00:00:00.000There are two things out of China that you really need to pay attention to.
00:00:08.640Article 38 and Document 9. What on earth are these things?
00:00:13.500Well, you may have heard that China has now introduced a new national security law to Hong Kong.
00:00:18.900Sounds kind of innocuous. Who doesn't support national security?
00:00:21.660Well, hold on a second. What is this actually all about?
00:00:24.300Well, Hong Kong is supposed to be able to maintain a form of independence until 2047.
00:00:30.060At which point, they would be absorbed into mainland China.
00:00:33.140A lot of people weren't stressing out about that too much because they thought by that time, by 2047,
00:00:38.240mainland China, oh, they'd stop being communist and authoritarian and centrally controlled.
00:00:43.020They'd become a liberal capitalist democracy just like us.
00:00:46.580In other words, China would become more like Hong Kong by then.
00:00:50.260Uh-uh. Not so fast. It's not happening.
00:00:52.760Now we are seeing China be very aggressive to make Hong Kong become more like them.
00:00:57.860And 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.
00:01:08.160So within this national security law, there is a provision, Article 38.
00:01:12.160What that article says is that anybody who advocates for Hong Kong independence anywhere in the world is breaking this law.
00:01:21.940This 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.
00:01:29.120If 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?
00:01:40.540Well, it seems like according to the letter of the law, you can.
00:01:43.580Can 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?
00:01:51.780Yes, I am. You would be breaking the law the same.
00:01:55.660So if you go there for vacation, watch out. You have run afoul of this law.
00:02:00.320This 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.
00:02:08.540But the fact it expands so broadly, really troubling. How could this possibly be?
00:02:13.500Well, to bring up that other document I mentioned, Document 9, I say this sort of approach, it's not a bug.
00:02:19.980But 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,
00:02:28.340where he spells out the big no's that he wants all the bureaucrats and politicians to know about.
00:02:33.920No human rights, no press freedom, no independent rule of law, independent judiciary, all of these things.
00:02:41.060He says they are Western fictions that are just promoted by us to try and give China a hard time.
00:02:47.280This is really important to contextualizing everything.
00:02:50.980If 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.
00:02:59.160Whenever 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.
00:03:05.960You 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.
00:03:12.160Clear 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.