I'm John Batchel with Mark Clifford, the author of Today, Hong Kong, Tomorrow of the World,

where 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, the United Kingdom,

empires come and go, their colonial masters. We race to the crisis of the 19th 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 45,

the British reoccupy 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.

That's his name is Bevan. 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, yeah, 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. And these were people who got away with things, whether it was

political arrangements or, you know, economic deals that, you know, wouldn't have existed

in Britain in the 20th century. I mean, they were still talking as if, you know, this were

early 19th century Britain. But there was a visionary

governor, Mark Young, who had been governor at the time of the Japanese invasion after surviving

horrible privations, eventually ended up in Mongolia as a cattle herder, I think a goat herder.

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