All right, hello everyone. Welcome to this E-Syp Online Conversation. My name is Frederick Erickson,

and I am very pleased to be joined today by author, scholar and journalist Mark Clifford.

And we are going to talk about his new book. Today, Hong Kong, tomorrow the world.

What China's crackdown reveals about its plans to end freedom everywhere,

which just has been published by St. Martin's Press.

Mark has had a fascinating career.

It was a journalist with the Far Eastern Economic Review, a weekly magazine that did, in my view,

some of the best reporting on Asia, but that is sadly no longer around.

Mark Alator came to be the editor-in-chief of the Standard and the South China Morning Post. Two English-speaking newspapers that had many people with an interest in Hong Kong, China and the wide region follow.

Mark also stepped into the world of academia and did a PhD in Hong Kong history at the University

of Hong Kong. And when I got to know him, he was the executive director of the Asia Business Council,

a very influential business organization that can be compared with the European Round Table

of industrialists here in Brussels. Mark is now the president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong.

Mark, welcome to this online conversation.

Thank you so much, Frederick. A real delight to be with you.

Well, it's a great pleasure to have you here and also to talk about your really fascinating book.

There are lots of things that we're going to cover in our conversation, but I wanted us to start in the situation in Hong Kong now today.

Two years ago, almost to the day,

two years ago, you got an ominous email that wasn't the start, but a strong acceleration of media crackdowns in Hong Kong. And you were a non-executive director of a company that was on the

receiving end of these crackdowns.

The email was from Jimmy Lai, an entrepreneur and activists who had founded the media company

Next Digital, which owned Apple Daily, then the most read newspaper in Hong Kong.

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