This is John Batchel, a conversation with the author Mark Clifford.

Today, Hong Kong, tomorrow the world.

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

You know about the authorities having crushed transparency and democracy in Hong Kong.

Mark takes us back to the entry of China into the WTO right

after 9-11 and how that entry and then the Great Recession of 2008 and then the enter and then the

ascendancy of Xi Jinping, an absolutist, have left us today with the Chinese miracle in Tatters,

at the same time the Chinese military threatening Taiwan and anyone in East Asia.

Mark Clifford gives us very careful and quick version of how Xi Jinping came to be the master of a war machine

that at the same time is looking to take advantage of its trading partners.

Here's Mark Clifford, today, Hong Kong, tomorrow, the world, much more of this later on tonight.

Well, economically, I think, you know, a signal moment was the global financial

crisis in 2008. And China got out of that by printing money and came out of it really, really

strong. But I'd also say you mentioned 2001 in the war, but it was also, and the obviously attacks,

the 9-11 attacks, just three months after the 9-11 attacks.

In December, China entered the World Trade Organization, which had been trying to do for a decade or so.

And many of us felt that this would put a lot of stress on China.

And I, in fact, wrote a book with the incoming Director General of the WTO.

We were more optimistic, but we thought it was going to push reforms within China along.

And it did push many reforms.

In fact, it was so successful that China became an economic juggernaut of a sort that the world has never seen in terms of the speed of its growth and the growth of its export sector and its manufacturing sector.

And so this combination of China entering the WTO in 2001, which really accelerated what was already

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