised this.

SDMETRO: Are the people in Hong Kong living in fear of being randomly picked up by the police or having someone pounding on the doors at night?

Clifford: Some certainly are. There’s been a lot of pounding on the doors over the last few years. So there’s definitely a feeling of fear. There’s a feeling of you don’t know what you’re going to do, you don’t know if you’ve crossed a line.

The great sinologist, Perry Link, who’s on the board of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, famously described the CCP as an anaconda in the chandeliers. You’ve got this huge snake and underneath you’ve got a wonderful ballroom. People are all dressed up. They’re eating canapes, drinking champagne and having a great time, but they all know that there’s a snake up there. It’s unpredictable. It might reach out and grab somebody or it might just raise its eyebrow. People adjust to avoid attracting the wrath of the snake.

Most people self-censor. And I know for a fact. I’ve had personal contact. I’ve had conversations like this cancelled because people are afraid of what it will do to their business if they have a conversation like this. There are people who have been very, very helpful, friendly to me, it’s not a personal thing, but I couldn’t get permission to use some photographs for this latest book because they didn’t want to be cited in the credits as having let me use one of their photographs.

I interviewed close to a 100 people for this book. Many didn’t even want their name used in the book. These are people who’ve known Jimmy 30, 40 years, but they still have some tie to Hong Kong. There’s a lot of fear.

The elite are living in a bubble. They’re convinced they’re victims, that Americans like me who are trying to hold a spotlight on abuses in Hong Kong, that we’re being unfair, that the government had to crack down on a society that had gotten out of control in 2019. I think that’s absolute nonsense. It shows a real parochialism on the part of the Hong Kong elite.

SDMETRO: The last time we spoke, you compared how Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index performed compared to the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and vice versa. When preparing for this interview, I looked at some numbers and the Hang Seng in 1992 was about 4,300. Today it’s nearly right around 20,000, having grown about four and a half times over the last 32 years.

In comparison, if you look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average during the same period, you get nearly 14 times the growth. What brings about this disparity? Is it the rulers in Hong Kong? Is it the fear of China?

Clifford: It might be more interesting to compare not 1992, but mid-1997. Because between ’92 and ’97, the Hang Seng roughly tripled, almost quadrupled, so it was closer to 15,000-something at the time of the Chinese handover. And as you say, it’s close to 20 now, it’s kind of in a narrow range, and it was up around 30.

So you’ve had a period of more than 25 years, 27 years. And they… Check my numbers, but I think that Hang Seng has gone up less than 30%. And as you say, with Dow Jones or the S&P has gone up 14-fold. And yet, to compound the paradox that you’re talking about, Hong Kong has been the international capital market for the fastest growing economy that the world will ever see. 10% growth for a period of three decades or so. So that’s doubling every seven years.

And yet the stock market has been flatlining. And I would say it’s a combination of political and governance issues. You don’t have an open and free press. And any true international financial market needs the free flow of information. You have lots of rumors and gossip and short sellers and other things, but the market needs to sort things out. It needs information.

The less people trust information, the harder it is to get true price discovery. And I could argue, and I think I’m on pretty firm ground, that Hong Kong and Chinese don’t have the same governance standards the U.S. does. And that has held back the return to shareholders. So, if you look at total return, you look at dividends, share price appreciation Hong Kong, is in the dust. Hong Kong’s governance issues, which are connected to the political ones from China, are having real economic effects.

SDMETRO: Was it a relief for Xi Jinping to see the return of Trump as opposed to having to get to know Vice President Kamala Harris? Do you have any thoughts about how Xi might compare Biden to Trump? Trump to Biden?

Clifford: It’s really hard to say. They’re so different. I think Harris is obviously less experienced on the international stage and with foreign affairs. She probably would’ve been kind of Biden version two. I think we’ve had enough time to see that since 2016 and, well, 2017 when Trump took office, he’s really shifted the entire global narrative, the optics of vis-à-vis China.

He’s been erratic about it. Sometimes he’s having a chocolate dessert at Mar-a-Lago or Brazil or wherever with Xi Jinping, and sometimes he’s putting on tariffs. So he’s a shape-shifter, and I think that really throws the Chinese off because they like stability and continuity. And in that sense, I think they would’ve preferred Harris.

On the other hand, Trump is very transactional. The Chinese may feel that they can get the better of him. They do one small thing, but then he lets them, he doesn’t really go toe-to-toe with them if they try to squeeze Taiwan more forcefully. So, it’s hard to say. People like Matt Pottinger and John Bolton and others in the first Trump administration did the American people and the entire world a favor by alerting people to the evil practices of the CCP.

There are the rapacious business and economic practices; the inability of China to live up to its commitments under the World Trade Organization, which again, you can say Trump is transactional, he’s mercantilist, he doesn’t really understand international trade, but hey, he understood it enough to really start making the Chinese pay more of a cost. Is that ultimately going to help China because it forces them to increase domestic consumption, which they need to do and force them to offshore and to diversify their manufacturing base? Maybe. We’ll see.

SDMETRO: What’s your take on his selection of former U.S. Senator David Perdue (R-GA) as the next U.S. ambassador to China?

Clifford: Not sure. There are people who are concerned he’s going to be quite accommodating. I am very encouraged by the selection of U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) as Secretary of State and Mike Waltz as security advisor. I think both these guys have a long track record and a very clear assessment of China and of the importance of human rights in our foreign policy.

Human rights is a great trump card. It’s just a great way in which the U.S. has something that China can’t offer. And I think human rights under both Democratic and Republican administrations has kind of been given short shrift for too long. But I am encouraged that he’s got some hard-edged China Hawks in there.

I should also say it was enormously encouraging that President-elect Trump has said he would get Jimmy out. He said, “100%, it’ll be easy – guaranteed.” And he did get out a trio of college students who had done some bad stuff during his first term. He knows how to do these sorts of transactions and these deals.

A deal to let Jimmy Lai out is only going to happen at the very highest level. I’m glad to see that even before he is taken office, President-elect Trump is on the case.

SDMETRO: China is always in the news it seems. And today there’s a story in The Wall Street Journal about Chinese-made routers by a company called TP-Link. The company apparently has about a 65% share of the market in the United States. There seems to be some worry they’re used to spy on the American public, maybe hack laptops, desktop, potentially their phones, tablets. Microsoft seems to think so. Is this just normal behavior for China? Should we start looking at every product made in China and not buy it?

Clifford: It’s normal behavior for China, but we shouldn’t normalize it. China will try to get any advantage it can. It has a very zero-sum approach to international relations. It has the greatest sustained economic growth we’ve ever seen from a country in history, let alone the most populous one.

But China says it’s a victim, despite the fact that we have allowed it to grow. Of course, I don’t want to take anything away from more than a billion Chinese people and workers who’ve made this possible. We’ve facilitated it, and I think we’ve been incredibly naive, and particularly when it comes to technology issues, whether it’s TP-Link or it’s Huawei or it’s ZTE or it’s TikTok, we’ve been incredibly naive.

Xi Jinping has repeatedly said the data is the new oil. The Chinese don’t know what they’re doing with all that data, but they’re scarfing up as much as they can. We should be worried. I don’t think we need to worry about every Nike sneaker that comes in, but technology products need to be looked at very, very carefully. And of course it’s going to be disruptive; it’s going to be expensive; it’s going to be inflationary; but why would we want to have our futures held hostage to China, which has said it’s preparing for war with us? It views us as the enemy. Shouldn’t we start trying to decouple now?

The Biden administration, I think, was very smart and much more strategic and focused, particularly on technology issues. I hope that’s continued in the next Trump administration. This is a very important security issue. If we don’t deal with it now, we’re either going to be under the thumb of the Chinese, having them having access to our most intimate thoughts and actions and able to influence our policies on a range of issues, whether it’s Taiwan or Xinjiang, where they’re imprisoning Muslims. Or Hong Kong or anything else. China wants to control the global debate on everything. They don’t believe in freedom. If we let them into our home, we’re asking for trouble.

SDMETRO: Will North Korea’s Kim Jong Un want to sit down with Trump?

Clifford: I give Trump credit. He tried to break the logjam with the Kims. This is the third Kim that has run North Korea since it came out of the ashes of World War II. I think Trump felt pretty burned by North Korea last time around.

If the reports are to be believed that North Korea has upward of 10,000 troops fighting in Ukraine, then it looks to me like we’re closer to the beginning of World War III than we are to some kind of detente between the U.S. and North Korea. But hard to say, and again, I think that’s going to be very, very interesting about a Trump administration and may throw the Chinese and many others off balance. Trump is very tactical, likes to surprise, likes to come up with innovative moves, and I’m sure it’ll be interesting for the next four years.

SDMETRO: What’s at stake for the United States if Taiwan is invaded and taken over by Beijing?

Clifford: The best parallel would be the Cold War. China’s not going to stop with Taiwan. They have no right to Taiwan. They have no claim to it. And their posture is spurious, it’s bloviation. I’m sorry that Nixon and Kissinger signed the agreement they did. But anyway, that’s the world we’re in. I don’t think an invasion is either inevitable or imminent. But the Chinese are going to just keep squeezing. I hope President Trump and his administration can stay strong, because if China is allowed to take Taiwan, what’s called the first island chain is all of a sudden more vulnerable.

The Philippines is next. You’re not going to see a Chinese commissar in the Philippines, but you’ll see the Philippines having to bend to China, as they’ve had to do on some things. They’re standing tough in terms of trying to defend their islands, which are slowly being encroached upon throughout the South China Sea. Vietnam, even South Korea and Japan, are going to have to bend to the will of the Chinese if they take Taiwan. They already are to some extent. The Chinese have an inordinate influence in the Pacific. They’re going to have a big role in the neighborhood, but they’ve made no secret of their desire to push the U.S. out of the Western Pacific.

That would be a bad for freedom and the world economy. You’re putting billions of people under the boot of a Chinese totalitarian government. That’s what’s at stake. It’s not just one little island of 20 million people that happens to be a key producer of semiconductors globally. We can make semiconductors anywhere, but you surrender the freedom of 25 million people who don’t want to be under the control of these thugs. There’s a mafia running China. That’s what the CCP is. They care about power, control, and money.

It’s not in anybody’s interest to let them do more than they’ve done. Just as Putin wasn’t stopped early enough. I would say Xi Jinping hasn’t been stopped enough. What he’s done in Xinjiang, where you have more people and civilians being held in captivity and in concentration camps since the Nazis, and it’s barely registered on the world. The U.S. has been ahead, but we could do more.

It’s another reason why it’s very important to stand tall for Hong Kong, to keep fighting for the freedom of Jimmy Lai, 1900 political prisoners in Hong Kong and the seven and a half million Hong Kong people who are living under the yoke of Chinese rule. Because dictators don’t stop. And Xi Jinping, who installed himself as dictator for life, isn’t going to stop – unless we stop him.

SDMETRO: When we talked earlier this year, I asked you if Nixon made a mistake in trying to normalize relationships with China? You seemed to indicate that that was probably a good idea. Now it sounds like you’ve changed your mind. Nothing wrong with changing your mind. We all do.

Earlier this year, I also had a guy who was a retired U.S. Navy Captain on the show. At one point, he was the chief of intelligence of the United States Pacific Fleet. He co-authored a book, and basically what they said was we were fooled by Deng Xiaoping. We seem to have one thought about what China was going to look like given all this economic freedom that came through. Now, it seems we’re dealing with a monster we never imagined.

There’s been a sea change in the thinking about what China is. How do you talk about this? What’s your sense of it?

Clifford: Yeah. First of all, I don’t think Nixon… And I was talking narrowly about Taiwan. That was the key point in terms of normalizing relations with the People’s Republic of China in the late 1970s. And by the way, it was done under Carter and Zbigniew Brzeziński in the end, so I can’t put it all on Nixon and Kissinger.

Look, I think it was right to try to engage China. I was a big proponent of China getting into the WTO. I don’t think I was wrong about that. U.S. Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and others who fought against giving China a permanent most favored nation status, which let it ship goods at favorable duty and tariff rates to the United States.

Who fought that all throughout the 1990s? It was Bill Clinton who came in and talked about dictators from Baghdad to Beijing and then de-linked human rights and business in the case of China. I now think that we were definitely wrong, and I was on the wrong side of that. I wrote a book when China got into the WTO, World Trade Organization, called Changing China, changing World Trade. I wrote it with the incoming director general of the WTO. We were right in many senses that it would supercharge the Chinese economy, and it would lead to a number of reforms.

What we didn’t see, and I don’t think anybody, even the people who elected Xi Jinping realized, was the monster they were electing. We were naive to believe that a Communist regime was going to go social democratic and was going to go softer and was going to undergo the kind of democratic transition that South Korea and Taiwan did.

Nixon wrote in that famous Foreign Affairs article (in 1967), when he was running for president, that you can’t ignore the biggest country in the world, and with over a billion people. You’ve got to somehow make them part of the world’s community. Certainly the U.S., as the global leader, needed to. I think we should have held their feet to the fire much more on everything from human rights issues to compliance with the WTO.

The Chinese are great negotiators. They work for their interests, and they do a terrific job at it. And we didn’t hold them enough to their agreements, whether it’s the Sign of British Declaration or the WTO or fentanyl agreements we have going now. We kind of make these agreements and don’t really enforce them. So yes, look, I think it was worth making the effort, but I think we should have been clear-eyed earlier.

I also think Xi Jinping did us a great thought by coming to power and having such a brutal approach 12 years ago. We’ve got time. We started waking up. It’s not too late. It’s not early. We’ve got time. We don’t have a lot of time, but we do have time.

SDMETRO: TikTok is sitting before the United States Supreme Court. If you were advising it about TikTok, what would you say?

Clifford: There’s been a very clear determination by Congress that we want TikTok out. I hope the Supreme Court would affirm that. Xi Jinping thinks data is the new oil, and we know they’re mining TikTok. We already know that they’re tweaking the algorithm to influence debates in America.

We see it in the Hong Kong activist community. They tweak things, so it’s much harder to find our point of view. Same thing with pro-democracy people relating to Taiwan; things related to the Muslims in Xinjiang, Uyghur Muslims, Tibetans. We’re already seeing this. It’s happening in real life, where this thing that’s like a central communications platform for hundreds of millions of Americans is being manipulated by a foreign government (China) to shut down free speech.

SDMETRO: There was an article in the Wall Street Journal’s op-ed pages that Russia’s Vladimir Putin, and perhaps all dictators, are in a weaker position than most of us in the United States realize. This is due to the Assad regime falling in Syria, and, obviously, it’s going to make Putin potentially vulnerable internally. Does any of this apply to Xi Jinping? Is he vulnerable in any way to being deposed, and if so, how would it happen?

Clifford: People have been predicting the downfall of the CCP since at least 1989, and of course they’ve been wrong. It seems like it’s impossible to see these big historical movements until they’re here.

Xi Jinping looks like he has a very, very strong position. The problem with dictators is the more control they have, the more control they want, and then the more fragile they sort of appear. So just look at the examples I mentioned in Hong Kong. Can you imagine that they nabbed somebody wearing a T-shirt and throw them in the slammer because they didn’t like what it said, or somebody was facing the other way at the national anthem, let alone the people who were booing the national anthem, they throw them in jail?

If you did that in America, our jails would be full. You can’t do that. You can’t do that forever. Xi Jinping has this technology. He seems to have unparalleled control over his society, and yet he’s got this continuing cycle of purges. He’s tossed out a number of very senior people he put in power.

It’s one thing when you come to power and you toss out your rival, as he did around 2012, when another guy on the Politburo, Bo Xilai, looked like he was making a move for maybe a counter coup. Well, Bo has been spending his time behind bars for the last 12 years or so; it didn’t help that his wife was implicated in the murder of a British businessman, but that was a convenient pretext.

Xi Jinping has kicked out his foreign minister, the defense minister, a number of people from the rocket division of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). There’s this ongoing purge in the PLA, which perhaps can give us a little comfort vis-à-vis Taiwan. I don’t think he feels comfortable yet with his military lineup. But I’m certainly not going to predict he’s going to be dislodged from power. He could be in power a long, long time. He’s a relatively young guy. He’s 71. He could have another 20 or 25 years of pulling the strings, either in the general secretary title or like Deng Xiaoping did at the end. These elders stay around for a long time, and he is unique in his ability to wheel power and do it in a consistent, strategic way.

SDMETRO: Thank you, Mark.