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  • Good morning John!

  • Last Sunday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Hong Kong to protest.

  • The police reactions to these protests were, surprisingly, intense -

  • resulting in, get this! far more people joining the protest!

  • This somewhat surprising result is only one of the things that can be explained through

  • a better understanding of what Hong Kong is, what those people are protesting about,

  • and what is motivating China.

  • A brief history! -

  • 1847: Hong Kong, a sparsely populated island off the southern coast of China,

  • is ceded to the United Kingdom after the Opium War.

  • 1898: China and Hong Kong agree to a 99 year lease of Hong Kong to the British Empire

  • to be a British Colony.

  • 99 years! That's, that's plenty of time to figure out - NOPE.

  • In the 90's, with the switch impending, the appointed - NOT elected - Governor of Hong Kong

  • started to talk about how it would be really great if Hong Kong were a democracy.

  • This is kinda hilarious after 150 years of colonial rule.

  • China finds this, not just hilarious, but also really annoying because

  • China would like to have Hong Kong's extraordinarily economically important cake and also eat it!

  • 1997: after 150 years of British rule, Hong Kong becomes part of China. Kind of.

  • After 150 years, Hong Kong has its own dialect, and judiciary, and taxes, and postal service, and money, and culture!

  • People from Hong Kong are ethnically Chinese, and they feel connected to the Chinese people,

  • but they don't consider themselves Chinese.

  • To get an idea of how weird this is, if you wanted to go from China, to China,

  • but you happened to be crossing the Hong Kong border,

  • you have to get your passport stamped and go through immigration.

  • To get a better idea of how weird this is, during the 2008 Beijing Olympics,

  • both China and Hong Kong had separate teams... Same country!

  • At the root of it, this is all because what Hong Kong is now is really great for China.

  • Not only would it be extremely difficult to have Hong Kong run by the same system as China,

  • which would be COMPLETELY different from the entire culture of Hong Kong,

  • it would also be bad for China! China wants Hong Kong to be the thing that it is.

  • It's a capitalist powerhouse that was created as a bridge between China and the capitalist world.

  • Hong Kong houses the third largest stock exchange in the world;

  • the Hong Kong dollar is the eighth most traded currency in the world!

  • For all that to keep working,

  • Hong Kong kinda has to be a thing that China finds really uncomfortable

  • - Free.

  • They call it, "one country, two systems."

  • Alright, this might be a little bit of a difficult thing to understand. In America,

  • we make fun of a politician on TV. That's not just okay, it's also, like, if that politician can handle it,

  • it's kind of a good thing for them - it makes them seem more powerful.

  • In China, where everything is very tightly controlled,

  • that kind of criticism would make a politician seem extremely weak.

  • So you have to imagine China as being run by a culture that does not accept any kind

  • of derision or appearance of weakness.

  • They're crazy with the control.

  • China's national day was this week and they let loose ten thousand doves in Tiananmen Square

  • they cavity searched EVERY dove to make sure there were no explosives inside of them.

  • That... is what you think it is.

  • China's government attitude is a mixture of immense pride in what they have done and vulnerability

  • - just fear of it falling apart. And that might be somewhat warranted,

  • because there are lots of China that don't want to be areas of China!

  • And with a weakening economy and the number of protests in China growing,

  • politicians are worried about losing stability - and they REALLY like stability.

  • Now add, to all of this, that the current president of China, Xi Jingping,

  • just did a massive crackdown on corruption.

  • This made him a lot of enemies of the Chinese officials who were benefiting from corruption.

  • You have a situation where the leadership in Beijing really wants to appear strong and

  • in control and not at all weak, and is thus not in any way interested to

  • conceding to the protests in Hong Kong, or even allowing them to continue!

  • The protest, itself, does probably hurt Beijing - though maybe not as much as they imagine

  • because people in Hong Kong and people in China don't actually get along that well anymore

  • for reasons that, surprisingly, involve shopping excursions.

  • Now I've gotten a long way into this and I haven't even talked about the reason why people started protesting last Sunday.

  • And that's kind of because, with all this background,

  • it starts to feel... inevitable. Like it's just a thing that was gonna happen.

  • But here's the specifics - since the hand-off of Hong Kong to China, it has been run,

  • not by a Governor or a mayor, but a Chief Executive if it wasn't capitalist enough for you.

  • The Chief Executive is elected by a kind of, like, weird electoral college

  • composed mostly of, like, business tycoons

  • that represent different constituencies, mostly corporate constituencies.

  • Now, Hong Kong's constitution, which isn't really a constitution,

  • eventually calls for the election of the chief executive by the people,

  • and not by a group of twelve hundred people who have the exact same interests as Beijing.

  • But, Beijing interprets that law a little bit differently, saying that, yes, the citizens of Hong Kong

  • can elect their Chief Executive, but they have to choose from a pool of candidates that Beijing pre-selects for them.

  • And that, of course, is not a democracy.

  • Now maybe even more importantly, since the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square,

  • the people of Hong Kong have had a proud and strong history of demonstration and protest.

  • And the intense response from the Hong Kong police was maybe even more scary to the people of Hong Kong

  • than was the prospect of not being able to elect their own leaders -

  • because the people of Hong Kong have never been able to elect their own leaders

  • but they HAVE been able to freely protest.

  • Some people hope that, as Hong Kong was a testing ground for China's unique form of capitalism,

  • it might also become a testing ground for actual Chinese democracy.

  • But the cultural gap between the structure and control of China and the freedom of Hong Kong

  • may be too big to bridge.

  • But while the protests are bad for the image of Chinese leaders, quashing them would be

  • bad for the continued economic prosperity of Hong Kong.

  • And the protesters know that they shouldn't mess too much with Beijing,

  • that's why they're directing most of their ire at the Chief Executive.

  • China's state media, meanwhile, does report on the protests in Hong Kong,

  • just like they reported on the protests of the Arab Spring. But, as they did with the Arab Spring,

  • they focus on the chaos and inconvenience that these protests bring.

  • And, really, what China needs is to stick together and be stable. Yay, stability!

  • And with the protesters in Hong Kong protesting in very calm and stable ways,

  • there seems to be a certain amount of agreement that stability is good.

  • There aren't very many voices calling for Hong Kong to secede from China, though China may be afraid that,

  • with continued cultural changes, that may eventually be the case.

  • But mostly, Hong Kong just wants to be Hong Kong - and exceptional, unique place where lots of amazing things happen.

  • Just, ideally, a Hong Kong with a little bit more control over its own destiny

  • for really, the first time in its entire existence.

  • But in the country where they check the butts' of pigeons for explosives,

  • having an entire entire seven million person part of the country not controlled by the central government,

  • is maybe not just scary, it might just be a completely foreign concept.

  • But just as China found ways to allow actual capitalism to occur within its borders,

  • maybe there's a way for actual democracy to occur within its borders.

  • That would be pretty amazing, and that would be a pretty fantastic outcome to this very, very weird story.

  • I guess we'll see.

  • John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

Good morning John!

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