Colleges Should All Stand Up to China

American universities need to show Beijing—again and again—that they reserve the right to unfettered debate.
By Rory Truex
About five times a year, the U.S. military conducts freedom-of-navigation operations, or FONOPs, in the South China Sea to challenge China’s territorial claims in the area.
American Navy vessels traverse through waters claimed by the Chinese government.
This is how the U.S. government registers its view that those waters are international territory, and that China’s assertion of sovereignty over them is inconsistent with international law.
Americans are witnessing a similar encroachment on territory equally central to our national interest: our own social and political discourse. 
Through a combination of market coercion and intimidation, the Chinese Communist Party is trying to constrain how people in the United States and other Western democracies talk about China.

Freedom-of-speech operations (FOSOPs) 
This encroachment needs a measured response—what we might call freedom-of-speech operations, or FOSOPs for short. 
American universities can take the lead.
They should routinely hold events on the fate of Taiwan, the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the repression of Uighur Muslims in East Turkestan, and other topics known to be sensitive to the Chinese government.
These events can be organized by students, faculty, or research centers.
They need not originate from a university’s administration.
If anything, the message that FOSOPs send—everything in the United States is subject to open debate, especially on college campuses—is even stronger if the pressure comes from the grass roots.
Last month’s NBA-China spat crystallized the basic problem.
After the Houston Rockets executive Daryl Morey tweeted in support of the Hong Kong protesters, Rockets games and gear were effectively banned in China, costing the team an estimated $10 million to $25 million.
It has become common for the Chinese government to force Western firms and institutions to toe the party line.
Gap, Cambridge University Press, the three largest U.S. airlines, Marriott, and Mercedes-Benz have all had China access threatened over freedom-of-speech issues. 
This list will continue to grow.
Recently, the Chinese state broadcaster CCTV canceled the showing of an Arsenal soccer game because the club’s star, Mesut Özil, had criticized the ongoing crackdown in East Turkestan.
The Chinese government regularly uses coercive tactics to affect discourse on American campuses, including putting pressure on universities that invite politically sensitive speakers.
This is precisely what happened at the University of California at San Diego, which hosted the Dalai Lama as a commencement speaker in 2017.
The Chinese government, which considers the Tibetan religious leader a threat, responded by barring Chinese scholars from visiting UCSD using government funding.
There is also disturbing evidence that the Chinese government is mobilizing overseas Chinese students to protest or disrupt events, primarily through campus chapters of the Chinese Students and Scholars Association. 
These groups exist at more than 150 universities and receive financial support from the Chinese embassy in the United States. 
As Bethany Allen-Ebrahimian reported last year in Foreign Policy, the embassy can exert influence over the chapters’ leadership and activities.
The goal of freedom-of-speech operations is safety in numbers.
Other universities remained largely mum after the Chinese government moved to punish UCSD, effectively inviting Beijing to deploy similar tactics against other schools in the future. 
But imagine if instead there had been an outpouring of events on Tibet or invitations for the Dalai Lama. 
Coordination is key.
An affront to one American university should be taken as an affront to all.
At Princeton, where I teach, we held three FOSOPs in recent weeks: the first on East Turkestan, sponsored by the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions; the second on Hong Kong, sponsored by a student group that promotes U.S.-China relations; and a third on East Turkestan, also sponsored by students. 
These events were not labeled as FOSOPs, of course; I, not the organizers, am applying the term.
The panels occurred independently, organically, and with no real interference or involvement from university administration, other than to ensure the safety and security of our students.
I played a small role in the Hong Kong event, at which I moderated a panel that featured three Hong Kong citizens discussing the ongoing protest movement.
Our China talks usually get about 30 attendees, most of whom are retirees who live nearby.
The Hong Kong panel last month was the biggest China-related event I have attended on our campus.
Our room was at maximum capacity, as was the overflow room we created for the simulcast.
It was clear that mainland-Chinese students and Hong Kong students—two groups whose views on the protests generally diverge—had both mobilized in some way or another.
The event was emotionally charged at the outset.
One Chinese student, apparently sympathetic to the Chinese government’s position, flipped the panel the middle finger after a panelist made a comment about police brutality against Hong Kong protesters.
Several of the audience members from mainland China pressed the panelists on some of the basic realities of the events on the ground.
One student asked if there was actually any evidence of police brutality.
It felt like Chinese students had come to the event just to push the Communist Party line. 
But it was healthy and helpful to have pro-Beijing views expressed and debated publicly, and juxtaposed with the lived experiences of the Hong Kong protesters.
As the panelist Wilfred Chan noted, it is especially important right now to have dialogue between the Hong Kongers and mainland-Chinese communists.
Western university campuses are among the only spaces where this can occur.
Firms, local governments, civic associations, and individuals can create their own freedom-of-speech operations.
Imagine if every NBA player signed a pledge to mention China’s mass detention of Muslims in East Turkestan at press conferences, just for one day. 
Or if American churches reached out to Chinese pastors to give sermons about the repression of China’s Christian community.
There will be pushback from the Chinese government, and some events might be labeled as an affront to “Chinese sovereignty” or “the feelings of the Chinese people”—standard rhetorical devices of the Chinese Communist Party.
University administrators may receive warnings or veiled threats in the short term.
But if this sort of interference is met with more campus events, at more universities and institutions, China’s coercion will be rendered ineffective, and its government would have no choice but to back down.
It is important that while we push to preserve freedom of speech on China at Western institutions, we also push to preserve the rights and freedoms of our students from mainland China.
Anti-China sentiment in the U.S. is at historic highs.
Freedom-of-speech operations should be constructed to encourage dialogue and foster norms of critical citizenship.
Done right, these events can protect Americans’ intellectual territory, and demonstrate the value of our open society. 

Sonny Bill Williams follows Mesut Özil in support of Uighur ethnic group

‘Sad time when we choose cupidity over humanity’
Australian Associated Press

This is the first time Sonny Bill Williams has publicly voiced his opposition to China’s treatment of the Uyghur people.

Sonny Bill Williams has tweeted his support of the minority Uighur ethnic group, mirroring the stance of football star Mesut Özil.
Cross-code star Williams may further provoke Chinese officialdom with his social media post, which denounces the treatment of Uighurs.
In his tweet on Monday, Williams echoed the belief of Arsenal playmaker Özil, who is also a practising Muslim, that more countries should speak out against China’s reported actions of detaining Uighur people in concentration camps.

Former Germany midfielder Mesut Özil has criticized Muslim countries for not speaking up for minorities subjected to abuse in China. More than 1 million people have been sent to concentration camps in the East Turkestan colony.

“It’s a sad time when we choose economic benefits over humanity #Uyghurs,” Williams wrote, accompanied by an image illustrating oppression against the Muslim minority group.


Sonny Bill Williams
✔@SonnyBWilliams

It’s a sad time when we choose economic benefits over humanity#Uyghurs

17K
9:02 PM - Dec 22, 2019


Greedy Arsenal distance themselves from Mesut Özil comments on Uighurs’ plight

Williams’ tweet comes a month after he signed a lucrative deal with Canada-based Super League club, Toronto Wolfpack, having ended a lengthy and successful career with the All Blacks.
It remains to be seen if there is a backlash from China against the 34-year-old New Zealander, who hasn’t previously voiced his opinion on such a sensitive international topic.
China’s state broadcaster removed the English Premier League match between Arsenal and Manchester City from its programming in response to Özil’s actions.
The German midfielder was also removed from a Chinese-produced football computer game.
Rugby league doesn’t have the same presence in China as football or basketball’s NBA, which paid a heavy financial price when an official criticised the Chinese government in October.
Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted support of protesters in Hong Kong, sparking Chinese demands that he be fired, which were rejected by the NBA.

China's Big Balls

China’s response to NBA Hong Kong tweet was a ‘violation of US sovereignty,’ Condoleezza Rice says
Rice’s comments refer to Beijing’s attack on Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey, who in early October tweeted an image that read, “Fight for Freedom. Stand for Hong Kong.”

By Natasha Turak

A Tiananmen Square-type crackdown on Hong Kong would be ‘huge mistake’: Rice

ABU DHABI, United Arab Emirates — China’s heavy-handed response to an NBA general manager’s comments on the turbulent protests in Hong Kong represents a violation of U.S. sovereignty, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said during a panel event in the United Arab Emirates capital on Monday.
“When China says to the NBA, the National Basketball Association, ‘your general manager cannot say something about what’s going on in Hong Kong,’ now that’s a violation of American sovereignty, because Americans have the right to say what they please,” Rice told CNBC’s Hadley Gamble at the annual Abu Dhabi International Petroleum Exhibition & Conference (Adipec).
“And so I think this has become something of a problem between the two countries, it’s not going to go away, it’s certainly not going to go away in Congress, where I think people are holding back on sanctions but worried that they may have to put them forward.”
Rice’s comments refer to Beijing’s harsh response to Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey, who in early October tweeted an image that read, “Fight for Freedom. Stand for Hong Kong.”

Chinese companies promptly suspended ties with the Rockets, and the Chinese Basketball Association terminated its cooperation with the team.

Men walk past a poster at an NBA exhibition in Beijing, China October 8, 2019.

In response to China’s anger, Morey and NBA Commissioner Adam Silver issued apologetic statements and distanced themselves from the Hong Kong comments, drawing a flood of criticism from members of Congress who accused them of putting profits over democratic values. 

With a population of roughly 1.4 billion people, China is the NBA’s most important international market.
Silver later said that Beijing demanded that he fire Morey.
Tensions continue to grip the world’s two largest economies, as stark differences in ideology and political values exacerbate animosity already triggered by a now 16-month-long trade war. Meanwhile, anti-Beijing protests in Hong Kong this week took their darkest turn since they began five months ago, with a protester shot by police and reports of a man set on fire.

In the last week, authorities have arrested a total of 266 people between the ages of 11 and 74, the Hong Kong police said Monday. 

Several pro-democracy lawmakers have been arrested and blocked roads are rampant around the city. 

More than 2,000 people have been arrested since October.
“There is great concern in the United States about what is going on in Hong Kong,” Rice said. 

“There is great concern first of all as to whether or not the promise from Beijing of one country and two systems is really being honored. And this is a conversation that I think governments need to have with the Chinese.”Still, she said, “We can’t tell the people of Hong Kong we’re somehow going intervene in Hong Kong. But we can continue to speak for the rights of those people to protest for their rights.”

Protesters set a shop of Chinese mobile brand Xiaomi on fire during a demonstration.

Protests in Hong Kong began in response to a proposed law that would have made it possible for Hong Kongers to be extradited to China to stand trial. 

That bill has been withdrawn, but the protests have continued. 

Hong Kong currently operates under the “one country, two systems” principle where Beijing gives Hong Kong’s citizens some legal and economic freedoms that it denies people on mainland China.
Among the protesters’ demands are a more representative democracy to choose the city leader, who is currently elected by a small, mostly pro-Beijing group of elites.
The fallout from the NBA controversy comes as both Republican and Democratic lawmakers are increasingly vocal in criticizing China’s trade practices and human rights record. 

It has only deepened distrust between the U.S. and China as the countries’ trade negotiators push ahead with high-stakes talks.
The worst thing China could do, Rice said, is to impose a brutal crackdown like that of the Tiananmen Square Massacre in 1989, when Chinese authorities killed an estimated several thousand pro-democracy protesters in an event whose history is now heavily censored and denied within the country.
“There is also concern as the reaction to the protests becomes more violent, as we’ve seen in the last day, and whether or not the Chinese government in Beijing is going to recognize this is not a flame they can just extinguish,” Rice added. 

“There is going to have to be a reckoning with the people of Hong Kong to help them to see that China intends to respect their system and their rights. I hope it’s not too late.”

Greedy American Quislings

China's vise grip on corporate America

by Erica Pandey


The NBA’s swift apology to Chinese fans for a single tweet in support of Hong Kong protestors is part of a troubling trend: The Communist Party in Beijing is setting boundaries for what Americans more than 7,000 miles away are willing to say on sensitive issues.

Why it matters: This isn't a covert operation. 

It's China using its market power to bully American companies and organizations in broad daylight — and muzzle free speech.

The big picture: U.S. companies are increasingly weighing in on social and political issues at home. But when it comes to China — in particular to Hong Kong or to mass detentions of Muslims in East Turkestan — they’re silent.
"When it has to do with market access in China and profits ... they will bend over backwards to apologize," says Bonnie Glaser, an expert on China at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The latest: An image that Houston Rockets' general manager Daryl Morey tweeted — then quickly deleted — that backed Hong Kong's pro-democracy protests kicked off a firestorm in China.
Both Morey and the NBA backtracked after offending Chinese fans. 

But the Chinese government, the Chinese Basketball Association and multiple Chinese businesses have severed ties with the Rockets, reports Axios' Kendall Baker.
Hanging in the balance is an NBA-Tencent streaming deal worth billions, the support of millions of Chinese fans and Morey's job.
This isn't the first time Beijing has squeezed an apology out of — or even changed the behavior of — an American entity.
Marriott apologized to China after Beijing shut down the hotel chain's website because it listed Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet and Macau as separate countries. 

"We don’t support separatist groups that subvert the sovereignty and territorial integrity of China,” the company said in a statement.
All three big U.S. airlines — American, United and Delta — bent to China's will last summer and scrubbed references to Taiwan as its own country.
The Gap — under threat of getting cut out of China — apologized for selling T-shirts with a map of China that didn't include Tibet or Taiwan. 

The company said its map was "incorrect."
Beijing, which is Hollywood's biggest international market, has also pushed American studios to alter content in order to get into Chinese theaters.
What to watch: NBA commissioner Adam Silver released a statement on the situation this morning.
"It is inevitable that people around the world — including from America and China — will have different viewpoints over different issues. It is not the role of the NBA to adjudicate those differences."
"However, the NBA will not put itself in a position of regulating what players, employees and team owners say or will not say on these issues. We simply could not operate that way."

The bottom line: Leveraging foreign access to its 1.5 billion consumers is one of China’s most potent weapons against the U.S.
"It's an authoritarian government, and the Communist Party is in control," Glaser says. 

"They are able to have impact on what their citizens do, and they can mobilize their citizens to hold boycotts if they want do that."

Chinese Peril

China Is an Underrated Threat to the World

By John Mauldin

Chinese occupying forces in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong, somewhere between 1–2 million people (out of a 7+ million population) have taken to the streets protesting an extradition bill proposed by Beijing.
These protests have been ongoing and persistent. 

That the extradition bill has now been withdrawn is seemingly not enough to satisfy Hongkongers.
And then came the furor over the NBA. 

The general manager of the Houston Rockets, Daryl Morey, tweeted out a small and rather innocuous message of support for the Hong Kong protesters.
(Note that Twitter is not allowed inside of China. This should have been a non-event. Almost any NBA referee would have overseen it as no harm, no foul.)
But it set off a furor within China. 

Contracts were cancelled, and the government demanded Morey be fired.

Think About That for a Second
Some low-level bureaucrat pressured businesses to cancel contracts and then demanded an American organization tell one of its members to fire one of its employees who had exercised what we think of as free speech over here.
Note that NBA basketball is one of China’s most popular sports. 

China is a growing market and moneymaker for the NBA. 

To his credit, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver defended the right of free speech and said there was “no chance” the league would discipline Morey over that tweet.
This was business as usual from the Chinese perspective. 

It is something every American company that does business in China has to deal with.
You don’t criticize the Chinese government. 

You block access to information the government wants hidden. 

You use maps that are Chinese-government approved. 

The list goes on and on.
The key “tell” is that the Chinese actually expected a reaction and felt they had the right to dictate to US companies and organizations, which because of prior acquiescence on the part of companies and organizations, led them to believe they would be successful.
Most of their “arm-twisting” is done behind closed doors and out of the view of the public. 

This was not…

This Is the Underlying Problem with China
The United States and the rest of the West are not dealing with 1.3 billion Chinese citizens and human beings. 

The country is run by the Chinese Communist Party, which controls almost every facet of life for everyone there.
Over the last three or four years, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with China’s ambitions.
There has been a surge of research pointing to the fact that the Chinese military has openly planned to be the dominant world power by 2049. 

And while many of these documents have been withdrawn, there is no doubt that they were written.
I have talked to people who have been in the libraries and read them in China. 

This desire for dominance has always been a latent force but one that was convenient to ignore, except that now we can no longer ignore it.
There’s a growing consensus that behind the Chinese economic colossus is a threat to not just the United States and other Western democracies, but the very concepts of free speech and personal liberty, not to mention property rights and the rule of law that we consider the foundations of civilization.
If something so utterly meaningless as a tweet about Hong Kong rises to the level that it requires “thought control” then what is next?

China’s Most Dangerous Profession

Jung Chang is one of the most celebrated chroniclers of modern China. Her life spotlights the threat that writing still holds for the country’s rulers.

By RICHARD BERNSTEIN

Jung Chang at the Times Chelte​nham literary festival.

If you grew up in China in the 1950s and ’60s, as Jung Chang did, the last thing you aspired to be was a writer. 

“Writing was the most dangerous profession,” she told me recently.
In fact, writing was taken so seriously that most of the violent purges engineered by the Chinese Communist Party’s demigod leader, Mao Zedong—including the Cultural Revolution—began with an attack on some article or play or piece of literary criticism on the grounds of its alleged bourgeois or anti-Mao characteristics. 

There would be an opening salvo written by a Maoist acolyte, after which everybody who was anybody in China would line up in an Orwellian exercise of ritual denunciation of the isolated and defenseless writer. 

From there, the campaign would expand to claim hundreds of thousands of victims. 

“No parents would tell their child, ‘Become a writer,’” Chang said.
Of course, Chang did become a writer, leaving China to study in Britain in 1978, and over time a celebrated chronicler of the modern Chinese experience in the English language, one of the first from China itself to overturn some of the romantic-revolutionary conceptions of Mao and his era that had a remarkably long life in the West. 

Her first book, Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China—a memoir of her grandmother, her mother, and herself living through China’s tragically turbulent 20th century—sold 10 million copies and was probably the most widely read personal account ever to come directly out of the belly of the Chinese beast. 

She followed that up 12 years later with a contentious, blistering, 800-page treatment of Mao himself, co-written with her husband, the historian Jon Halliday; then came an eye-opening revisionist biography of the Empress Dowager Cixi, a sinister villain in the eyes of most previous historians, a progressive feminist hero to Chang.
Her role as a writer who explained China to the West has dissipated somewhat—as China has grown in importance and as news coverage of the country and its impact on the world has increased. 

There are also now an array of writers from China, many of them living in the West, who have created a specifically Chinese voice that is accessible to foreigners in English (as well as a litany of other languages), with much of their best work, be it novels, memoirs, or journalism, banned in their motherland. 

In a way, these writers have picked up where Wild Swans left off, providing an ongoing dissenting portrait of China in the years since the events that Chang wrote about. 

In addition, a younger cadre of Western historians who study China deeply has emerged, demolishing whatever remains of Maoist apologetics.
Yet one thing is unchanged from Chang’s younger years: Writing about China remains a dangerous occupation—dangerous of course to China’s citizens, but now even to foreigners who challenge the official doctrine. 

Witness the storm of protest from China, the threats and the economic penalties imposed on the National Basketball Association over a single tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, who briefly wrote of (and hastily deleted) his support for pro-democracy demonstrations in Hong Kong. 

China’s ruling authority has a very thin skin. 

Inside the country, the danger of writing leads to pervasive self-censorship, and more and more that appears to apply to those outside the country, too.
Of course, even at the time when Wild Swans appeared, Chang was not alone in opening Western eyes to the full horror of the Maoist era. 

When we spoke, she was quick to give credit to Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai, an unforgettable account of survival in the Cultural Revolution, as an earlier example of such works. Subsequently there have been other books—Wu Ningkun’s A Single Tear and the physicist Fang Lizhi’s The Most Wanted Man in China among the most affecting of them. 

But while she hasn’t had the field to herself for a long time, Chang occupies a special position, not only because Wild Swans, with its historical, multigenerational sweep and its sheer narrative power, is a true masterpiece, but also because she has moved on from memoirist to what might be called a polemical historian.
Chang could have followed what some might have expected to be her natural trajectory—becoming a kind of Chinese Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a public critic of China’s cruelly authoritarian, one-party system. 

Her more recent works, including Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister, out October 29, instead take a different approach.
“I like the distance that only history provides,” she said. 

“History is no less devastating.” 

She meant devastating in the effect that an honest attempt at recounting the past can have on the sanctioned Chinese version of the past. 

In China, that is the heroic chronicle according to which the Communist Party rescued the country from the scourges of imperialism, poverty, and oppression. 

A few years ago, in a proclamation known as “Document Number Nine,” the party’s central committee warned against what it said were wrong ideological tendencies, among them “historical nihilism,” meaning history that undermines the official account of the past. 

“History is one of the biggest taboos in China today,” Chang told me. 

“It’s not some harmless, apolitical thing.” 

In this sense, Chang is one of the world’s leading historical nihilists.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister is a collective biography of three women of China’s 20th century, the Soong sisters—famous for marrying powerful men, notorious for their extravagance and corruptibility, and for the ways they used their proximity to power. 

Soong Qingling (Red Sister) married Sun Yat-sen, the leader of the 1911 revolution that overthrew China’s last dynasty; Soong Meiling (Little Sister) was the wife of the Nationalist head Chiang Kai-shek, who led China for 20 years until he was overthrown by the Communists; and Soong Ailing (Big Sister) was married to H. H. Kung, Chiang’s corrupt minister of finance. 

Chang makes the case that the trio, in their different, conflicting ways, were both close observers of and participants in the deadly, knife-in-the-back struggle for power between Chiang’s Nationalists and the Communists that in one guise or another dominated China for a quarter century.
Like Wild Swans, the book intertwines the intimate with the big historical picture, tying their personal stories to the deep and irreconcilable political divisions among them. 

Meiling, for example, had an early, visceral dislike of the Communists, while Qingling loathed Chiang, her brother-in-law, which was one of the things that made her a faithful servant of Mao and the Communists most of her life. 

At the end of 1947, not long before the Nationalists would have to flee to what is now Taiwan, it had become clear to both Chiang and Meiling that the Communists were winning the Chinese civil war. Meiling, on a mission from her husband, invited Qingling on an outing to ask her what the Communists’ conditions were for ending the conflict. 

Qingling replied with “the same old make-believe,” Chang writes, “that she had nothing to do with the Communists” and didn’t know their conditions. 

Then Qingling “left her sister and boarded the next train to Shanghai, where she immediately informed the CCP of the conversation between her and Little Sister,” not wanting the party to suspect her of double-dealing.
The new book fits into the period between Cixi and Mao, and seeks to understand how China went from the promising days after the fall of the last dynasty to the Maoist wreckage. 

And while it is probably Chang’s least edgy, least contentious work, it is still stamped by her revisionist impulse.
Cixi was the most powerful person in China for most of the second half of the 19th century and has been regarded by most historians as a usurping, reactionary tyrant, but Chang portrayed her as a pioneering reformer, “the modernizer who brought China out of the medieval world,” as she put it to me. 

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, Chang argued that it was Cixi who had fostered the freedom that China experienced in the couple of decades after the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty. 

“She was the first to ban foot binding, which had tormented my grandmother and Chinese women for a thousand years,” Chang said. 

“In school in China we learned that it was the Communist Party that did that.” 

Her and Halliday’s biography of Mao was criticized by some historians for always putting forth the worst possible interpretation of things. 

Still, informed by some 200 interviews with people who knew Mao, the book made a powerful case for the authors’ withering judgment of a man still admired in parts of the world as a revolutionary genius. 

In Chang and Halliday’s view, Mao belonged with Hitler and Stalin as one of the most destructive and hateful figures of 20th-century history.
Big Sister, Little Sister, Red Sister keeps in that revisionist tradition. 

Chang debunks Sun’s reputation as one of China’s great founding figures, for example, finding him to be not just mediocre and self-serving but at least partially responsible for bringing an end to the democratic experiment that marked the first couple of decades following the overthrow of the Manchus. 

She also blames him for inviting to China the Soviet advisers who brought Leninism to the country. 

In a significant recasting of conventional views on this topic, she also argues that it was Sun’s, and subsequently Chiang’s, war against the republican government in Beijing—presented by most historians as a liberation of the country from warlord control—that doomed the chance of a Chinese liberal democracy.
Chang is translating the book into Chinese for publication in Hong Kong and Taiwan, but almost surely not mainland China. 

It contains too much truth about Mao and the Communists to get past the censors. 

And here we see again the threat, in Beijing’s view, of writing: Not only are Chang’s and others’ published work not available to Chinese readers, but that work has led many of them to be exiled from the country. 

After her biography of Mao came out, Chang was banned from China. 

Only through the intervention of the British government did Chinese authorities relent slightly, allowing her to visit the country to see her 88-year-old mother, but just for two weeks at a time and under strict conditions.
“When I’m there, I’m in a cocoon,” she told me of her trips to China. 

“I can have no contact beyond my immediate family.” 

She spoke of her dread that even this “privilege” will one day be revoked, of the anxiety she experienced living apart from her mother, of the sadness she felt for being treated as what she called a “nonperson” in her home country. 

“But,” she said, “I realize this is the price I pay for writing honestly.”

The Chinese Threat to American Speech

American companies have an obligation to defend the freedom of expression, even at the risk of angering China.
The New York Times

China’s assertive campaign to police discourse about its policies, even outside of its borders, and the acquiescence of American companies eager to make money in China, pose a dangerous and growing threat to one of this nation’s core values: the freedom of expression.
The Communist state is becoming more and more aggressive in pressuring foreign companies to choose between self-censorship and the loss of access to what will soon be the world’s largest market. 

An old list of taboo topics, sometimes described as the “three Ts” — Tibet, Tiananmen and Taiwan — has been joined by newer subjects that must not be mentioned, including protests in Hong Kong and China’s mistreatment of its Muslim minority.
This month, China responded to a tweet by Daryl Morey, the general manager of the Houston Rockets, in support of the Hong Kong protesters — a message he posted while in Japan, on a website that is not even accessible in mainland China — by demanding Mr. Morey’s firing and by canceling broadcasts of N.B.A. games, a histrionic display intended not just to punish the N.B.A. but also to intimidate other foreign firms into censoring themselves.
The Constitutions of China and the United States both enshrine freedom of speech, but China’s totalitarian regime has long taken a narrow view of that freedom — and American companies have long accepted those restrictions while doing business in China. 

Now, however, China is seeking to control not just what is said in China but what is said about China, too. 

If China has its way, any topic it deems off limits will be scrubbed from global discourse.
For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the United States finds itself in a contest of ideas and principles with a country in its own weight class. 

But this time is different. 

The United States and China are economically intertwined.

But China is engaged in the kind of cultural imperialism it often decries.
China insists that its national interest is at stake. 

So is the national interest of the United States and other free nations. 

China has taken a hard line, and it’s time for the United States to respond in kind. 

The United States and American businesses have a duty to not appease the censors in Beijing — even if the price of insisting on free expression is a loss of access to the Chinese market.
The N.B.A., to its credit, is standing firm. 

After an initial round of obsequious apologies prompted widespread criticism in the United States, the league’s commissioner, Adam Silver, said that the league was committed to free expression and that players and other league personnel remained free to speak their minds despite what he described as “fairly dramatic” financial repercussions from lost business in China.
“We wanted to make an absolutely clear statement that the values of the N.B.A., these American values — we are an American business — travel with us wherever we go,” Mr. Silver said on Thursday in New York. 

“And one of those values is free expression.”
But far too many American companies have shown that their values are for sale. 

They don’t even haggle much over the price. 

Last year, the Chinese government demanded that foreign airlines remove references to Taiwan from their websites, because China views Taiwan as a renegade province. 

The four American airlines affected by the order — American, Delta, Hawaiian and United — present themselves to the world as representatives of the United States. 

The American flag is painted on the outside of their planes; the interiors are American territory. 

But instead of standing up for American values, the airlines complied with China’s orders. 

Other recent examples of capitulation include the fashion retailer Coach destroying T-shirts that read “Hong Kong,” rather than “Hong Kong, China,” and Marriott firing a social media manager in Omaha for “liking” a tweet posted by a group that backs Tibetan independence.
Increasingly, China doesn’t even need to raise an eyebrow for global businesses to blink: American companies are engaged in proactive appeasement. 

In the new animated movie “Abominable,” released by DreamWorks, a subsidiary of Comcast, one scene includes a map of China with a boundary line encompassing most of the South China Sea. 

The United States does not recognize that line; neither do the other nations that border the sea, including Vietnam, which pulled the film from theaters. 

ESPN, a Disney subsidiary, displayed a similar map of China — showing what is known as the “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea — on a recent broadcast.
Comcast and Disney are, of course, free to advocate for the Chinese Communist Party’s position, and against the American and global consensus, in the continuing dispute over China’s international boundaries. 

But by all appearances, the decisions were both less principled and more pernicious: The companies acquiesced in China’s view of the world simply because that was the path of least resistance.
Some companies have tried to evade the issue by insisting they want to avoid politics altogether. Blizzard Entertainment, a subsidiary of the California video game maker Activision Blizzard, banned a user for shouting “Liberate Hong Kong, revolution of our times” during an online tournament earlier this month, and confiscated $10,000 in winnings. 

The company, which later returned the money and commuted the ban to a six-month suspension, said it would have taken the same action if a player had shouted in opposition to the Hong Kong protesters. 

A rival company, the Los Angeles-based Riot Games, announced its own ban on political speech, warning players to “refrain from discussing” political issues, including the Hong Kong protests. (Tencent, a Chinese conglomerate, holds a 5 percent stake in Activision and owns the entirety of Riot.)
Companies face particular pressure on the internet because deference to physical geography is no longer a viable standard. 

“When in Rome, do as the Romans do,” has lost its meaning. 

On the internet, one is always at home and always in Rome, too. 

But there is, or should be, a critical point of difference between American and Chinese internet businesses. 

Corporations are the creatures of a particular state, however much their executives prefer to think of their operations as multinational. 

American companies choose to operate under the laws of the United States and to reap the benefits of life in the United States — and they ought to be held accountable for upholding the values of the United States. 

American companies should feel a responsibility for maintaining the right to free expression in the internet spaces they create and operate. 

Otherwise, they risk becoming the enforcers of a corporate regime of global censorship that takes its marching orders from Xi Jinping.
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Facebook, which is banned in China, said this week that the character of the internet must not be taken for granted. 

“Today, the state of the global internet around the world is primarily defined by American companies and platforms with strong free expression values. There’s just no guarantee that will win out over time.”
Facebook’s role as the private manager of the nation’s public square generates constant controversy, most recently over its refusal to prevent politicians from disseminating clear falsehoods. 

And the debate over its policies highlights the challenges and contradictions of America’s commitment to free expression. 

Yet Mr. Zuckerberg is undoubtedly correct that his imperfect company, along with other American tech giants, are the guardians of free expression on the internet. 

The responsibility of American companies is to maintain that commitment to free expression even if the price is not doing business in China.
It is a price The New York Times, and several other media companies, already pay.
Donald Trump has weakened the ability of American companies to stand up for American values, including free expression, by making clear he does not share those values and by failing to firmly oppose China’s demands. 

A White House spokeswoman last year described China’s order to airlines as “Orwellian nonsense,” but the administration, which has been so quick to threaten China with harsh consequences for its trade policies, did not defend the airlines by warning of similar consequences for China’s efforts to suppress free speech. 

If American companies are to stand up for American values, their own government should be in their corner.
Back in 2009, North Carolina State University canceled an appearance by the Dalai Lama, whom China regards as an enemy of the state. 

The explanation offered by the school’s provost, Warwick Arden, was memorably frank: “China is a major trading partner for North Carolina.” 

What Arden and the many Americans in positions of authority who have since followed him down that disgraceful path seem to forget is that North Carolina is also a major trading partner for China. 

Those fearing the loss of what the United States gets from China would do well to consider that China fears the loss of what it gets from the United States. 

And the government can buttress American companies by making clear that penalties for free speech will be met in kind. 

The proper response to a Chinese threat to prevent American planes from landing in China is to make clear that Chinese planes would not be allowed to land in the United States.
America also can strengthen its hand by making common cause with other nations that value free expression. 

China has placed similar pressure on the Italian company Versace; German companies, including Mercedes-Benz; and airlines from around the world.
America’s commitment to human rights, including the freedom of expression, has always required careful tending and firm resolve. 

It now faces an especially stern test. 

The world is watching — and talking.

A moral pygmy with muscle

LeBron Jame$ Is A Coward

There's nothing wrong with exporting capitalism. There's absolutely something wrong about supporting tyrants.
By David Harsanyi

NBA superstar LeBron James says Houston Rockets General Manager Daryl Morey was “misinformed” and “wasn’t educated on the situation at hand” when he tweeted in support of Hong Kong’s freedom demonstrations. 

Morey’s sin was sharing an image of a slogan that read, “Fight for freedom. Stand with Hong Kong.” Even though the GM, regrettably, deleted his tweet, one strongly suspects his grasp of China— where the state is running “re-education” camps filled with Uyghurs—is considerably stronger than any of the NBA’s leading apologists.
Only last year, James, a purported champion of social justice, came out in support of former quarterback Colin Kaepernick with the vacuous platitude, “I stand with anyone who believes in change.” 

Anyone? 

Of course, LeBron’s stand, as with most acts of pretend celebrity bravery, resulted in hosannas being thrown at him by the press, and, more importantly, never costing him a penny.
Americans tend to use word like “stand” and “fight” in their political disagreements, although they never really have to stand and fight for anything. 

Tank Man stood and fought. 

The Hong Kong protesters stand and fight. 

We take to social media and argue. 

Posting a Nike-approved picture on your Instagram account of Kaepernick—adorned with the $40-million market-test slogan, “Believe in something, Even if it means sacrificing everything”—is not an act of bravery, LeBron.
And that’s fine. 

All of this just speaks to the relative safety afforded dissent and protest in our political life. 

In the United States celebrities are free to accuse the president of being a fascist dictator or “bum,” and no one is coming to knock on their doors. 

Watching fabulously wealthy men fretting over their words abroad is a useful reminder of the liberalism we have inherited.
There’s nothing wrong with playing NBA games in China. 

The Chinese people are the victims of their system, after all, and the more connection they have to the rest of the world the better. 

There isn’t really even any pressing demand for professional athletes to speak out on geopolitical issues. 

Once the Hong Kong question was exposed, though, it was deeply revolting to watch those who benefit most in a meritocratic society acquiescing to the illiberal diktats of a foreign regime.
It’s especially galling to listen to those who peddle hysteria about contemporary American politics pandering to the Chinese commissars. 

Apparently, those most prone to calling out pretend Hitlers can’t get themselves to say a negative word about real-world Hitlers.
Take Warriors coach Steve Kerr, a constant social media commentator, with opinions on seemingly every contemporary political issue. 

First, Kerr deflected questions about the totalitarian Chinese state by risibly claiming he needed to confer with his brother-in-law, a professor, to get a better handle on the issue. 

When later asked if he’d ever been confronted about human rights abuses on his previous trips to China, Kerr replied, “No. Nor has (America’s) record of human rights abuses come up either… People in China didn’t ask me about, you know, people owning AR-15s and mowing each other down in a mall.”
Showing contempt for your own country doesn’t erase 70 years of mass murder, famine, and incomprehensible hardship for the Chinese people. 

The Chinese state not only sanctions concentration camps today, it subjects countless people to other forms of totalitarianism. 

Those who shoot AR-15s in American malls are criminals and murderers who are breaking an array of laws in a free country. 

Not a single politician or organization approves of their actions. 

The fact that Kerr would compare the two is at best clueless, and at worst shamefully unpatriotic.
“My team and this league just went through a difficult week,” LeBron ludicrously lamented after some well-deserved blowback to his initial comments, “I think people need to understand what a tweet or statement can do to others. And I believe nobody stopped and considered what would happen.”
What happened? 

The Chinese Basketball Association cut some ties with the Rockets, and it would probably cut ties with the NBA if players and managers had the decency to speak out.
I suppose it’s too much to expect NBA stars to back Hong Kong freedom fighters rather than agonize over rounding errors in their banking accounts. 

The NBA wants to make money in China. 

There’s nothing wrong with exporting capitalism. 

But if the NBA is going to start adopting and enforcing the illiberalism of the Chinese state to make money, it becomes a huge ethical problem.

Be Brave. Be Water. Be Ready: Three Days Among The Freedom Protesters In Hong Kong

When a fourth of your population demands something, there is a serious consequence when nothing happens — when millions of law-abiding people feel their autonomy is at risk.
By Ben Domenech

On a gray, humid day in June, a 35-year-old man named Marco Leung climbed atop a platform on elevated scaffolding outside the ritzy complex known as Pacific Place in the Admiralty district of Hong Kong, and announced he was tired of being ignored.

He wore a bright yellow raincoat festooned with slogans — in the days to come, Hong Kong protesters would brand him “Raincoat Man” — and he unfurled a lengthy sign saying in English and Chinese: “No extradition to China, total withdrawal of the extradition bill, we are not rioters, release the students and injured, Carrie Lam step down, help Hong Kong.”
In the hours to come, police and firefighters would swarm the area. 

Negotiators attempted to convince him to come down, but he refused. 

Firefighters ended up confronting Leung, who, after climbing away from them outside the railings, fell about 60 feet to his death, missing an inflated police cushion. 

It was branded a suicide, the first of eight since the Hong Kong protests began, though the macabre footage doesn’t really bear that out.
Leung was no radical, at least until recently. 

He had previously indicated support of the Hong Kong Federation of Trade Unions, an establishment group, and backed establishment candidates on social media as recently as 2016. 

He backed Wong Kwok-hing, among others, who lost his seat to the more aggressively pro-democracy Roy Kwong — a Democracy Party legislator who was at Leung’s protest that day, urging him to come down safely. 

The police declined to let Kwong participate — so he crossed the road and used a loudspeaker instead, ultimately to no avail.


Ray Chan
✔@ray_slowbeat
My colleague Roy Kwong has done his best to prevent tragedies & abuses. As butcher Carrie Lam's regime remains in power, sad events including the loss of life are bound to happen. This Gov't and its enablers must be made accountable for their fascist politics. #HongKongProtests

211
5:22 PM - Jun 15, 2019 · Hong Kong

After his death, Leung’s parents spoke out through a friend, urging on the young people of Hong Kong.
“Every brave citizen who takes to the street is doing so because they love Hong Kong deeply. Only by protecting themselves and staying alive can young people continue to speak up bravely against social injustices.”
The location Leung chose indicates the way the Hong Kong protesters cut across lines of culture and class.
While a “V for Vendetta” slogan is spray-painted a stone’s throw from where he hit the ground — “People shouldn’t be afraid of their government, governments should be afraid of their people” — this is no class uprising.
It is instead a broad cross-section of Hong Kong’s 7 million citizens who are joining in: blue and white collar, those of wealth and middle class, sons and daughters delaying their college education to join in.
At the luxuriant lounge in the JW Marriott, housed within the Pacific Place complex, about a hundred American dollars buys entry to a buffet of endless caviar, seared foie gras, lobster thermidor, fresh langoustines, mussels, crab legs, shrimp dumplings, lamb pops, roasted beef and pork, roasted squab, sushi, fruits and cheeses of all manner, four kinds of aged ham, three kinds of smoked salmon, bespoke Asian noodle dishes, and bottomless wine and champagne.
The tourists are mostly from the mainland: The men wear “Avengers” T-shirts and drawstring shorts with Nikes, while the women dress in shimmering summer blouses and flowing skirts with ankle boots.
Upper-middle-class people gorge while the middle class goes for an esteemed mother’s birthday.
She loves her gift of Italian perfume from the mega complex beneath us, five floors of an adult playground of shopping and excess that rivals any high-end American mega mall.
All the brands are there, though a group of college-aged girls express disappointed sounds outside the Celine store that is not yet open.
The doors are where you notice it first.
The heavy metal door hangings are bound in multiple ways, M-shaped locks paired with chains and padlocks, plus sandbags and interlocked metal barriers at other entrances.
It creates mazes where shoppers have to backtrack and ride the same escalator twice.
When you do the circuit, it’s easy to spot the choke points.
That’s where you’ll find men in suits who look tired and hold radios or have earbuds, wearing sunglasses, always watchful.
This is the same complex where just a few months ago, Leung would be the first death in a series of protests that would rock Hong Kong.
Over the course of the past 19 weeks, protesters have taken to the streets all over the city.
They have engaged in all manner of behavior.
Several of them have died, all reportedly by suicide.
Not all the protesters believe that’s the real reason.
But others claim the despair is so great among the youths of the city that suicide is very predictable.
When you talk to the people who are behind the democracy movement, to the protesters and the organizers and the organizer-adjacent, you can view the motives that have animated the streets for the past 19-plus weeks as existing within a broader context of conflict over autonomy and self-determination.
If you are a young Hong Konger, in your late 20s to early 30s, you remember the past before the handoff.
You are mindful of the years when Hong Kong had a higher degree of autonomy that would presumably be protected.
You see what you are losing in the current moment — and that’s what makes you take to the streets.
The current protests are being framed by the West as the first in Hong Kong in the era of comprehensive digital media and social communication that can bypass the restrictions of the state. That’s true to an extent — much of what’s happened in the past weeks here has focused on that audience.
But what separates this from the past, such as the Umbrella Revolution, is that the whole city is all in on this, existentially, regardless of class divide. 
This despite the wishful thinking of the likes of Russia Today, the propaganda network of Vladimir Putin, which compared the protesters to classist uprisers from the film series “The Purge,” splicing clips together between the violent American movie and the acts of protesters in the city.
That level of deadly violence, as waged by the protesters, is absent, but there is violence nonetheless — petrol fire bombs, sharp objects, and vandalism abound.
Graffiti is omnipresent, but painted over lazily, as if the cleaners know that they will be back to do the same task again the next morning.
The city does not feel like a powder keg — more like a solid pot that looks safe and cool to the touch, but inside hides a roiling boil that will burn you in an instant.

Hawley’s Night with Hong Kong Protesters
The night one policeman’s neck was slashed, Sen. Josh Hawley, freshman Republican from Missouri, was in the streets with the protesters, bearing witness to their actions and the response of the police.
A white Kia emblazoned with graffiti, smashed and broken open with its contents spilled on the ground, was a short half-block from the main street.
According to protesters, the occupant inside had presented himself as a journalist, but was in reality a cop embedded within the movement.
Whether true or not, the protesters had exacted their revenge on his vehicle, cracking it open like an egg and feathering it with fliers and leaflets.
After a few minutes of press attention, clad in yellow jackets, streaming in a multitude of languages, holding up their various electronic devices in the spitting rain, came the sound of shouts that in any language reveal the the oncoming threat of Five-O.
“Be Water” is the mantra of the protesters now — a reference to their own Bruce Lee, who said, “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way around or through it.”
Instead of seeking physical confrontation with the cops, now they flow away from the high ground in all directions, and regroup.
The cops roll in en masse, prompting a scurry of masked individuals from the scene.
They run in all directions as bus after bus unloads masked police officers, clad in armor and bulky gear, wielding large shields and bellowing orders.
They surround the scene and push back anyone in the area, blocking the nearby intersection.
They carry tear gas guns and batons, with no identifying badge numbers, and if you try to take their picture even of their glaring eyes, they unleash a torrent of epilepsy-inducing strobe lights.
Hawley, a slim athletic man who looks more like a health nut executive than a senator, loped through the cross streets, standing head and shoulders above the crowd, talking variously with protesters and with press, taking pictures on his own phone to share with the Western world.
His staff had to work to pull him away from the scene, even when the loudspeakers are ordering crowds to disperse.
The protesters and organizers know who Hawley is, and some even mention that he is the youngest senator.
It is a funny thing to hear Hong Kong twentysomethings with a greater knowledge of American civics than the average U.S. voter — especially when they query about subcommittee hearings and unanimous consent.
The interest of the protest-adjacent leadership is in the passage of the Hong Kong Human Rights and Democracy Act — authored originally by Marco Rubio, with more than 30 bipartisan co-sponsors.
Whether it would result in meaningful impact on Hong Kong’s situation or not, it would be a signal to Hong Kong and Beijing and other nations as well about the way these protests are perceived.
An older woman, unmasked and barefoot, wearing a flowery orange and pink dress, stands on the corner of the intersection, letting the police have it.
A call and response develops between the different corners as members of the press crowd around the woman.
The protesters are not throwing anything at the police or engaging in physical action, but they are daring them to do what they have seen them do for weeks: to beat the citizens they are supposed to protect, not for doing anything wrong, but for the things they dare to say.
Everyone is waiting for something to break.
This time, the cops hold back.
They know the next 24 hours will potentially bring an even bigger demonstration, and don’t want to make another martyr on the eve of a public spectacle.
They set about clearing the makeshift barricade protesters had arranged — a rather impressive mix of trash cans, traffic signs, concrete, and rebar.
Well-dressed shopkeepers along the main drag peer through metal slats they bring down whenever the sirens draw near.
In between the stores and shops, the graffiti blanketing wooden barriers alternates between Cantonese and English, expressing all manner of viewpoints — but all anti-cop.
Some words indicated the cops were working hand in glove with the local Triads criminal operation, something that has been accused multiple times.
Others focused more blatantly on the mainland, including one saying, “Pooh is watching,” Winnie the Pooh being a stand-in for Dictator Xi.
Recently, a particularly enterprising protester set up a broadcast allowing for the “South Park” episode “Band in China” featuring just that reference to be displayed after it was, well, banned in China.
These are the types of tactics these young, technologically adept and passionate protesters are engaged in.
A strobe light from an anonymous cop’s shoulder doesn’t really stand a chance against it.
In the morning, Hawley will describe the scene in Hong Kong to the Western press as a “police state” — prompting Hong Kong’s chief politician Carrie Lam to disagree.
It is hard to see how he is wrong.


Josh Hawley
✔@HawleyMO
I chose the words “police state” purposely - because that is exactly what Hong Kong is becoming. I saw it myself. If Carrie Lam wants to demonstrate otherwise, here’s an idea: resign https://twitter.com/tictoc/status/1183935160707764225 …
Bloomberg TicToc
✔@tictoc
"To describe Hong Kong as a police state is totally unfounded."
Leader Carrie Lam says U.S. senators visiting Hong Kong have preconceived views about the city. Senators Josh Hawley, Ted Cruz and Rick Scott have visited the city since the #HongKongProtests #香港

23.7K
5:31 AM - Oct 15, 2019

American Response and Corporate Censorship
In recent weeks, this story took on new life in America and the West thanks to some odd flashpoints. For America, much of it was focused on the issue of the National Basketball Association.
The NBA has an extreme foothold here — 17 percent of its revenue comes from China, and it had the misfortune this month to discover that this Hong Kong issue was creeping into the overall tour that was going on promoting the basketball association in China, featuring some of its biggest stars.
After Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey had the audacity to retweet an image meme supporting freedom in Hong Kong, the Chinese flipped, and Americans flipped even more when they saw how quickly various "woke" athletes and administrators in the NBA, who have made politics a centerpiece of their appeal in recent years, were willing to bend the knee to the Chinese communists.
The most recent was LeBron James, whose cowardly comments trended on Twitter hours after the massive protests took over Hong Kong streets again.
James called for Morey to educate himself.
Well, we’re all in need of a good re-education, from time to time.


Ben Domenech
✔@bdomenech
This was the Top Tweet I saw as I switched from my burner after three days in Hong Kong among the protesters.
Look into the eyes of a young Hong Konger who has seen her friends beaten and imprisoned and spout this bullshit.
I have never hated LeBron until this instant. https://twitter.com/BenGolliver/status/1183917743680020480 …
Ben Golliver
✔@BenGolliver
Lakers’ LeBron James on NBA’s China controversy: “I don’t want to get into a ... feud with Daryl Morey but I believe he wasn’t educated on the situation at hand and he spoke.”

5,592
5:15 AM - Oct 15, 2019

In the category of video games, an outburst from a gamer within the Blizzard universe led to crackdowns and apologies that rocketed around a world of advanced E-gamers who have become far more popular than ever before, even rivaling great physical athletes.
Protesters also saw the bending of the knee from other corporations, such as Apple, which deleted the HKmap.live app being used by some protesters to track the activities of police in Hong Kong.
But it was hardly their only app.
In Hong Kong, it’s understood that not everyone can take the black or wear a mask.
For their part, the white-collar protesters are doing their best to hide.
They are canceling their own social media accounts.
They are trying to prevent themselves from being connected to their businesses for any political expressions.
They are worried about the accountability and the enforcement mechanisms used by authoritarian regimes that can control the access to billions of potential customers.
But they still are showing up to the protests, such as those on Monday that clogged the streets with peaceful demonstrators.
Meanwhile, the police union has asked for permission to fire at will on protesters who use various implements:
Authorities have already loosened guidelines on the use of force by police, according to documents seen by Reuters on Thursday, as they struggle to stamp out anti-government protests that have rocked Hong Kong for nearly four months.
The loosening of restrictions on the use of force by police came into effect just before some of the most violent turmoil yet at protests on Tuesday, when a teenaged secondary school student was shot by an officer in the chest and wounded — the first time a demonstrator had been hit by live fire. …
Local media Now TV and Cable TV reported the changes to the police procedures manual took effect on Sept. 30, the day before Tuesday’s violence at widespread protests on China’s National Day, during which the student was shot. …
The updated guidelines also removed a line that said “officers will be accountable for their own actions”, stating only that “officers on the ground should exercise their own discretion to determine what level of force is justified in a given situation”.
Police have shot one protester already with live ammunition. 
The protesters expect there will be more.
On the mainland, the focus has been on economic policy and welfare, and Carrie Lam would like to stick to that.
But in reality, these protests are about a lot more than that.
They are about the future of a Hong Kong that many people see as slipping away, one that young people in particular fear they are losing.
The protests started with concerns that the extradition law would mean the end of Hong Kong as they know it.
Now, it’s about something much bigger.
After multiple incidents where the cops are seen as having whitewashed the facts, they have lost the assumption among the citizenry that they are telling the truth. 
Already, political activists are fleeing to other countries.
Elderly groups who attempt to protect the children have already incited police incidents.
Religious freedom concerns are rising, particularly about the Chinese state wanting to set up boards to infiltrate and alter those assumptions of religious schools.
The crackdown on free internet is constantly feared.
A government official who was asked about this on the radio recently was quoted as saying, “Never say never.”

This Hong Kong Protest Is Different From the Past
This is not the first era of protest in Hong Kong since the handover in 1997.
Previous protests, such as the Umbrella Revolution, were overwhelmingly peaceful, but there is now a feeling that a peaceful approach has not been effective, particularly in an era in which police appear ready to engage in escalating levels of violence.
For years, pro-democracy advocates who feared that Beijing would crack down on the city system they know and love restrained themselves, participating almost exclusively in nonviolent protest. They would march with permits, organize under the existing law, and generally not buck the system they inhabit.
This feels different.
Joshua Wong, a student activist who was at the center of both Umbrella and other protests in the past, who was standing in jail when he saw the nearly 2 million people come out to protest peacefully in the streets back in July, is concerned that this is a moment in which Hong Kong could see its autonomy seriously slip away, based not just on its own situation but on the international priorities of Dictator Xi.
These are the sorts of concerns echoed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.
Wearing all black in sympathy for the protesters, he visited key figures in Hong Kong this past week and spoke to the West on “Face the Nation.”
A spokesman for Beijing reportedly said he would no longer be welcome in Hong Kong, something which Cruz may be likely to test in the future.
The use of excessive force is an underlying element of all of the protesters’ complaints. 
Police remove gas masks from protesters who are trying to resist the tear gas the officers throw. 
They use water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. 
They take gas masks even off journalists, and they arbitrarily arrest bystanders. 
During the Umbrella protests, there were only eight arrests of cops for use of excessive force, stemming from two incidents.
And according to protester counts, in the past four months, the police in Hong Kong have deployed 3,000 gas canisters, compared to 89 during the entirety of the Umbrella protests.
The establishment on the island, made up of both politicians and tycoons who work within the financial sector, have largely favored what Beijing and the mainland has favored in recent years.
But the threat of an extradition law that would have rolled back the authority of Hong Kong to adjudicate criminal matters regarding its citizens proved a bridge too far.
Not wanting to displease the political authorities but wanting to maintain their authority, a few of these corporate citizens have broken from the rest of the herd.
Mainland China is not interested in such breakage. 
It is demanding more and more the kind of fealty one would expect from an authoritarian regime.

Hong Kong Protesters Have Big Demands
The protesters have five demands — a series of issues they want to be at the centerpiece of the conversation over the next week as the Legislative Council meets for the first time since these protests began.
Carrie Lam, under siege politically and facing falling popularity, is set to give an agenda-setting speech, though it’s unclear whether security concerns will allow her to give it in person.
The mask ban is a key point of dispute here.
It attracted international attention recently, designed to crack down on the ability of protesters to keep their identities secret.
It was not a legislative action, but an executive one — a step undertaken outside the process.
Protesters fear it is a sign of what will come.
Rather than being motivated by independence, the protesters in Hong Kong are focused on the issue of autonomy — a form of autonomy they have experienced for decades.
They see within the expansion of Xi Jinping’s power the threat to that existence and to the one country, two systems approach.
These protests are more connected to other populist movements around the world, of the past and the present, than external observers have acknowledged.
It took over a year of open combat before the Americans gave up on their original aim of self-governance under the crown and went for independence in the 1700s. 
Radicalization takes time, but when it comes, it comes in a torrent.
All around the world, people are tired of being governed by leaders who do not care how they vote. Hong Kong is joining them in this.
The possibility that the Hong Kong authorities will use colonial powers to suspend habeas corpus, defy the public will, and crack down in violent fashion on these protests is very real.
Wong predicts that protests will continue, regardless of what is done when the Legislative Council meets or when elections are held.
The fear is that Hong Kong is being turned into a police state beholden to Beijing, where these crackdowns are viewed as necessary to keep up appearances to the outside world.
But that is harder in an era of ever-present smartphones.
Beijing is primarily focused on containment. 
It does not want to see the kind of protest happening in Hong Kong spread to other key cities under its regime, but there are other schools of thought as well.
If Beijing does let the unrest fester, it could be because Beijing sees the potential lesson for other citizens: Protests damage the economy, and it can say to others on the mainland, “See what happens when you want freedom and sovereignty?”
At the moment, it is mostly the mid-tier industries affected by these protests, tourism and the like. This is a real problem.
The malls are half-filled with the types of people who normally shop there.
New deals only do so much to offset the ever-present reminders.
What the protesters are demanding is big.
For one, universal suffrage: In the current system the powers that be, anointed by Beijing, are the ones who pick the candidates people can vote on.
Real universal suffrage would include the people’s ability to pick their own candidates for key positions.
For another, the rejection of the label “rioters,” one that carries with it a 10-year potential imprisonment.
And it is unlikely any of the protests will dissipate absent an independent commission looking into the police response.
For big demands like this, the peaceful protests of the past did not result in the kind of changes they wanted to achieve.
In July, almost a quarter of the island’s population came out to peacefully protest, and while that led to Carrie Lam’s decision to pull the extradition bill back, it did not lead to the kind of shifts those protesters really wanted to see, ones that would clearly indicate that the powerful had heard the complaints of the island citizenry over the encroaching reach of the mainland.
Instead, protesters are left to appeal to the international community.
Some are even hoping for the direction of sanctions under the Magnitsky Act, including severe economic sanctions against those found to have engaged in human rights abuses, freezing or seizing their assets and canceling their family visas to the West.
As the danger to autonomy increases, the response from Hong Kong’s citizenry becomes more strict and more aggressive.
The differences between past protests are clear.
This one is leaderless.
Leaderless movements are better, the protesters tell me, because they cannot be shut down just by arresting one person.
The protesters who have engaged in more violent activity, including the throwing of petrol bombs and the like, damaging property, and setting up barricades, have been branded by the media as radical. But the protest activists call them brave.
This is a matter the activists believe has been an increasing problem for the police force in Hong Kong.
The cops hide their badge numbers and their faces so they cannot be identified, and so even when protesters attempt to report the kind of brutality they readily experienced and for which there is a significant amount of video and photographic evidence, there is no way to attach those complaints to an actual officer. 
Protesters say this is the worst they’ve ever seen it, that the government tactics are escalating.
They now risk violence eagerly and say the police complaint mechanism is broken, where anonymity prevents any useful accountability.
Protests are now being routinely redefined as inherently unlawful, where no permission is granted for the kind of peaceful exhibitions that had existed in the past, so there is no incentive to organize peacefully.
The police have lost credibility, and Hong Kong now has no safety valve. 
In response, some within the protest movement have engaged in mob violence.
“Take care of it ourselves” is the mantra, including vigilante justice against those individuals the mob believes have engaged in behavior that hurts their cause.

Protesters Aren’t Giving Up
The Hong Kongers took the streets again on Monday night, with a specific focus on U.S. policy. There were hundreds of thousands of them, surrounding buildings, raising flags, singing songs.
There was no violence.
They were happy and optimistic, uninterested in violence.
They were trying to send a message.


Jessie Pang@JessiePang0125
Thousands of protesters rallied on Monday night to call for the support on the HK Human Rights and Democracy Act. It is also the first rally that obtained non-objection letter from the police since the #AntiMaskLaw is implemented. Yet, many still wear their masks tonight.

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3:03 PM - Oct 14, 2019

Much of the intelligent analysis of populist uprisings in recent years has understood the central nature of autonomy to the appeal, right and left, of such anti-elite movements.
Hong Kong should be seen as part of this.
This is not just a student revolt.
It is not a class revolt.
It is a revolt on behalf of citizens demanding individual accountability. 
They look to the lot of young people losing hope and the rise of suicide among those who see a loss to their freedom, and they want a path that is cordoned by the nostalgia for the past.
An upcoming election could prove significant in terms of the ability of the city to let off steam, but this is a long-term problem.
The people of Hong Kong see a government that is beholden to Beijing and the interests of the mainland, as opposed to responsive to its citizens. 
They see a government that is pushing for cameras in the classrooms to monitor which students are wearing masks or all black in school, showing an affinity for the protesters. 
They see the punishment for corporate leaders summoned to Beijing after expressions of solidarity with the protesters, and they fear that if the situation spirals further, significant crackdowns away from the cameras and protests could be the result.
The Hong Kong Human Rights and Diplomacy Act is scheduled for hearing in the House of Representatives this week.
The political freedom of Hong Kong depends on Beijing, and no act of Congress will change that. But the protest community is more hopeful, because they believe they are being heard — that by taking on this endeavor while their autonomy still hangs in the balance, before it is stolen away by the mainland, they can look to the economic freedom of Western business as a reason why all is not lost.
Others are less optimistic.
But when a fourth of your population demands something, there is a serious consequence when nothing happens — when millions of normal, law-abiding people feel their own autonomy, and the autonomy of their children, is at risk.
As one protester told me, with a smile: “We’re not afraid of tear gas anymore.”