Hong Kong After The National Security Law | Hoover Institution

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Well, greetings, everyone. We're going to do something that doesn't always happen at Stanford University. We're going to start on time. And part of the reason why we're going to start on time is because we have a webinar audience that is with us and is waiting and expects us to start on time. And they can't kind of shmuse with one another the way we can in person. So I'm Larry Diamond. I'm a senior fellow here at the Hoover Institution.

And with Glen Tiffert, I lead the program on China's global sharp power here at Hoover. I also want to thank Francis Hiscan for her work in organizing this. Thank you, Francis. And thank you to the remarkable staff here at Hoover, Janet. Thank you for you and your team who do so much to make everything work so smoothly. The way we're going to proceed is that I am in a moment going to introduce our four speakers. And then I'm going to dim the lights by appeal to our staff.

And we're going to show a remarkable short video, a very powerful video. With the person featuring the person who is not in this room, who we dearly wish was in this room, but who is sitting in a jail in Hong Kong and whose spirit is in this room and whose son is in this room. And that is Jimmy Lime. And then we will have each of our panelists speak for about seven minutes. And then I'll have a conversation with them.

And then you can have a conversation with them by writing a question on the note cards that we've passed out or on the pads of paper that are on your chair. And we'll come and collect those and organize them and read them. So let me begin with the son of Jimmy Lime, that is Sebastian Lime immediately to my left. He leads the international campaign to free his father, Jimmy Lime, the pro-democracy activist and publisher currently jailed.

And I will say as a political prisoner by the Hong Kong government. Having had international calls for his release from multiple states, including the US and the UK, Jimmy Lime's ongoing persecution mirrors the rapid decline of human rights in Hong Kong as well as press freedom in the rule of law. Our next speaker knows the Hong Kong situation well as an American who served there as a consul general from 2005 to 2008. That was very privileged to be able to visit when he was there.

And thank you for receiving me. He is Ambassador James B. Cunningham. Prior to serving as US consul general in Hong Kong, he served as ambassador and deputy permanent representative to the United Nations. And after his service in Hong Kong, he was US ambassador to Afghanistan and then to Israel. So the United States government has tapped him multiple times for very difficult assignments. And he's had a very distinguished career as an American diplomat as a career minister.

And he's currently a consultant, a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and an adjunct faculty member at his alma mater Syracuse University at its Maxwell School of Public Policy. He's also the board chair of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.

Next we have Sophie Richardson, a long time activist and scholar of Chinese politics, human rights and foreign policy, currently a visiting scholar across the way here at the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford. I think you know her best as the China director at Human Rights Watch from 2006 to 2023. There she oversaw the organization's research and advocacy. She's published extensively on human rights in China.

She's the author of China Cambodia and the five principles of peaceful coexistence. She has her doctorate from the University of Virginia and her current research focuses on the global implications of democracies around the world responding so weekly to increasingly repressive Chinese governments. Finally, Sherry Wong is a nonpartisan policy analyst and advocate.

And her influential leadership at Alliance Canada Hong Kong, a grassroots community organization, has garnered international attention for its comprehensive research publications and eloquent unwavering advocacy in Canada, China relations. Recognized for her nuanced and progressive approach, Sherry Wong is a sought after authority among decision makers, academics, journalists, researchers and policy makers.

She has frequently appeared before parliamentary committees and Canadian media as an expert commentator speaking on diverse public policy issues such as international human rights and transnational repression. So if you've just come in, you've come in at exactly the right time because the video clip we're going to show you now is so deeply moving that I am going to get out of my seat to watch it for a third time. Long determined love to be frightened by fear.

Jimmy Lai, a native of mainland China, Jimmy, reached Hong Kong in a fishing boat as a stall away at the age of 12. Then came the 1989 Tiananmen massacre. Founding the pro-democracy next magazine and the Apple Daily again, a pro-democracy outlet, we have to confront the biggest enemy. In the democracy protests that swept Hong Kong, Mr. Lai now in his 70s insisted on marching in front where the authorities could see him. China is determined to take away our freedom.

Mr. Lai vigorously opposed the new national security law that Beijing was then threatening to impose on Hong Kong. I think one day China has to unravel. Beijing did impose the new law, imposed it. I think that maybe the legal system now is beyond the inference of Beijing. And that some 200 police raided Mr. Lai's office's handcuffed him and then before taking him away, walked him around the floor of his newsroom so that all his journalists would see what was happening.

I just do what I have to do, say what I have to say without thinking about the consequences and you argue what? That Western values are in fact universal. You can be a good Chinese and protest in favor of democracy and freedom of speech. We have to fight. Otherwise, we will lose everything. If we lose freedom, we will lose everything. I think that is the dimple we still have. If the consequences comes, I will just accept it as my destiny. And if it's my destiny, it's got to be pressing.

This is the way I look at it. I can't change it. You know, if now, giving myself, I come to think as a redemption of myself. Not only are you facing prison, you're out almost $100 million of your own money to continue what you've been doing. Is that fair? It's very simple because we have to fight. We have been fighting for freedom for 30 years. Democracy is only the means to the end. The end is freedom. Any suffering is embarrassing. Any suffering is an experience.

You know, I don't treat suffering as something very tough. I'm simply afraid. You know, maybe I need another way to understand life. Another way to live my life to a full extent. Maybe suffering can happen. By giving myself, I feel the happiness and redemption. I think this is the way I accept my faith. I will have the fight to the last day.

What we're going to do in this session now is ponder what has happened to Hong Kong since the passage of the National Security Law on June 30th of 2020, and the imposition of Article 23 on March 23rd, 2024. This was not the beginning of the repression of denial of aspirations for democracy in Hong Kong.

And so we want to look back further in time and ponder what has happened to Hong Kong, this rule of law, its democratic aspirations, its remarkably vibrant civil society, its incredible free press, which Apple Daily was really in many ways the headliner of the leader of. And I will just say, finally, before I turn it over to you, Sebastian, I've told you privately, I'll say now publicly.

But one of the most poignant moments I've had as a democracy scholar was hearing your father speak here at the Hoover Institution. And he was asked, I actually don't remember whether it was publicly or privately, why are you going back? You're facing probable imprisonment. He knew what he was looking at. And the answer he gave is the answer people saw in that film and will let you elaborate on it and tell us how he's doing and what we can do.

So, thank you for cutting me and thank you very much and I'm organizing this and making this possible. Just to answer that question first, in campaigning for my father over the last few years campaigning for his release, you end up reading a lot of things about him and watching a lot of interviews. And I came across across this quote that he said to CNN about 15 years ago and it essentially says that he believes that you can't have dignity on their shared freedom as a person.

And therefore campaigning for democracy is in political. It's a moral duty. So Hong Kong has always been in this test of how China views the rights of the West essentially or democratic countries, not just the West, or obviously Japan is also democratic. And it's worth noting that my father has been campaigning for democracy as you could have seen the video. I've lost that. He has genuine square was a real turning point for him.

He started Apple Daily and they've just been calling the government on corruption telling true to power for the last three decades. What's really changed is why we're here as the passing of the National Security Law. I still remember in the 2014 protests, we were watching TV as a family. Dad wasn't there. That was the protest. And suddenly on the TV, there was breaking news that that had been attacked. Someone had thrown some substances on him.

And I still remember to say we were all freaking out because we couldn't contact him. And suddenly the door slams open. This was horrible smell. And that just looks at us. These covered in pig antelope. And he just smiled and says, well, I guess I've got to take a shower. That's how he lived for the last 30 years. He rolled over the punches. He's had death threats, assassination attempts. Our house has been firebombed a few times.

He's had to sell his business to a dyno because of his journalism and the journalism of his newspaper. But he never left. He always stayed and he always woke up every day and did the work. The reason why he's now behind bars is because of the NSL. It's a very deliberate decision by the Hong Kong government to weaponize their illegal system. And so my father has been behind bars in the last three years.

And there's a lot of hints that you could get from what Hong Kong is now by the style of how he has been persecuted. When he was first arrested a few months after they raided his newspaper. They sent 500 people to raid out with him and arrested his colleagues as well. And then a few days after, actually to this day, they still claim that they have free press. And I think this is one thing that we have to note about Hong Kong. Hong Kong used to be at release.

In order to protect its anxiety as a financial center, they had all these freedom. They had the press freedom speech, the rule of law. And bit by bit in the last five years, all these institutions that made Hong Kong great, they made it a place where human capital could flourish, have been broken down one after another. And another example of the rule of law. In the cases that were leveled against my father, one of them is he got 14 months of that.

So my father has been in jail for the last three years. He served the 14th month sentence for attending a Tiananmen Square video. He led candle and set a prayer. And before that, he got more than a year. This is especially important because you know, Tiananmen Hong Kong was the only place where you could celebrate Tiananmen Square in any Chinese territory.

And so not only does this kind of message, this commemoration of these brave people that were rolled over by Tangsion in China, they can't be commemorated. Well, this part of history has been erased essentially. Not only that, it also tells you that law of work could get you on anything. And it doesn't have to be, it could be something that you've been doing for the last 30 years. So now what is currently happening is he's going through his National Security Law trial.

He stands a maximum sentence of life imprisonment. There's no jury. There's three government appointed judges. And the chief of security of Hong Kong has boasted that it's 100% conviction rate. I mean, if you need another proof that that's a police state, that's a pretty strong one. So my goal is to free my father. And in order to do that, we have to shine a light on what Hong Kong is doing to my father and the 1800 political prisoners that are behind bars and the unfair persecution.

Hong Kong still wants to be a financial center. And in order to do that, it needs to have all the freedoms that I outlined before. And there's otherwise, Hong Kong has no natural resources. I mean, we have good food, fish, and I think that's basically an important, I think that's basically it. It's a rock without without the guarantees that you could do business there. Unencumbered.

And so, yeah, my goal is to shine a light on that, and to put pressure on the Hong Kong government and to tell them that the world is watching. And you can't keep executing all these people without very real consequences. Thank you. Thank you. Well, we'll want to ponder more what of a practical nature we can do. But thank you for starting us off Sebastian. And for your devotion to your father and your devotion to Hong Kong. So next we turn to Ambassador Cunningham. Thank you, Larry.

And thank you all for coming and for your viewers for joining us. Let me just say a brief word not about exactly what's happened in Hong Kong, but why it is that we should care about it. When I arrived in Hong Kong as Consul General in 2005, Hong Kong was in a very optimistic period. It was the freest Chinese city in the world.

It had very many valuable attributes that it was bringing to bringing China and international commerce, finance, bringing that together, developing projects, such as joined education. We did a lot of work on anti-pollution technologies and things like that.

And the future looked, I wouldn't say optimistic, but it looked hopeful that Hong Kong could achieve the kind of status over time that I think was embedded in the joint declaration from the beginning, which was that over time, Hong Kong and its liberal values would become a magnet for China over time. And there were a number of people during that period that hoped that that would be the case.

And there was a lot of discussion about this in mainland China as well, not just in the US and the international community, but in China as well, looking forward to a time when it thought that maybe restrictions on the mainland would loosen as they were, as China became more engaged with the international community. And Chinese people became somewhat more optimistic, I think, about what their own future prospects might be as they were clearly becoming wealthier and their society was developing.

That part of it, the development of the economic development of the society worked better than I think anybody could have imagined when I was in Hong Kong, China was growing at 12, 13 percent a year. That created lots of problems, but obviously the direction was going in the right way. So the aspirations that people like me had in that period was to see if China could develop into what one of our folks called the responsible stakeholder in the international community.

Unfortunately, that didn't pan out. So we have the situation that's developed over the last four years or so, which you all know and we all know. So why should we care about that? Why should we care about what happens to Jimmy Lye, the 1800 political prisoners that are now in Hong Kong, Jail's, and that number is growing and what's happening to Hong Kong itself?

I would, apart from the moral justice of it and the commitment that I personally feel because I loved Hong Kong actually and Jimmy Lye as a personal friend as our others who are sitting in jail now, I would submit that the reason that we should care about what's happening in Hong Kong is not just over morality and justice, but it's over the differences of vision of society that are playing out more broadly across the world and are epitomized

by the contrast that's come to the fore in Hong Kong itself. That is of course the competition between liberal values that embody include rule of law, including media, freedom of thought, freedom of behavior, democracy or at least aspects of democracy. Hong Kong was not at democracy, it never was, but it had aspects of democracy.

The way to fundamentally different is that it was based on these liberal values and then you have the other vision of the future that is embodied in the steps that the Communist Party and Xi Jinping have taken in Hong Kong which have brought it down. If you want to see in the real world what Xi Jinping's vision of the future is in China, in his region, in Hong Kong and wherever China can establish its influence and dominance, you have only to look at Hong Kong.

That's what I think is the kind of strategic importance for our point of view of this, people who support a world based on those liberal values as opposed to a world that is based on a liberal values, on the contrary vision. There are in those embedded in those values there are two very different competing visions of what order is and I think this is what Jimmy himself stands for.

There is a first vision of order which is based upon the premise that you order a society around the proposition that it should enable an opportunity and freedom for individuals to develop themselves, to develop their economic prospects, to develop their society in a peace and sustainable way. That's one vision of order.

The other vision of order which is the one that now is being imposed upon Hong Kong is the kind of order that is based upon not rule of law but rule by law and on political control, political control of all the means of expression so that the state creates the framework in which its people operate.

Obviously those are two very fundamentally different visions but that's the struggle that's taking place on the ground right now in Hong Kong and it exists more broadly in other parts of the all the other parts of the world where you have conflict now and you and somebody in Vladimir Putin's view of the world and in the view of other autocrats large and small throughout the world.

That I think is really the struggle for this century and that's why I think Hong Kong matters and why we owe it to ourselves as well as to Jimmy Lai and the 1800 political prisoners and the people of Hong Kong to stand up for them and make clear that we're willing to do what we can to make that kind of life, that kind of vision more difficult and encourage a realization that the way forward for China in the end is to release the political prisoners

to cease the repression in Hong Kong and allow the restoration of some kind of civic space in Hong Kong for what might be a better future for Hong Kong and for all of us in the coming years. Thank you.

Thank you so much, Jim. Do I am tempted to note that you started as Council general in Hong Kong right after George W. Bush gave that remarkable second inaugural address where he spent the whole inaugural address making some of the points that you just made about what the struggle is and what the US stands for. I had nothing to do with that. I had nothing to do with that. You certainly defended it well in the United Nations and in Hong Kong and we thank you for that. Jerry, you're next.

Perhaps I'll take us to the very beginning in 1997. I was two years old. My family decided to move back to Hong Kong. There was a thought of maybe we could prosper under the rule of the people's Republic of China. But when I was growing up, I had one question that no adult in my life has been able to answer and I doubt anyone of us here can answer it. What happens after 50 years of one country to system? What does that mean? And I remember people tell me that, "Well, it's not our problem.

It's a you problem. When you grow up, you'll figure it out." And so when 2019 the protest movement started, it was very clear to me what I needed to do. I needed to organize. I needed to get involved, not only in the protest movement, but also in my home community in Canada.

I needed to be able to do something political to talk to the government of Canada about the future of Hong Kong and fighting for a democratic future, ensuring that Canada has a middle power not only as one that has very close diplomatic relationships with Hong Kong, but also as a middle power to facilitate conversation to talk about the future of Hong Kong. So I founded Alliance Canada Hong Kong, a grassroots group made out of Canadians from all across our coasts.

And months after we started our group, the talks of national security law came to our attention. And I remember having this very grim conversation with my organizers and volunteers. And I said, "Who has hope to go back to Hong Kong to visit your family members?" And frankly, a lot of them put up their hands and said, "Yeah, I have elders back home. I need to go home, take care of my family, my parents, my grandparents."

And then I had that very frank conversation and said, "Well, if you plan to do that, you will not be a part of our core team organizing. I will reject your participation in our organization." And I understand that was an act of self-sensorship. And I am actively censoring those who are in my community who are willing to participate, or wanting to put their labor in to create a freer Hong Kong. But why did I do that? I think that answer becomes very clear today.

I wanted to protect my community members. On July 1st, 2020, when the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region made it clear that they will not tolerate political views that do not align with Hong Kong and the CCP's political interests, it was clear and expected that they target political opposition. The broad spectrum of pro-democracy politicians were the first to go. The crack-downs continued. It became any local voices that offered a different point of view from the CCP.

It was social workers, lawyers, teachers, journalists, students, and labor activists. The space for civic engagement practically disappeared overnight because of fear that the NSL will apply to them and that they would be held indefinitely in jail. And that is exactly what happened. These political prisoners aren't there because of political crimes. Their crimes are simply because their viewpoints are different than what the regime allowed.

It was mundane as a social media post, a possession of a sticker will get you a NSL charge. And the white tear that spread, the fear that your friends and family could report you, that saying the wrong thing to the wrong person could land you in jail, that was the society that my grandparents came from, that they survived from, and that they said, "Watch what you're saying because your neighbors are listening." That became a reality for Hong Kong and Hong Kongers.

And as a result, the Hong Kong society crumbled not only because of the political crackdowns that started with media organizations and political parties. It continued to crumble our social support systems, some of which were founded to support our protesters, folks who gave legal aid, who gave mental health support, who provided community to people who felt alone and hurt by the government's actions. That continued.

Professional bodies where lawyers and accountants, educators and social workers come together. The governance boards of these professional councils were filled with pro-baging supporters. It was a very clear message that no matter what you do, no matter your profession, what your work is, as long as you align with Beijing, you'll be allowed to do it. And the moment you speak out, you won't. And of course, the crackdown continued with NSL.

They started to reform the educational curriculums, whitewashing history, rewriting history, rewriting facts favorable to the regime. And I don't want to dismiss the important work that is being undertaken by those who are still in Hong Kong because there's still people fighting back, operating within this red line that was created by the National Security Law and subsequently the Article 23. But that red line is vague. It moves around depending on who is in the room.

With Article 23, I became very clear that Hong Kong's position is to make any form of dissent illegal. And both national security law and Article 23 has no consensus on what is and is not illegal. And I still remember this specific pro-Baging politician, she was sobbing outside of the Hong Kong liaison office because she wrote this letter to the Hong Kong liaison office asking them to clarify where the red line is. What is the, what is the National Security Law and Article 23?

What are we allowed and not allowed to do? And she stood there alone holding this envelope, shaking, and in tears. And I'm talking about a pro-Baging politician who is sobbing in fear of not knowing where the red line is. Of course, I wouldn't know what it's like to be in Hong Kong. I'm an overseas activist. I've always been. And I think it is my responsibility to speak and to provide analyses where I can.

And as an overseas activist, I understood the National Security Laws extradaritorial laws and clause as a warning. Those who are overseas and has opposition towards the Hong Kong government will suffer. And on the day the National Security Law came into force, I published a statement to say that I will never return to Hong Kong or the PRC and that I will never be willingly entering to those territories.

Because the one fear that I had was that it may be irrational, but I may be kidnapped and reappear in China one day. And that's frankly not that irrational when you have heard many stories of dissidents who have experienced exactly that. When Article 23 came into play, it was a heavy-handed change. It was very clear that not only Hong Kong, but the People's Republic of China thinks it's an overdue national security change. But from my own perspective, it changed very little.

I made a joke with some of my friends. It's a very dark joke. I said, you know, let's go through this legislation and see how many clause I have broken and how long of jail time I would get just as a thought exercise. And my friend just stopped me and said, "Cherry, don't even. You would just be held indefinitely until you die." And I said, "Well, you're right, actually." Well, there goes my thought exercise like no longer needed.

But it's very clear that they have legalized transnational repression. They have made it possible for them to apply their laws no matter where we are. And it's simply an affirmation that our work overseas is more important than ever before. We're speaking and we're providing analyses for those who are in Hong Kong who are unable to do so. And afraid to do so.

I understand that transnational repression has come into the political discourse in the last few years, but I also want to give credit where it's due because it occurred and it started happening long before I stepped into this activist space. And it will occur long after I leave. Beijing first initiated transnational repression as a form to suppress the voices overseas as they crack down on Tiananmen Square student movement.

They realize that the overseas community has power to change the world's perspective on Beijing and they felt threatened. And that's why they engage in transnational repression. And that's why they try to silence us despite we're in an ocean of way living in a liberal democracy.

But I'm sorry to say that they could throw whatever law at us and we will continue to speak out because I think we have a commitment not only for democracy and for future where we could be liberated and have the ability and the freedom to choose the future for Hong Kong, the right to self-determination. But also because of our friends and family who are wronged, who continue to survive the violence that are led by the Hong Kong government as well as the Chinese government. I'll wrap up here.

Look forward to your questions. Thank you very much. I know Sophie. Thanks. This isn't especially a challenging group in which to go last. Maybe I'll just offer a couple of thoughts about how we got from a world in which Hong Kong people were guaranteed a high degree of autonomy and in which one country to systems was supposed to prevail for rather longer than it has to one in which even just in the last week or two we've observed the Hong Kong government ban glory to Hong Kong.

I'd be happy to sing along if anybody else would like to join. I'm not a very good singer. But to do things like imposing bounties on activists outside the country. Imposing laws that are so wildly intention with the Hong Kong government's obligations under international law, I think it's important to point out that by virtue of the basic law, Hong Kong was and remains a party to the international covenant on civil and political rights.

So I get a little bit frustrated when I hear people talk about Hong Kong now as opposed to 10 years ago or Hong Kong versus the mainland as opposed to what Hong Kong people are entitled to no matter who's in charge. Because that's a very high standard and one that I think millions of Hong Kong people have made abundantly clear they care deeply about.

I was given the task of trying to summarize international responses to 28 years of threats to democracy in Hong Kong, which is a little bit of a challenge. But I think maybe the short version of the story is to say that most democratic governments that engaged on this issue tended to regard the various threats as idiosyncratic and not part of a larger pattern or an expression particularly once Xi Jinping came to power of the pathologies of that regime.

Many people for some time defensively I think really clung to the idea that one country two systems would survive and treated Hong Kong differently from the mainland government. But I think especially after, excuse me, the protests in 2014 were really met with disdain and hostility by the Hong Kong government. And we started to see for example, the inability to hold Hong Kong police accountable for abuses against protesters.

I think the signs were very clear that it really had become one country one system. And I think most democracies were unwilling or unable to adjust their responses. I think that was largely a function of the international business community, which is very well entrenched in Hong Kong, pushing governments not to push Beijing. We could have a long conversation about whether that was for fear that doing so would make things worse.

I will certainly never forget the full page ad that the big four accounting firms took out in the South China Morning Post discouraging peaceful protest, which I thought was a particularly bad sign. The responses from governments were really quite for the most part per funcury. There would be statements about particular arrests. There would be statements about clearing protests.

One of the requirements set out under the the China British Joint Declaration has the UK Foreign Office published a six monthly report on Hong Kong. I can't remember how many of them now in total there are. I have actually read them all. In a way, they are a fascinating and quite meticulous account of all that has gone wrong and remarkable in that nobody did anything as a result.

For the last several years, most of these reports have concluded with, I'm not going to get the exact sentence quite right, but a statement that Hong Kong authorities continue to be in a state of noncompliance with the China British Joint Declaration. I'm guessing that that language really doesn't cause Xi Jinping any heartburn.

I think it's one pro tip to take away from this whole experience is don't sign a treaty or any other kind of legally binding agreement with the Chinese government that doesn't have a redress clause.

As the China British Joint Declaration does not, the number of governments, most notably the US, have taken steps in recent years to do things like impose sanctions or visa bans to grant people asylum not nearly fast enough in my view and not nearly enough people to call for the releases of political prisoners. There's largely been an unwillingness to challenge Beijing in a meaningful, consequential way.

I do want to give a little bit of a special shout out to some of the UN Human Rights experts not let me be clear, the Secretary General. You for some exemplary work both in calling for releases, but also in reviewing the Hong Kong government's failure to comply with its obligations under international human rights law, because I think those are some of the analyses against which we're best off assessing all that's really gone wrong and all that Hong Kong officials continue to get away with.

I just want to offer a couple of quick thoughts about what in these circumstances governments can actually do, because I think it's both unconscionable and unstrategic to abandon an extraordinary community of people who have fought so clearly and so peacefully in defense of their and their community's human rights. First of all, I think there's a lot of room to leverage the Hong Kong government's interests in economic privileges for among other things, the releases of political prisoners.

For Jimmy, for Joshua, for Chao Hong Kong, for Lei Chuk Yan, for Alberto, we could sit here and probably name all 1800 of the political prisoners who were considered community figures 10 years ago. Now they're considered political prisoners, and that's that I think there's room to bring a lot more pressure to bear on Hong Kong authorities to release those people.

Second, I think there's a lot of room to engage for democratic governments to engage with a broad cross section of Hong Kong Democrats, and I mean Democrats with a small b. Inside Hong Kong as possible, this is now much harder to do because of national security law, and outside as desirable, to talk about what people want and to see what space they still see existing inside Hong Kong and how best to try to protect that without complicating realities.

In my world, you know, the Secretary of State should give as much status to people from exile and dissident communities as they do to the foreign ministers of autocracies. And I think a failure to do that is a missed opportunity. I think there's a lot more work to do in helping people who want to get out in different ways. Sometimes it's people seeking asylum. Sometimes it's more sort of regular paths to resettlement. People need employment. People need legal status.

These two are soluble problems. And then last but not least, I think the Hong Kong government's performance on human rights has to be assessed relative to international human rights law, not relative to what's happening in the mainland. Often you'll hear people say, well, isn't the Hong Kong still better than what's happening in the mainland? That's not the metric we should be operating by because that just lets Xi Jinping continually lower the bar.

And I think Hong Kong people have made very clear that they know their rights and they want them and they'll defend them. I'll stop there. Thanks. Thank you. Before we go on, could you share or you, Sophie or you any of you just explain to the audience the content of these two obnoxious provisions, the national security law that was adopted on June 30th and passed, I guess, through a ledge code that had been itself reformed. And I would like to remind if I mention that you're here.

We have a member, a democratic member of Hong Kong's legislative council elected from the functional constituency of the digital technology sector, one of the few that held to democratic aspirations from the last Hong Kong legislature that had any fragment of democratic representation really. That's Charles Mach. We're very happy to have him here as a visiting scholar at Stanford.

So do either of you want to tell us what the national security law and then article 23, which was imposed just very recently, what they do, what they provide for? Well, very briefly and others should chime in. These are a pair of laws that purport to protect national security by prescribing certain behaviors and explaining what the legal process will be if you violate them. So for example, there are now restrictions on certain kinds of speech. There are restrictions on certain kind of behavior.

All of these are wildly intentioned again with Hong Kong's obligations under international law. But essentially these laws criminalize free speech. They criminalize the right assembly. And they set out very harsh penalties for violating these provisions. Now, it's actually hard to explain these because the law itself is so vague, which is by design. Right?

Because if you know that you could potentially get 10 years for violating a law that says you can't insult the authorities or that to engage in certain behavior is a threat to Hong Kong authorities. But you don't really know what the actual behavior is. You're going to change your behavior and you're really going to err on the side of caution.

Most worrying in some ways from my perspective and others will certainly have different views is that the national security law sets out a separate apparatus to try national security crimes. And in a territory that is legendary for having a highly trained independent professional judicial system, the idea that there are now national security courts, the judges which are appointed by political actors and that place considerable limits on your right to the Council of your choice.

For example, all of the standard due process that has for a long time been afforded to defend its under-hung Kong law is now all set aside in national security proceedings. So that's my very brief summary, but others might want to add to that. You want to say anything more about how you perceive it and experience it, Charine? Yeah, perhaps I'll speak to the legal processes a little bit. I think most folks who are charged under the national security law has been denied bail and that's on purpose.

So like Sophie said, the law is meant to be vague so that it could kind of apply to anything and anyone and that red line, like I said earlier, moves depending on who you are, what status you hold. And the ability to deny bail also serves as a deterrent for you to get legal representation. I believe under the new Article 23, you now do not get a choice of legal representative as well. So I think the best way to describe it is legalized repression.

They have legalized ways to repress your political difference. They have legalized ways for you to be repressed by the legal system. It is no longer rule of law and does not apply equally to people who are in Hong Kong. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're a Hoover fellow or a Stanford professor and no kind of life connection to Hong Kong, except that you have embraced the pro-democracy movement, denounced what Charine has done and lent support to Democrats at risk or imprisonment.

Are you at risk yourself if you visit Hong Kong? Likely, I dare say those of you who are in the room are already in violation of the National Security Law and Article 23. I apologize. Well, I just want to assure everyone the cameras point this way today and not that way. Yes, go ahead Sebastian. Yeah, just to, I read more on that point. The, what constitutes a National Security charge now, Article 23 is also opened to interpretation by the chief executive.

So essentially he decides if what you say to him is the Constitution of Security charge. It's extraterritorial. So, as you mentioned before, everything we do here is accounts towards that. I don't know if you're in space or can't, but I think it's, they might get you for it anyway. There's no presumption of well or at least the holding period of someone arrested in the National Security. It used to be 48 hours.

I mean, in every single commas jurisdiction, it's around that time and now I think it could go to weeks. And if it's an NSL charge, they don't need a warrant. They could just go in and arrest you. And in fact, when the National Security Law first passed, I remember these sort of hard breaking stories about our, a lot of our reporters staying up until five in the morning because that's when they knock on your door to tell you that they, they, they need your other police station.

And actually, the other point I wanted to make about this NSL, but actually a broader point about anybody of Chinese descent that holds a foreign possible. My father's a British citizen and he essentially, the moment he landed in Hong Kong when he was 11 was the first time he ever had papers. So he never had a Chinese passport.

But in this case and in the case of many others, they will, they will treat you as a, as a Chinese national, even if you never had a child of Chinese passport as long as you are of Chinese descent. And I believe 23% of the Bay Area or at least San Francisco is of Chinese descent. They will trial you as a Chinese national and there was a night or consul access to, so that's something that's worth noting.

There's a, there's a belief of some reason by the Chinese Communist Party that all person of Chinese descent belongs to them and that's, it's completely false and it, but it's hugely problematic and that's how, that's how these people are tried and they're able to, there's traitors or whatever it is, even though democracy, I don't see how you betray your, your, your, your, your nation by believing in democracy. Thank you.

Yes, this was a point we tried to make in our original publication of the project on Chinese global sharp power that, that is one of their major forms of pernicious sharp power projection is to regard every one of Chinese descent as kind of a Chinese national owing unquestionable loyalty to the motherland and therefore being a fair target for the long arm of not just repression, but intimidation and threatening of family members till in the mainland. And so on and so forth. A couple of things.

First of all, if you have any questions you'd like to ask if you could write them out and pass them to the inner aisle, we'll collect them, keep an eye on them. And then anyone want to comment further on this before I ask the next question, go ahead Sophie. I just want to add that it's interesting to me, especially given that Hong Kong is known as a global financial center. It's a hub for all sorts of businesses.

It never, one aspect of the national security law that I thought never really got a great deal of attention is a provision in the law that clearly states that companies can be entities that violate the law.

And we know that you can pick up a newspaper here anyway and see that from business press that not insignificant numbers of companies have moved to Seoul, to Tokyo, to Singapore, often offering up publicly some other explanation for doing that, but it's about quality of life, it's, you know, nobody has explicitly said that it is in response to the national security law.

You know, but I think companies have to explain a little bit more clearly how they are mitigating risks to themselves, to their employees. I mean, one of the reasons that we saw so many media outlets close so quickly was because they couldn't control for the risk to staff members of being accused of violating the NSL. And I think that's one thread for all of us to pull a lot more.

Great. So I'd like to kind of look back a little bit and then we can look forward and talk more about the policy realm. And so I have a question for you, Jim. You arrive there at a more hopeful time. You mention Robert Selix aspiration and that famous speech that we envisioned and hope that China would become a responsible stakeholder or a deputy secretary of state. You arrive roughly eight years after the handover in 1997.

So during those years, 2005 to 2008, what did you imagine might be possible for Hong Kong? And what did we, the United States government, imagine that we might be able to help the people of Hong Kong and the authorities of Hong Kong evolved toward or nurture along? Well, thank you for that because in my view, it's a tragedy that events have probably should have been foreseeable, but it's a tragedy that events have occurred as they have.

Because let me just answer your question by saying, I did a lot of public speaking in Hong Kong when I was there, including at every opportunity I could get to probaging groups, the Hong Kong conservative groups. And when I met with them, the argument that I tried to make was in the context of that time that the future of Hong Kong and China should be seen as not antithetical, but as converging over time.

And that it would be in Hong Kong's interest to serve as a model for China of how different views of society could be accommodated in a way that advanced joint prosperity and personal achievement, increasing possibilities for education and health care, all the things that the population in mainland China was starting to demand. As the Chinese economy was growing and as economic development was taking place, the cities were rapidly becoming more and more middle class.

And the Chinese government faced the challenge of lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in a way that was inherently in some degree chaotic. And what I tried to argue is rather than seeing democracy and freedom as inimical to Chinese society, they should find ways to try to bring elements of it into Chinese society. And Hong Kong could serve as an incubator for that.

And as I said in my earlier remarks, at that time, in those years, there were thoughts in the mainland, in academic and some political circles in the party, that that kind of experiment could begin to develop at local levels in advanced places like Guangzhou and Shenzhen and other places. And from a very kind of local level of district counselor or whatever, however they could create it.

And what I tried to do and what our government tried to do was encourage the thought that we could all advance together. So rather than the discussion that we're having now about conflicting societies as a power emerge, this debate was taking place then, by the way, also. Some American academics, think tanks, types, policy types, were already writing about the danger to the west of the emerging China.

And if the Chinese seeing this, I forget the name of the gentleman who wrote it, but there was a very famous piece done by a Chinese think tank that argued that no, all the boats needed to rise together. And the west should not be afraid of a rising China that the task was to bring those aspirations together. And that's where the responsible stakeholder and that kind of aspiration came together. So that contrast of use of the future was already taking place.

What we as a government and as what I was trying to do was to encourage the former more optimistic view that we could find a way to manage that kind of development over time. And that in the promise for Hong Kong was for 50 years of this kind of evolutionary future. And that was not a deadline, by the way. That was a capture of a period of time.

Hopefully that development, that parallel development of two systems would continue beyond that 50 years, if the political will were there on the mainland. I don't have any kind of crystal ball, obviously, to know what Chinese leaders were actually thinking during that time. But they were certainly trying to create the impression that they wanted to allow time in space for our relationship, West and China relationship to develop that Hong Kong was an important part of that.

They were not a trusively intervening, but they weren't a trusively intervening in Hong Kong at the time. You never saw anybody from the central government or the PLA. There was no parallel security apparatus or any of that stuff. They were operating behind the scenes. They were harassing Jimmy and things like that. They were clearly following me when I was meeting with pro-democracy types like Jimmy and Martin Lee and Cardinals N and going around to the political parties and that sort of stuff.

But it was low key and it wasn't a truss. Because they were at that time, they were trying not to scare people off. That shifted, in my view, that shifted after they've, in my time, the whole argument was about how universal suffrage was going to come to be. It was all focused on how the chief executive was going to be selected or elected. And I think my perception is that the Chinese Communist Party's view of this started the change.

And they made an offer that would basically have allowed them to approve candidates to run for election for chief executive in Hong Kong. And the Democratic force, the parties and forces in Hong Kong rejected that offer. I'm not going to opine on whether I think that was mistake or not. That's history now. But I think that's when the view of the CCP in terms of how they regarded this in Hong Kong started to change.

And then it's pretty clear to me that in 2014, after the umbrella movement and after the another factor that I credit for this changing scenario, is the ineptitude of Hong Kong's own politicians to manage their own political problems, which came to head in spades in the anti-extradition law and their inability to manage the protests afterwards.

But that started, I think, in 2014-15, when they were politically incapable of bringing together a process that maintained some kind of political cohesion in Hong Kong. I think a little bit unconventional here, but the only Hong Kong politician is someone I'm looking at right now. You want to ask a question or make any comment? I'll start. I'm put already. But what next, maybe to start with, what do you think about the future for your father? The future for my father.

Well, in doing this, you have to keep a chin up and be optimistic. And I'll tell you the reasons why I'm optimistic. In the last few years, obviously, there's been a lot of crackdowns in Hong Kong, but on the flip side, a lot of companies have also been moving out of Hong Kong. And economically, Hong Kong is hurting. I mean, a lot of the offices are at 60% occupancy, where it usually was in the high 90s. The state prices is going down. There's a lot of issues.

I mean, there's a lot of excuses they could give. But I mean, most people know why these issues are these things are happening. It's because, as I mentioned before, Hong Kong is a rock. It's a beautiful rock. It's where I'm from. But again, without all these freedoms, if it's just another Chinese territory, it has no economical advantage. There's no reason why you'd move there instead of just going directly to China, where you will enjoy the same little similar liberties.

And it's cheaper in China, actually. So in light of that, it's got into a point where they are starting to feel the pain of what they're doing to the people of Hong Kong and to the diaspora. Now, whether they rationally wake up to that and realize that actually most people don't want to work or invest or live in a place where having pro-democracy views or attending a video could land you and been prison, is up to them. I don't know if the current government even cares for that.

But I think at some point they'll have to realize this and bend to the pressure and realize that there's vendetta that they have towards the pro-democracy camp is it's madness. It's destroyed. It's killed the goose that laid the golden egg. But it's not dead yet.

I think there's still an opportunity where if they let all the people out, if they don't go back obviously, but if they're willing to at least discuss going back to the rule of all of these, you know, it's 23 and whatnot, where it could still go back to what it was. And that would be beneficial to everybody. It would be beneficial to China and Hong Kong, obviously, for the very simple economic benefits of it, but also beneficial to the West because Hong Kong is a middlewoman.

It's a place where values of democratic values and then or democratic values of China could mingle and then where you'd have a place where you could talk and that's no longer here. I'll let any of you comment on that if you wish, but I'd also like to get your political analysis of the following in thinking about bringing pressure. Is there how much autonomy is there for the government of the Hong Kong S.A.R. to act on its own?

Is it meaningful to bring pressure on the current government of Hong Kong or is everything in the end so controlled, approved, restrained and scripted in Beijing that this is largely a fiction? I understand there's actually different views on this, at least on the margins, but maybe we'll start at the end and move down. Let me say it this way.

I struggle to imagine that if John Lee, who is the chief executive of Hong Kong, former head of the police in Hong Kong, well-qualified for the current role by Beijing's job description, and that if he wanted to take a particular position, say, for example, to release Jimmy, I have a lot of trouble imagining that he would not be overruled by his bosses in Beijing. Maybe smaller-scale issues.

Maybe there's still some latitude, but I think the reality is that decisions about serious big complicated issues get made further north. Do you have the same view, Sharon? I do agree with Sophie that the big decisions are probably out of Hong Kong, say, our hand. I do think it is meaningful to keep pressure on the big and small issues.

The Hong Kong government right now has a very hard job to do to convince the global north that Hong Kong is still a global city, and we cannot let them win that narrative. It is in the CCP and in Beijing's interest to keep Hong Kong as this facade of one country to system, as this global financial hub, though it's no longer a global financial hub.

But as long as we keep the pressure up, both towards Hong Kong and with Beijing, we're able to keep facts as facts, which is, Hong Kong is no longer under a one country to system. I believe it is the UK's foreign secretary's word. Hong Kong, Beijing is in ongoing non-compliance with the Central British Joint Declaration. The responsibility of keeping Hong Kong as is is John Lee's job. How well he does it is up to him and his cabinet.

I do think they face a lot of pressure from Beijing to do certain things well, and there are other spaces where perhaps we could wiggle in a little bit of liberal changes. But in the end, Hong Kong's future, I don't believe it can coexist with the Chinese Communist Party. I don't believe it will be democratic or free under the Central British Joint Declaration or under this one country to system false narrative that we've been sold for so many years. But it is meaningful to keep the pressure up.

We have to be cautiously and realistically optimistic about it. Okay. Let me form the question of pressure in a different way. This comment, question, notes, I guess we could benefit from some elaboration of the depiction here, that Hong Kong is hurting economically. I think you referred to this. The property market is in a very deep downward spiral. The stock market, small businesses have been failing. A lot of foreign companies have been leaving.

This can't be good for John Lee and his self-image, not to mention his political standing within Hong Kong to the extent that that is something that even matters. So, following from that, to the extent that's true, if you could all illuminate us on that, on the economic situation, does Hong Kong business have any ability to influence things, either in Hong Kong itself or more directly in its engagement with the Beijing authorities? I think the place of obviously Hong Kong was a financial center.

And so, the narrative before was the things I was being word of a black cat or a yellow cat as long as it catches mice. That was the position of the business. As long as they were growing the economy, they had a lot of leeway. At some point though, in the last five, ten years, there's been a shift change. There's been a change in the societal position of a business person. I think China decided that actually these people need us more than we need them.

And actually, that's the position they take on a lot of different relationships between countries as well. And so, you can see that very visibly, for example, in China with Jack Ma when he criticized the banking officials and he disappeared for a while. You can see this slow shift change. So, I don't think that the business community in Hong Kong has that much power to influence policy, unfortunately. And you can really see that.

Obviously, we're talking about the economy, the stock market, but a lot of small businesses in Hong Kong are really, really suffering. I saw this report on Bloomberg recently saying that the Costco incident was one of the easiest Costco in the world because everybody in Hong Kong would rather go across the border to buy stuff because there's cheaper there. And again, if you have the same liberties there, you might as well have this arbitrage.

And I don't know what the goal is of the chief executive. I don't know why he would keep going down this road because at some point, it's just everybody at every single level is going to be affected. And I don't know how he could say that he's got to know how anybody could argue that he's doing a good job even Beijing. I don't know how Beijing could want someone like that at the out of it. So the next question echoes a thought I had as well.

Why should the Beijing leaders care what happens to Hong Kong? I mean, in the end, if Hong Kong goes down and Shanghai becomes more important in relative terms, will they shed a tear? And what leverage do people in Hong Kong have given the heavy lid of repression that's been brought down upon them and intimidation and uncertainty of the nature that you spoke about, Sherry, in terms of people not knowing where the boundaries are.

It's pretty obvious they don't want any kind of model of civic space, civic and political pluralism, any modicum of self-determination. If the price is the end of Hong Kong as an arena, not just a prosperity, but of rule of law, and whatever, so what? At least the questioner asks, Sherry. I wrote this down as you were talking about that economic point. And I'll use Cantonese first. The intention is to keep the harbor.

Hong Kong is named the "fragment harbor," so to keep the harbor, but not to keep the people. And that is the latest narrative coming from state media, and that's pretty clear where they are going with this, right? Their intention is not to keep Hong Kong for its people or its culture. They don't care about that. But Beijing Carabaugh is the false image of reunification. And Xi Jinping has said this much, right? They said he said it is his duty to bring for a unification of China.

And that includes Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. There's no intention to keep the cultural significance or the difference, or to honor that. What he wants and what he is currently doing is bringing all of these territories into his control. And frankly, he succeeded with Hong Kong. He succeeded with Macau, and the next step is Taiwan. So unfortunately, they care because they frankly care about that image of a one unified China.

They don't need to care about the nitty gritty of that cultural significance or economic success. But he wants is that image of success so that he could be the supreme leader of China. Well, he is certainly that. Time is running out. It's remarkable how fast it goes. I hope that will be the case for the Chinese Communist Party too, but we'll come to that. And before we do. So I have a big question I'd like to ask that's related to that.

And then there's another question that we should close with. I'll ask it of each of you. But before I do, there's a very specific question, Sophie, that you might be able to address. How might people help to protect the Asperer activists from being reported to the mainland government? Well, Sherry should have a go at that one too, for sure. I do think some democratic governments have gotten a wiser about what transnational repression looks like and what it entails.

You know, forms of stalking, harassment. We could tick on the list that for example, the FBI or the British police use to characterize this kind of behavior. I think there's still a long way to go in publicizing the kinds of reporting mechanisms that exist. You know, that that are now I think better known amongst some sectors of the Asperer communities, but not necessarily really broadly. There's a lot of public education work to be done.

There's also the challenge of figuring out how to prosecute some of these kinds of cases, especially if the perpetrators are not standing in the jurisdiction or the harassment or the other kinds of abuses are taking place. It's been good to see the US, for example, actually take forward cases. The DOJ has the Department of Justice has announced cases prosecuting individuals for transnational repression and certain kinds of harassment.

But I think there's a lot of work still to do with the Asperer community groups and activists in letting people know what mechanisms exist. You want to, you've got more to say about this than I do. I do. It's been a great focus of mine personally and professionally to keep my community and those who I work with safe. And that's a huge ask.

One of the main things that we've done is allowing a non-os participation of our participants and volunteers because many of them who wish to contact their families back home, who still want to maintain contact with those in Hong Kong and China. But I think on various, it's a huge question. So I'll try to keep it as brief as possible. But allowing refugees and resettlement is a huge issue.

If we can bring our family members and loved ones, and I'm not talking about a traditional and nuclear family, for us in our culture, it's about our cousins, our uncles, our aunties, our grandparents are like, twice removed cousin that you grew up with. It's allowing them to come to safety. Bears, I don't believe there is a Western country that has sponsorship plans that allow you to bring families with various degrees of separation over.

But that would allow us to bring the people who are at the very high risk over so that we could conduct our advocacy and activist work. Support for community members. We're talking about mental health support. Folks who have dealt with severe trauma, who have relocated here, who cannot access basic support to understand and unpack the emotional and psychological trauma that they have endured. Safety, it means different things to different people.

It's allowing folks to have good, cybersecurity practice telling them, you know, here is a checklist of how you can practice cyber hygiene so that your footprint doesn't get tracked by the Chinese government. It's understanding that some members of the community will want to stay quiet because they are so afraid that something could happen to their loved ones overseas.

But I think most importantly, one of the critical ways for us to build against transnational repression is community resiliency, allowing our community to thrive overseas, having a space for us to practice our culture, our language, our traditions.

That has not been the case traditionally because most of the Asian and Chinese organizing overseas have focused on mainland culture rather than Hong Kong culture, but allowing that space for us to come together as a community to be there for each other. That's what community resiliency mean to me. And for us, if we have support in each other, we can come together to counter the repression that we face from overseas. Great. That's very powerfully stated. Thank you.

So I will preface one of my two final questions. I'll ask them both and give you each a chance to answer either or both by saying what I felt when I was thinking about 1997, 50 years, what comes after. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist only a few years before. I'm just going to be honest and saying. And I'm not sure that I will be proven wrong by the way. I actually think it's still a 50/50 proposition. I didn't expect then the people's Republic of China to exist in 2047.

And I'm still not convinced it will exist in 2047. So in answer to the second question, what is the one thing that gives you hope for the future of Hong Kong? I'll just preface it by saying don't give up on the future of China. But so I pose these two questions to each of you. Number one, how should we think about this deep and inescapable connection between the future of Hong Kong and the future of China?

And what can each of you say or what do you want to say about what we might do to nudge the bigger question, which in the end might be the way to change the smaller question. And then I will ask this beautiful question, what is the one thing that gives you hope for the future of Hong Kong? So Jim will start with you, we'll go to Sophie and then to Sherry. And I want to give Sebastian the last word in this session. Okay, thanks.

So somebody asked me in an interview yesterday, was I optimistic about developments in Hong Kong and the future. And I said no, I learned in my 40 years as a diplomat, I learned it was dangerous to be optimistic, but I was always hopeful. And to go to your question about what happens at the end of this process, what you said, I think is the thing that is most important to keep in mind in this kind of endeavor when you're, we've heard today how complicated all this is and all this many facets.

What we are trying to do collectively as governments, I think, and as in our case individuals, is try to figure out how to deal with the problem that China causes with the problem that is China. So there's no answer to that now. But I think the point you made about will, will the Chinese Communist Party even exist? And 2047 is exactly the point, maybe it will exist, but it may not be the same thing at all, maybe completely different, maybe it'll be much worse, who knows.

But if you're hopeful, it can be much better. So that's what I think we need to work on when we're trying to do the, from the small but important thing to the big thing, the small but important thing right now is freeing Jimmy Lai and political prisoners, saving some space in Hong Kong and looking to the future. The big thing is what's going to happen with the transformation of China.

The work that I'm doing is trying to bring those two things together because I think the leverage, if there is leverage in dealing with China over Hong Kong, it's over the future of China's economy. And what role, not just what role Hong Kong plays in that, but what role can we create for Hong Kong in a situation in which the Hong Kong leadership and the Chinese leadership is trying to convince everybody in the world, there's nothing wrong in Hong Kong.

But we all know there is a lot of wrong in Hong Kong. We need to strip apart that Potemping Village and keep reminding people, no, that's not true. Now, the business and industry is going to figure this out and they're going to vote in their own as they become more and more aware of it. But the, I believe the key to this at some point, somebody important Beijing realizes that what they're doing is counterproductive.

And we have the right, we find the right way to get that message to them and realize. So this all seems very daunting right now. But I think my lesson out of my career is you can't give up on history. You can't know what history is going to produce. It doesn't move in a straight line.

And the lesson that I always use when I'm teaching or speaking about this is I spent the first half of my career working on Europe and European security and NATO affairs and disarmament stuff dealing with the Soviet Union. And during that whole time, it was just taken as a truism that Germany was never going to be reunited. Absolutely impossible. Never going to happen for a variety of reasons. Not least of which is that Europeans didn't want Germany to be reunited.

That whole thing changed in two weeks because the forces of history came together in a way that nobody for saw and the great game shifted literally within two weeks. It wasn't until two weeks before the Berlin Wall came down that people started realizing this could actually happen. So that's my lesson is don't give up on history. You can make it work in your direction if you're lucky enough to find a way to do it. Thank you Sophie. It's a slightly different take, baby.

The two of the biggest China human rights stories of 2014 were the umbrella movement protests and the Hong Kong government's complete unwillingness to really engage. It's a pretty reasonable demand from peaceful protests. It was also the year that Xi Jinping launched the strike hard against violent extremism campaign targeting weekers.

And this was the thinking that laid the blueprint for massive human rights violations in that region that have risen to the level of genocide and crimes against humanity. And the leadership in Beijing continues to enjoy complete impunity for some of the most serious crimes under international law. And I think unless and until that changes, it's hard to imagine more systemic or widespread change across the mainland.

But to connect it to Hong Kong, I will say that I don't think I've ever experienced anything like civic life in Hong Kong. Like those words just don't capture the depth and the texture and the breadth and the scope of the kinds of organizational life, whether it was church groups, whether it was a neighborhood association, whether it was some sort of local community welfare association.

And it's been extraordinary to watch that recreated outside Hong Kong, whether it is a Cantonese language, weekend school, if it's these incredible new organizations that are lobbying governments. And I find it fantastic watching people from Hong Kong who've obtained citizenship in other countries running for office. Absolutely taking that democratic spirit to wherever they can actually deploy it.

And maybe sort of my longer term hope is the idea that maybe someday, maybe sometime this would be so cool to see Margaret Ng leading the team prosecuting Xi Jinping. That's my long term hope. I like that vision. Thank you. Sherry. Perhaps you'll indulge in my radical act of a self prior to engaging in advocacy work. I believe in my lifetime, the CCP will fall. I believe in my lifetime, Hong Kong will be free. And I believe in my lifetime, Tibet will be free. East Turkestan will be free.

And that deep connection between Hong Kong and the PRC, when the PRC falls, the opportunity comes for us as the global north, as the global community as a whole to enable the people within the PRC, people in Macau, people in Hong Kong to exercise self determination. What do you want your future to be?

And for the first time, we will see a truly democratic process where people of all regions of all linguistic diversity, cultural diversity, ethnic diversity can come together and decide for their future. That is my dream. I believe it will happen in my lifetime.

It's a firm, probably irrational belief, but I see hope for Hong Kong because of the people I work with every day because of my community members and of conversations I have here, of people who believe that there could be a better future, that future where people are equal and people are able to participate and decide for their own future. My personal goal is hope believes doesn't matter in that future.

It's a collective decision for the people of Hong Kong to come together to make what do we want. And we have never been asked that question, not in 1997 when Hong Kong was "returned to China", not when the single British Joint Declaration was signed. So for the first time, I would like to see Hong Kong and Hong Kongers be asked this question, what would you like your future to be and you have the powers to decide?

Sebastian. So I think the road that Hong Kong and China are walking down at the moment, if they don't fear from it, it's quite dark and quite scary. My hopes for Hong Kong, for Hong Kong's future. And I don't think what Hong Kong is going to look like in 50s, I don't even know what's going to look like in five times. But I know the people of Hong Kong. I still think the county's language is the most efficient language I swear.

You could pram the most amount of swear words, the least amount of sentences. It's a place of people like my father and some of you here who's family escaped China, escaped communism to our Hong Kong and really took advantage of the freedom and built it into what it is today. I just want to finish with one of the story, actually, that touches me very deeply. It was in a dark time when they first read it Apple Daily. People lined up.

The people of Hong Kong lined up the next day very early in the morning to buy a copy. They were scared. Someone was asked in line, you know, are you on to your freight? Are you afraid to buy Apple Daily? Now that the government has essentially almost made it illegal. And he turns around and he says in Cantonese, he says, "Albati domai," which translates to "Albai even if it's a white piece of paper." And that's a spirit of Hong Kong. So that's why I am pessimistic for the island of Hong Kong.

I'm very optimistic for his people. Thank you. Well, I just want to say two things in conclusion beyond thanking our panelists. The first is, Sherry, I am absolutely convinced it will happen in your lifetime. And I hope to be around in 2047. And I think there's, I've got a decent chance of having it happen in my lifetime. But in any case, we now have a reception outside for all of you and our panelists. And please join me one more time in thanking them. [MUSIC] Thanks for watching ~!