The big gag: Hong Kong's crackdown on freedom

This episode explores the severe impact of Hong Kong's national security laws on its political freedoms and the suppression of dissent, especially regarding the Tiananmen Square remembrance.

1. Hong Kong's political freedoms are rapidly deteriorating under new national security laws.
2. The annual Tiananmen Square remembrance vigil has been suppressed, reflecting broader constraints on public memory and freedom of expression.
3. The trial of the Hong Kong 47 represents a significant move by Beijing to quash political dissent.
4. Recent legal changes and trials suggest a decline in judicial independence in Hong Kong.
5. Despite rare acquittals, the overall atmosphere in Hong Kong is one of increased government control and reduced public dissent.

1. Introduction

Host Rosie Blore introduces the episode’s focus on Hong Kong's shrinking political freedoms. Key points include the historical context of Tiananmen Square’s remembrance in Hong Kong.

• Rosie Blore: "In Hong Kong, the anniversary was a day for remembrance."

2. The Hong Kong 47 Trial

Discussion of the trial and conviction of the Hong Kong 47, significant figures in the pro-democracy movement, under national security laws.

• Emma Irving: "Their trial ended on Thursday, and 14 of them were convicted."

3. Impact of National Security Laws

Exploration of the broader implications of national security laws for Hong Kong's political landscape and its resemblance to mainland China.

• Emma Irving: "The national security laws are bringing Hong Kong and the mainland ever closer together."

1. Stay informed about international human rights issues to understand global political dynamics.
2. Support organizations advocating for freedom of expression and judicial independence.
3. Educate others about the importance of political freedoms through social media and community discussions.
4. Participate in local or online events that focus on global democratic movements.
5. Engage with policymakers to express concerns about international human rights and support legislative actions that promote democracy globally.

There has been a slow strangling of freedom in the territory where pro-democracy activists have been convicted; an annual vigil for the victims of the Tiananmen Square crackdown in Beijing in 1989 has been replaced by a food fair. A boom in startups suggests America is recovering its pioneering spirit (8:06). And remembering June Mendoza, portrait painter to the royals, and the less well-known (16:28).

People

Emma Irving, Rosie Blore

Content Warnings:

None

Janice Torres
Hi, this is Janice Torres from Joquiero di Nero. From a local business to a global corporation, partnering with bank of America gives your operation access to exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Visit bankofamerica.com bankingforbusiness to learn more. What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.

Ryan Reynolds
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm your host, Rosie Blore. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

In recent decades, America had lost some of its pioneering spirit. Giant firms dominated the economy. Now the country is in the midst of a new startup boom, and the entrepreneurs are spread far beyond Silicon Valley.

And June Mendoza once bartered a portrait for a bottle of cough syrup and another for a fur coat. Her images captured both the famous and the unknown. Our obituary's editor paints a picture of her life.

First up, though, 35 years ago today, pro democracy protesters were massacred in and around Tiananmen Square in Beijing. In mainland China, the events of June 4, 1989, have since been erased from the history books. But in Hong Kong, the anniversary was a day for a remembrance.

A vigil was held every year to commemorate the crackdown, and thousands of people would light candles in Victoria park in the heart of the city.

That was, until recently. In 2020, the gathering was banned under pandemic restrictions, and soon afterwards, Beijing imposed a draconian national security law on the territory, quashing further demonstrations about June 4 or anything else. Today, a food fair is taking place in Victoria park, where the Tiananmen dead were once remembered. The muzzling of Hong Kongs vigil is evidence of a bigger truth. The crushing of political freedom in the territory and the imposition of government will is playing out in the courts, too.

Emma Irving
So over three years ago now, a group of really prominent pro democracy activists who became known as the Hong Kong 47 were arrested for crimes against the state. Emma Irving is our asian news editor. And their trial ended on Thursday, and 14 of them were convicted. Two were actually acquitted, and another 31 had already pleaded guilty. And this all comes at a really sensitive time for Hong Kong because it's when the city would normally be preparing for June 4 commemorations.

Rosie Blore
What were these activists on trial for? EMMA well, back in 2020, they held an unofficial primary to try to pick pro democracy candidates that they thought would have a really good chance of winning a majority in an election that was scheduled for later that year. And they wanted to use the control they got in that election to try to demand greater democracy or to oppose the government's budget, which would have forced the resignation of the chief executive, who was someone called Carrie Lam, who's backed by Beijing at that time. Now it's the second week after the implementation of national security law. Our voice hope to be represented by our vote and led Beijing to realize that people in Hong Kong choose not to kowtow to China.

Emma Irving
I do think it is my civil. Rights and my responsibility to come out. And to represent myself and others similar. But under a national security law that Beijing brought in that year, that activity basically became tantamount to subversion. Whereas the defendant's lawyers would say that really what they'd done was just kind of normal political dealing.

The election was then postponed for over a year, which the authorities said was because of Covid-19 measures. But in that time, they also arrested the 47 and they changed the rules to exclude those not deemed patriotic to Beijing from politics. But this isn't just about excluding a group of people from the political process, is it? What do the convictions mean for the territory? Well, they really represent the kind of ongoing strangulation of any kind of dissent in Hong Kong.

You know, the government initially said that the national security laws would be used sparingly, but at least 244 people have been arrested under it since then. And Ngo's say that thousands more have been charged under separate laws for advocating for democracy. And none of those accused under the national security law who've gone to trial were found innocent until the two acquittals that we saw on Thursday last week. So those two acquittals are quite interesting. Do they suggest that some kind of justice is actually happening in Hong Kong?

Possibly. There's still a very strong independent legal system in the majority of cases. But when it comes to the national security law, you know, there was a 100% conviction rate until Thursday. Possibly those two acquittals do suggest that there is still a bit of independence, even when it comes to the national security law. Others have suggested that the government was actually just getting embarrassed about the conviction rate, although it has already said that it will appeal.

And things are only getting worse in Hong Kong. In March, the territory actually enacted a new national security law known as Article 23, which broadens and runs alongside the existing law imposed by Beijing in 2020. And has Article 23 been changing things for protesters in Hong Kong, particularly in the run up to June 4? Well, last week we saw the first arrests under the new measure. They were related to some social media posts about the June 4 anniversary of Tiananmen Square.

And one of those arrested was Chao Hang tung, who was one of the original organizers of the vigils, who's already in prison for other national security law charges. And police also arrested her mum, and yesterday they actually arrested her uncle, too. So he became the 8th person to be arrested under the new law. So all of that has really meant that the atmosphere in the city ahead of the Tiananmen anniversary has been one of sort of quiet resignation, as one person who attended the vigils almost every year when they were running told me. Makes me feel very sad.

I look forward to going every year. I look forward to joining the rest of that. However many people, Hong Kongers, I feel lost. I feel as well, nothing we can do. It's helpless, you know, in commemorating this event and share just momentarily that sentiment.

Emma Irving
So there's a real sense that people are very on edge here. Emma, you're painting a grimmer and grimmer picture of Hong Kong. It sounds increasingly like mainland China. Is there a difference still between the two? I think in terms of political freedom, not really.

The national security laws are bringing Hong Kong and the mainland ever closer together, and Article 23 will probably ensure that the last embers of judicial independence flicker out. And as we see with the Tiananmen Square remembrance for many years, 30 years, that was a sort of really clear example of the way in which Hong Kong was far more independent than the mainland. And the fact that now remembrance of Hong Kong, not just in terms of the vigils, but even in terms of books about the massacre, for example, being removed from bookshelves, all the kind of memories of Tiananmen are being snuffed out. And that's bringing Hong Kong, therefore, much closer to the mainland. Emma, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you very much for having me.

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Rosie Blore
If I say pioneering spirit, you'll be thinking America. Right from the light bulb to the motor car, processed food to, well, the Internet. Innovation has been core to America's strength and identity. What was the core of this? What was the seed?

What is the essence of Microsoft? I think there's a lot of elements that go into it. A vision of what software could do. What was your vision? Well, a computer on every desk and in every home.

Simon Rabinovic
This is one device, and we are calling it iPhone. The world has been under this illusion that electric cars cannot be as good as gasoline cars, that if you have to go with an electric car, you're accepting a product that's worse. What the Model S is fundamentally about is breaking that illusion. But more recently, ah, not so much. America seemed to lose something of its entrepreneurial verve.

Rosie Blore
In the early eighties, nearly 40% of american firms were startups less than five years old. By 2018, that share fell to 29%. Now the dazzle is back. There was a big increase in startups in 2020, 2021, at the start of the pandemic. Simon Rabinovic is our us economics editor.

Simon Rabinovic
And that might be expected because of the many disruptions to life and the ways that people were trying to reinvent the ways of working. The surprising thing is that the increase in startups has continued such that at this point, you could say America is really in the midst of a full fledged startup boom. So Americans are finding their entrepreneurial spirit again. That's pretty exciting stuff. Yeah.

And it might seem a little bit odd to some listeners because America is always sort of thought of as a go getting country. The early two thousands brought us Facebook, Instagram, Twitter type of companies. But really for quite some time, economists have been concerned that although you've got these big tech giants, the startup culture in America had begun to weaken. If you look at the numbers over the last four years, the increase in business formation is about 80% compared to what it was before the pandemic. It works out to about five and a half million companies being established annually in America.

Parts of the world, including Europe, have seen some increase in startups, but nowhere nearly on the same scale as what America has seen. Five and a half million companies is a lot. What, what are they actually doing? Many of the companies aren't going to be the next Silicon Valley meta style company. Many are fairly small people who are starting up food trucks or starting a catering service or a small accountancy.

But there are also, amidst the five and a half million, some that potentially will grow into bigger and more important enterprises. What's interesting is that when you look at the change in the nature of these companies in 2020, 2021, at the height of the pandemic, a lot of the startups were catering to the working from home revolution, online retailing, that kind of thing. Since mid 2022, there's been quite a discernible shift where many of the more promising startups are tech companies, often ones that have some application related to artificial intelligence. So aside from the people starting companies from their bedrooms during the pandemic, are we seeing basically a kind of new Silicon Valley rush? One of the notable characteristics about the current trend of startups is that it's actually much more broadly based.

Yes, there obviously have been important companies such as OpenAI coming out of Silicon Valley, but in fact, it's incredibly dispersed nationally. Partly that goes back to the pandemic. You had so many talented people who chose to live in smaller communities, and of course, with the rise of remote work, that helped to spread talent throughout the country. A second factor is that the job market is incredibly tight right now, and that has given people the confidence to go out and start a new job, start a new company. If it doesn't work out, they can go back to what they were doing before.

And when you look at technology like AI, it's not just the big companies that you've heard about in Silicon Valley. It's lots of smaller companies that are catering to smaller businesses or smaller niche consumer platforms that are looking at ways to apply it. I went to Greenville, South Carolina. It's a small city population of about 50,000. It's not the kind of place that's known for its entrepreneurship.

You now have a real cluster of tech companies that have started up there. I looked at one company that was developing earrings as wearable tech to help women, to monitor their health, to monitor their menstrual cycles. I looked at another company that was using AI to help small businesses manage overly cluttered inboxes. And Greenville was just one city that I went to. I could have gone to any number of cities.

Boise, Provo, Providence. They're all, to varying degrees, seeing similar startup booms. Wow. Earrings that measure menstrual cycles definitely sounds like something to be celebrated. But how sustainable is this rise in new startups, really?

There is always a question about the sustainability of things. So you have lots of companies that are now trying to get their workers to come back into the office more often. So you can imagine that could put a little bit of sand in the years. Another big issue is funding for all of these startups. One of the things that's happened over the last two years is that interest rates have gone up dramatically and that's had spillover effects for funding for startups.

Venture capital funding, which is for slightly more mature startups. While there was lots and lots of fundraising early on during the pandemic, starting last year, VC funding fell sharply in America. And so that could ultimately proved to be a constraint so far at least, because the big VC's had done so much aggressive fundraising when interest rates were a lot lower. They're still sitting on a lot of dry gunpowder, which means that if you are a promising startup, the hurdle might be a little bit higher, but you probably still can find willing investors good. News if you've got funding.

Rosie Blore
What about if you don't have funding, or you're not ready to launch your own wearable tech or AI firm? Are there any benefits for the rest of the economy? Well, it's really important for the rest of America and ultimately for the rest of the world as well, because the more that you have new companies coming up with new ideas and challenging established companies to innovate themselves, the more that generates growth, the more that generates new jobs that hopefully also will pay slightly higher wages. Now, there is an important note here, which is that so far the economic data has not registered this kind of a positive impact. So we can see the startups being formed, but we can't see the knock on consequences for economic growth.

Simon Rabinovic
One possibility is that to a certain extent, this might be a repeat of the 1980s. In the 1980s, observers could see that personal computers were beginning to spread throughout the economy. Businesses were shifting their models, mobile phones were just over the horizon. But it wasn't until the mid 1990s that the economic impact of all those innovations really percolated through to the efficiency with which the american economy was operating. And maybe something similar is at play right now, where the startup boom started in 2020, and it's continued until now.

But it's really not going to be until the end of this decade that you really see it paying dividends for the economy at large. So these startups, they're still very young. Let's give them a few years to make their mark. Thank you so much for your time. Simon thank you, Rosie.

Ann Rowe
June Mendoza looked out of her window one day to see the ideal man. Ann Rowe is the economist's obituaries editor. She was, at the time, busy painting four past presidents of the Royal Society of Engineers. And suddenly there was this face in the background which actually, she thought would be a wonderful one to draw. She opened the window and said to the chap, who was a scaffolder and was busy about his work, just putting up the tubes, she said, would you like to sit for me?

And he said, yes.

Most of her career was not spent in quite such a random way.

She was famous for painting all the grandees of the land. For example, the royals. She did Prince Philip three times, Diana twice, Charles three times, and the Queen five times. She got very good at painting pearls.

After that, she did generals, archbishops, sporting personalities, entertainers, great musicians. She was very, very busy. But about a third of her productions were what she called her pickups, which was when she went out into a restaurant or the street or into shops and just saw a really fascinating face. Her gift for catching a likeness wasn't anything she'd learned to do. She reckoned she was just born with it, like perfect pitch.

But her childhood was spent touring around theatre productions in Australia, because her parents were theater musicians and she was the little girl backstage who had a drawing book, and all she wanted to do was sketch the interesting faces she saw performing. In fact, at 14, still in her school uniform, she also went to life classes. But she didn't turn her hair at all at seeing naked men. She was just interested in faces and bodies.

She was very strict with her sitters. They always wanted to wear something smart or some favorite, rather over the top jacket or that sort of thing. But she wanted to do them as they seemed most relaxed whenever they sat to pose for her. They would be pretty tense at first, but then there'd be a break or something would happen, and immediately they'd relax and she would say to herself, that's it, and pounce with her brush. Capture them.

Her formal artistic training was really almost none. She went for two spells at art college, didn't really learn anything. She'd moved to London and, like many Australians, shared it up in Earl's court with a single gas ring and not much more money than the bus fare. And she began to paint, to bring in money, and also as barter. She bartered one picture for some cough syrup and another for a fur coat.

She did get a paying job at last. When she became the illustrator for the belle of the ballet, comic strip and girl magazine. She did that for five years. But it was really the painting that was making her reputation. And in the end, she was rushed off her feet.

With commissions, she would drive herself and the easel, the length and breadth of the country to wherever her sitters were, and lug the easel up and down stairs herself, even into old age. And while she was bringing up a family, she would race around the country in just the same way. She seemed to have indomitable energy as she painted. She made some very good friends, wonderful friends, and this was partly because of the intimacy of the situation. It was a good place to chat.

She always chatted a lot. They could have conversations. They knew they were confidential. But there were also long, companionable silences when she was working, and the sitter, too, was working, helping her to achieve the task. And the only person she found she really couldn't connect with was Margaret Thatcher.

She found her so controlling and so rigid that there was nothing there, she said. And she was rather dissatisfied with the picture that came out of that.

In fact, she was very rarely satisfied with anything she did because she was always aware of the balance she wanted to strike between getting a really good likeness, which needed energy and dynamism, and had to appeared to be a good likeness to the sitter and to anyone who knew the sitter, and making a great painting.

Was she trying, perhaps, to catch the soul in her subjects? And was that why she kept going back to ordinary people? Because there was a way there in which she could focus on the energy of someone whose background she didn't know at all? No, she said she thought it was rather pompous to talk about capturing the soul. She just found wonderful faces to draw.

And one of those was the scaffolder who had appeared to her that morning, and his picture ended up in a special people's project exhibition in Girton College, Cambridge, where he hung beside a curricle maker and a blacksmith and a wheeler dealer, all sorts of people painted by other artists and looked as proud and happy in his work as anyone could wish for. In fact, Hugh Mendoza thought he could quite justifiably hang beside the Queen.

Rosie Blore
Ann Rowe on June Mendoza, who has died aged 99.

That's all for this episode of the intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. You can get in touch@podcastseconomist.com. we'll see you back here tomorrow.

Janice Torres
Hi, this is Janice Torres from Yokiero di Nero. If you own or operate a business, whether it's a local operation or a global corporation partnering with bank of America could be your smartest move. By teaming with bank of America, you'll enjoy exclusive digital tools, award winning insights, and business solutions so powerful you'll make every move matter. Position your business to capitalize on opportunity in a moment's notice. Visit bankofamerica.com bankingforbusiness to learn more.

What would you like the power to do? Bank of America na Copyright 2024.