This is CBSI in the World. I'm John Bachelworth, the author, Mark Clifford, the journalist,

Mark Clifford. Today Hong Kong, tomorrow the world, where China's crackdown reveals

about its plans to end freedom everywhere. Mark arrives in Hong Kong in 1992. At that

point, everybody in China, I read, was still reacting to thinking about or unaware of

something that horrible had happened in Beijing in 1989, that we now refer to as Tiananmen.

What was Tiananmen to the people of Hong Kong when you arrived, Mark? Can you cast your youth

and imagine what they were saying about it, what they thought about it every June when

the anniversary came? Well, they didn't wait until every June, pretty much every day.

They were conscious that in five years, they were going to be taken over by the Chinese Communist

Party. The slogan was, today's China is tomorrow's Hong Kong. That's what started, that

was appeared during the Pro-Democracy Protests of 1989, not just in Beijing, but in dozens

and scores of cities around China. Hundreds of people were killed outside of Beijing. Hong

Kong was very aware that the brutality that they saw in China, displayed by the leadership,

to kill some of the best and the brightest of the students in Beijing and others around

the country, that brutality, that leadership was going to be taken over Hong Kong in five

years. There was a lot of fear. I moved in June, mid 1992, June, and it was a couple months

after the Supreme Leader, Deng Xiaoping, had made a famous Southern tour, which was trying

to re-want to the south of China from Beijing. He was in his 90s then, and it was late

80s then, and he was trying to revitalize economic reforms because Deng had started economic

reforms after the disastrous Mao years, and they had gotten some purchase, gotten going,

but it was still early days, and then the Tiananmen killing just stopped everything. Deng

was trying to restart the economy and restart the economy, but keep politics under control.

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