New Yorker Writers on Hong Kong, and Nixon After Tiananmen Square

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2019

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The months of protests in Hong Kong may be the biggest political crisis facing Chinese leadership since the Tiananmen Square massacre a generation ago. What began as objections to a proposed extradition law has morphed into a broad-based protest movement. “There was just this rising panic that Hong Kong was becoming just like another mainland city, utterly under the thumb of the Party,” says Jiayang Fan, who recently returned from Hong Kong. In Beijing, Evan Osnos spoke to officials during their celebration of the Chinese Communist Party’s seventieth year in power. He found that the leadership is feeling more secure than it did in 1989, when tanks mowed down student protesters. “I think the more likely scenario,” Osnos tells David Remnick, “is that China will keep up the pressure and gradually use its sheer weight and persistence to try to grind down the resistance of protestors.” And, from the archives, reflections from Richard Nixon on the fallout from Tiananmen Square.

Transcript

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0:00.0	From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:11.2	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Donald Trump has made China one of the defining issues of his presidency.
0:18.9	He seems to have done everything he can to provoke China. He's
0:23.0	ignited a trade war. He's escalated tensions over North Korea and much more. And yet instead of
0:28.8	backing the pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong, Trump has reportedly told President Xi Jinping
0:34.8	that the United States would remain silent about democracy as they
0:39.0	worked out their trade deal. The protests in Hong Kong against Beijing's rule have been going on now
0:44.3	for months. Combined with slowing economic growth across the country, they've created a political
0:50.1	crisis for Xi Jinping right at a time when the Communist Party is supposed to be celebrating
0:55.2	its 70th year in power. The situation is more serious than anything since the Tiananmen Square
1:01.7	uprising a generation ago. Two of our staff writers are recently back from China, Evan Osnose,
1:08.4	and Jayong Phan. Jayang, you just got back from Hong Kong,
1:13.2	and I want to get a sense, first,
1:15.5	the emotional tenor of what's going on in the streets.
1:18.8	What kinds of people are participating,
1:21.5	and what's the feeling out there?
1:23.9	I would say 80% of the participants are middle class, working class. They range in age from probably 20 to 75. The folks I spoke to feel just so strongly that they are there to support the freedom that they have understood to be part and parcel of Hong Kong society. I think
1:47.3	many of them are undecided about how far they're willing to go, and most of them would claim
1:54.2	they're not what's known as frontline protesters. What is a front-line protester mean? A frontline
2:00.0	protester is the ones that have been featured so prominently in Western media,
2:04.5	the ones wearing the gas masks, clad in all-black.
2:08.0	They occasionally throw the Molotov cocktails and resort to more extreme measures.
	...

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