Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

Colette is where free thought lives. We are an independent grassroots platform for heterodox ideas and fearless commentary.

Our podcast is a team effort and is jointly hosted by myself, associate editor Toby Young

and Canadian editor Jonathan Kay.

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Welcome to the Quillett Podcast.

I'm Jonathan Kay.

In 1999, I spent a week in Hong Kong.

My hotel overlooked the barracks where Chinese soldiers could be seen in the early

morning doing their drills in the walled courtyard, but they never left those barracks. And at the time,

I felt it was a good metaphor for the situation in Hong Kong.

Yes, this was ultimately a Chinese territory.

It had been handed over in 1997, but the mainland communist government's presence was kept deliberately light, so as not to suppress or

intimidate Hong Kong's more free and prosperous culture.

Those days are over, of course, as the mainland dictatorship imposes a more direct form of repressive control.

This includes application of authoritarian Chinese policies on some Hong Kong residents,

it's often used as a pretext to pick up human rights lawyers or leaders of activist organizations.

With me to discuss this is Peter Bear, professor of social theory at Lincolnon University in

Hong Kong and a Colette author.

I spoke to him this week over Zoom about what it's like to work as an academic in Hong Kong,

where unwritten rules of behavior now make it more difficult for everyone to speak their mind and exercise their political conscience.

...