Juno News - July 03, 2020


Hong Kong's security law explained


Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

184.89066

Word count

620

Sentence count

38

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

China has a new national security law that could mean that anyone who advocates for Hong Kong independence is breaking the law. Article 38 and Document 9 are two things you need to pay attention to in order to understand what China is really trying to do.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 There are two things out of China that you really need to pay attention to.
00:00:08.640 Article 38 and Document 9. What on earth are these things?
00:00:13.500 Well, you may have heard that China has now introduced a new national security law to Hong Kong.
00:00:18.900 Sounds kind of innocuous. Who doesn't support national security?
00:00:21.660 Well, hold on a second. What is this actually all about?
00:00:24.300 Well, Hong Kong is supposed to be able to maintain a form of independence until 2047.
00:00:30.060 At which point, they would be absorbed into mainland China.
00:00:33.140 A lot of people weren't stressing out about that too much because they thought by that time, by 2047,
00:00:38.240 mainland China, oh, they'd stop being communist and authoritarian and centrally controlled.
00:00:43.020 They'd become a liberal capitalist democracy just like us.
00:00:46.580 In other words, China would become more like Hong Kong by then.
00:00:50.260 Uh-uh. Not so fast. It's not happening.
00:00:52.760 Now we are seeing China be very aggressive to make Hong Kong become more like them. 0.94
00:00:57.860 And they never did materialize as that beacon of democracy and capitalism that a lot of people promised us would happen during the 1990s when we talked about China entering the WTO.
00:01:08.160 So within this national security law, there is a provision, Article 38.
00:01:12.160 What that article says is that anybody who advocates for Hong Kong independence anywhere in the world is breaking this law.
00:01:21.940 This has had a lot of people around the world, including Hong Kong dissidents who live in places like, oh, I don't know, Canada worried about, well, hold on.
00:01:29.120 If I go there to Hong Kong for vacation or to visit family members, even if I don't say anything wrong, even if I behave as a compliant citizen, can I still be arrested and locked up?
00:01:40.540 Well, it seems like according to the letter of the law, you can.
00:01:43.580 Can I, by advocating and saying I support Hong Kong independence, which I do, right now on this video, am I breaking that law in China?
00:01:51.780 Yes, I am. You would be breaking the law the same.
00:01:55.660 So if you go there for vacation, watch out. You have run afoul of this law.
00:02:00.320 This is incredibly troubling. The whole broader national security law is to clamp down on advocating for Hong Kong independence if you're in Hong Kong.
00:02:08.540 But the fact it expands so broadly, really troubling. How could this possibly be?
00:02:13.500 Well, to bring up that other document I mentioned, Document 9, I say this sort of approach, it's not a bug.
00:02:19.980 But it's a feature. Document 9 was a document put forward by Xi Jinping and those around him shortly after he became the leader of China in 2012,
00:02:28.340 where he spells out the big no's that he wants all the bureaucrats and politicians to know about.
00:02:33.920 No human rights, no press freedom, no independent rule of law, independent judiciary, all of these things.
00:02:41.060 He says they are Western fictions that are just promoted by us to try and give China a hard time.
00:02:47.280 This is really important to contextualizing everything.
00:02:50.980 If you want to understand any sort of article, any sort of law being passed in China right now, you've got to go back and read this, this Document 9.
00:02:59.160 Whenever we try and affix our own standards, whenever we try and think about what China is doing through our own lens, well, that doesn't cut it.
00:03:05.960 You have to go back and really look at what's Xi Jinping talking about, thinking about the things he's actually writing about or saying.
00:03:12.160 Clear cut. They're right there out in the open. Document 9, an incredibly troubling document, and it explains why we see troubling things like Article 38.