I'm John Bachelor with Mark Clifford, the author of today Hong Kong tomorrow the world,

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

Hong Kong is part of the story of Europe discovering Asia,

16th century Portuguese, 18th century of the United Kingdom Kingdom empires come and go their colonial

masters. We race to the crisis of the 18th century which is the opium wars and then we race again to the Japanese

invasion of the mainland and the occupation of Hong Kong 41 to 45.

Hong Kong was attacked on the same day Pearl Harbor was attacked.

This moment, however, strikes me as revelatory in Mark's books.

And it's a story of how the people of Hong Kong were treated by London, the beloved

democracy, parliamentary democracy of London.

What I read Mark is that in 1945, August of 45, the British re-occupy Hong Kong.

They're the administrators. and there's a governor and there's the

British Empire. Churchill is moving on and there's a new foreign minister of his name is Bavin, that's a moment you note that Hong Kong

was ready for self-governance and there was something called the blimps that disregarded it.

Who were the blimps?

Well, yeah, great questions, a great moment that was not seized.

Hong Kong was a very insular self-satisfied snobbish colony and the blimps were the British

businessmen and administrators who personified that I mean was, was anti-Semitic, not surprisingly, was racist towards Chinese

and basically everybody.

And these were people who got away with things, whether it was political arrangements or economic

deals that wouldn't have existed in Britain in the 20th century.

I mean, they were still talking as if, you know,

...