This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, May 29th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Chinese government's assertions and now new powers to make Hong Kong formally a part of China complicates the U.S.

relationship with both China and Hong Kong.

But what, if anything, should the U.S. do?

Cato's Doug Bandau comments.

There are two major steps they've taken.

The first one is to directly impose a national security law from Beijing.

Now this is an extraordinary statute that will define all sorts of offenses and it will treat basically

democracy activity, protests, demonstrations, as treason, as separatism, these kinds of things. as

seperitism, these kinds of things.

So suddenly much of what people in Hong Kong

have been doing based on a British set of liberties

will be viewed as anti-Chinese law. And second is they're going

to allow their security forces, that is Chinese security forces, to operate in

Hong Kong.

So the presumption is that out of this we will see, essentially anyone who is an opponent

of the regime could be taken to Beijing.

This is very draconian.

It's clear the regime decided they no longer could rely on the local

legislature and because of that they're just directly ruling and it's going to have extraordinary impact on people in Hong Kong.

All right, so this wasn't entirely unexpected. There were a lot of moves that the Chinese Communist Party made in the last

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