TRAGEDY UNDER XI: 1/4: Beijing remain quiet on the Prigozhin episode: 4/4: Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World: What China's Crackdown Reveals About Its Plans to End Freedom Everywhere by Mark L. Clifford
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 15 January 2024
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
https://www.amazon.com/Today-Hong-Kong-Tomorrow-World/dp/1250279178
Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World tells the complete story of how a city once famed for protests so peaceful that toddlers joined grandparents in millions-strong rallies became a place where police have fired more than 10,000 rounds of tear gas, rubber bullets and even live ammunition at their neighbors, while pro-government hooligans attack demonstrators in the streets. A Hong Kong resident from 1992 to 2021, author Mark L. Clifford has witnessed this transformation firsthand. As a celebrated publisher and journalist, he has unrivaled access to the full range of the city’s society, from student protestors and political prisoners to aristocrats and senior government officials. A powerful and dramatic mix of history and on-the-ground reporting, this book is the definitive account of one of the most important geopolitical standoffs of our time.
1924
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS I on the world. Here's John Bachelor. I welcome Mark Clifford, the author of Today Hong Kong Tomorrow the World. |
| 0:16.8 | What China's Crackdown reveals about its plans to end freedom everywhere. |
| 0:21.2 | Mark is a veteran journalist many, many years in Hong Kong, various publications, |
| 0:27.0 | the South China Morning Post, and then as a director of the Apple Daily publication, we are now looking at how did we get to a city that's |
| 0:39.9 | had its spirit crushed by the People's Republic of China's bully boys. |
| 0:45.0 | And we begin with a quote that Mark gives in his chapter about how we got here. |
| 0:51.7 | This is from the distinguished scholar Harry Ling. The Chinese |
| 0:55.8 | government's censorial authority in recent times has resembled not so much a man-eating |
| 1:00.7 | tiger or fire snorting dragon as a giant Anaconda coiled in an overhead chandelier. |
| 1:10.0 | Mark, congratulations and good evening to you. |
| 1:12.4 | I ask you to explain that Anaconda in the |
| 1:16.7 | chandelier above us. How does that sit on the people of Hong Kong then and now? Good evening to you. Well good evening John and thanks of |
| 1:25.0 | course for your interest. Well Perry link was talking about the trying to |
| 1:29.7 | explain the puzzle of how visitors to China would see well-stocked supermarkets. the the old Soviet Union where there was never anything and people looked really beaten down and in China people to |
| 1:46.3 | Outward appearances look like they're having kind of you know middle-class lives especially in the city with without a lot of repression. |
| 1:53.6 | But the Chinese, he compared it to the Anaconda, the rest of the quote goes on to talk about |
| 1:59.8 | guests at a cocktail party, it's an elegant party. Everyone's well dressed. They're enjoying their |
| 2:04.4 | champagne. But they all know that Anaconda is up there in the chandelier. And the Anaconda doesn't really |
| 2:11.1 | need to do a lot. But every once in a while it reaches out and more or less at random just grab someone and kills them. |
| 2:19.0 | And I think that's a really great analogy for China and also for Hong Kong. |
| 2:25.0 | Most of the time, by all appearances, particularly Western visitors who don't know China well |
| 2:30.5 | can go and think it could look like, you know, many other Asian cities and what's the problem? |
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