I'm John Mathsford with Mark Clifford, the author of today Hong Kong Tomorrow the World,

what China's crackdown reveals about its plans to end freedom everywhere.

Hong Kong is part of the story of Europe discovering Asia, 16th century Portuguese, 18th century

of the United Kingdom, empires come and go, their colonial masters.

We race to the crisis of the 18th century, which is the opium wars, and then we race again

to the Japanese invasion of the mainland and the occupation of Hong Kong, 41 to 45.

Hong Kong was attacked on the same day Pearl Harbor was attacked.

This moment, however, strikes me as revelatory in Mark's books.

And it's a story of how the people of Hong Kong were treated by London, the beloved

democracy, parliamentary democracy of London.

What I read Mark is that in 1945, August of 1945, the British reoccupied Hong Kong.

They're the administrators.

And there's a governor and there's the British Empire.

Churchill is moving on and there's a new foreign minister, his name is Bevin.

That's a moment you note that Hong Kong was ready for self-governance.

And there was something called the blimps that disregarded it.

Who were the blimps?

Well, great questions, a great moment that was not seized.

Hong Kong was a very insular, self-satisfied, snobbish colony.

And the blimps were the British businessmen and administrators who personified that.

I mean, it was anti-Semitic, not surprisingly, it was racist towards Chinese and basically

everybody.

...