I'm Tom Batch with my colleague, Mary Kistle, executive vice president, Stephens,

incorporated. Former senior adviser to the Secretary of State, and before that many

years in Hong Kong, and we begin by discussing China in terms of its brutality towards all

individuals, especially those in Hong Kong, Mary, I learned from the Wall Street Journal

that this is Jimmy Lies, one thousandth day incarcerated. He's a British citizen. He's

been detained and persecuted by the People's Republic of China for publishing facts in a newspaper

in Hong Kong, where he enjoyed the celebration of the people around the world. I note this

only because it is a puzzle to me how to go forward dealing with the regime that advertises

its brutality and its indifference to law and order by persecuting a man, a world famous

man such as Jimmy Lies. Well, for many decades now, the regime in Beijing and their

proxies in Hong Kong have relied on our love of money and greed in the West to lure us

into investing and turning a blind eye to their barbaric practices and their non-existent

rule of law and their lack of property rights and the brutality in which they treat young

women or people of faith or minority groups like Tibetans and Uyghurs and Kwei. But that's

changing, and they're rolling out the same playbook begging for foreign investors to come

back, and they're fleeing. The law firms are rolling back their presence. You have significant

investment firms like Elliott, Capital Management, and others who have left, manufacturers

and the hundreds of thousands who are diversifying away from China. And so it's fascinating

to see the United States government try to push people back into dialogue, back into investment

at the same exact time when our private sector actors are saying, hey, no thanks. The risk

is too much. I mean, I see this at Stevens when I talk to small business owners or private

you know, founders or boards or other actors that have previously been invested there. They

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