Hong Kong Burning: Simon Elegant on the 2019 Protests

00:00:31 Andrew Keen: Hello, everybody. Beyond our Ukraine and Middle Eastern obsessions, we're trying to cast our minds around the globe a little more liberally. Last month, we did a show on Taiwan on the growing crisis there. With Stanford University's Eyck Freymann, whose new book Defending Taiwan: A Strategy to Prevent War with China is particularly interesting. And today, we're talking with an Asia based journalist, the guy who's been based in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for many years. He was formerly, up until about three months ago, the Washington Post's man in China, till Jeff Bezos changed his mind about Washington Post coverage of the world. And Simon Elegant is also the author of a fascinating, intriguing new novel on Hong Kong called City on Fire — which describes itself as a novel of Hong Kong. Simon, the globetrotter that he is, is talking to us from New York City just by the UN. Simon, does the UN still exist? I heard that the Americans shut it down.

00:01:45 Simon Elegant: Well, from what I hear from people in the UN, because my wife does a lot of work over there and we see some people, it is shutting down. They're moving people to Nairobi, to Geneva. There are other headquarters, and they're really running out of money — to the great satisfaction, I assume, of its critics in the US. But yeah, it does seem to be — they're always crying wolf, but I think this time it's really serious.

00:02:08 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I meant it as a joke, although, of course, it's not very funny. Your book, your new novel, City on Fire, is this your first novel? I know you've written a couple of other books about China itself, A Chinese Wedding and A Floating Life. Is this the first —

00:02:24 Simon Elegant: They're both novels. Yeah. I've never written a nonfiction book, actually.

00:02:29 Andrew Keen: But this is the first novel about, Hong Kong. Is that fair? At least not the first novel, of course, in the world, but your first novel.

00:02:37 Simon Elegant: No. The first book was about, an American woman who marries a Chinese chap and goes to Hong Kong to live there. And I wouldn't say hilarity ensues, but problems do develop, you know, cross cultural marriage, that kind of thing. That was my very first book — written in Britain, god knows when, before the flood kind of thing.

00:02:54 Andrew Keen: So Hong Kong comes up a lot. I know were you born there?

00:02:57 Simon Elegant: I was born there. Yeah. My dad was a reporter as well. Same same business. And, he was I think he opened the news bureau, if you could imagine that, which was long ago closed a bit long with the magazine. So time moves on. But, yeah, I I spent a chunk of time there before I was packed off as a traditional to boarding school in Lancashire.

00:03:18 Andrew Keen: Punished. Where'd you go to boarding school in Lancashire?

00:03:21 Simon Elegant: Punished — you're telling me. It was —

00:03:23 Andrew Keen: It's bad enough going to Lancashire, let alone to boarding school there.

00:03:26 Simon Elegant: Yeah. I gather you're from North London, so I thought I caught you in one of your podcasts talking to someone from the North and you were

00:03:32 Andrew Keen: Yeah. Keith Teare from

00:03:33 Simon Elegant: Oh, he was clearly you were, but, yes, it was quite amusing.

00:03:38 Andrew Keen: So you were born in Hong Kong, and you spent a lot of time reporting on China, particularly, as I said, for the Washington Post. Not everybody, of course, knows the story of, of Hong Kong, of its relations with China and its current history. Perhaps you might give us an introduction, Simon.

00:04:04 Simon Elegant: Well, just shout at me when I'm blathering on too long. I'm sure you will.

00:04:08 Andrew Keen: Don't worry. I'm not shy.

00:04:10 Simon Elegant: I've listened to quite a few of your podcasts with some admiration, by the way — it's a good habit. Yes, Hong Kong. So, eighteen forties: Britain couldn't find any way to break into China. The Qianlong emperor at the time said to the lord Macartney, who was the delegate sent there to open up the markets, that was fifty years earlier, we don't need anything you make. And, eventually, the Brits figured out that the only way was to become drug dealers, so they sold them opium. This made the Chinese pretty damn unhappy. So there were a series of wars beginning in the eighteen forties, and the Chinese were ill prepared, corrupt, and far behind technologically, lost miserably, and had to give away chunks of territory. The first of which was what Palmerston called a barren rock called Hong Kong. But it may have been a barren rock, but it had a wonderful harbor. And eventually, a few more bits were given, with Hong Kong becoming an extraordinary success story of benign British administration and incredibly entrepreneurial Chinese given free rein. But eventually, that had to end, and it was handed back. The lease was ninety-nine years for the New Territories. So in '97 it was handed back. And since then it's been a story of Hong Kong people basically assuming that the terms negotiated by Thatcher and Deng Xiaoping back in the day before 1997 were real and true and would be adhered to — and then discovering that actually they had no rights, and that Beijing would come in and effectively crush them. It was just a question of whether it'd be with blood in the streets or a silent coup. And eventually — I mean, in a population of maybe six million now, there were at one point a million people on the streets protesting over —

00:05:51 Andrew Keen: — a period. This was in 2019 to 2020.

00:05:54 Simon Elegant: Well, it culminated in 2019. It really began earlier — the first attempt to pass the national security law was actually in 2004. They occupied what would be the equivalent of 5th Avenue in New York, right through the center of town, in 2014. But it got really ugly, and that's what I'm writing about in the book. Basically, the hero of my book is actually a policeman. I did not want to make it, you know, purely —

00:06:22 Andrew Keen: I want to come to the book, and I want to come to the demonstrations against the Chinese. But before we get there — we joke about Lancashire and Britain and all the rest of it, but can Hong Kong be used as an example of enlightened colonialism? I mean, how how would you interpret the first hundred years of colonial history of Hong Kong?

00:06:48 Simon Elegant: True. I mean, enlightened colonialism — yeah —

00:06:51 Andrew Keen: That's not a contradiction in terms, of course.

00:06:54 Simon Elegant: I mean, if you take all the examples in Africa, from the Belgian Congo and so on, I think it's definitely enlightened compared to that. I would say it was a relatively light hand in this case, and there were many great things — I mean, the British administration effectively invented the kind of public housing they did. They did a really good job because so many refugees came in from China. They had no choice. They did a fantastic job of building public housing so good that Singapore copied them, that kind of thing. So the administration — and they built a brilliant civil service. It's worth remembering that Hong Kong was uncorrupt —

00:07:32 Andrew Keen: — of course, certainly compared to most. After a certain point.

00:07:34 Simon Elegant: After 1972 — when basically they had a police mutiny. It was so corrupt they had to invent [the ICAC]. But yes, effectively it turned out to be a very good combination of the Chinese's amazing entrepreneurial spirit and the Brits, especially some of the very good governors. There was a governor called Lord MacLehose. His nickname was Jock the Sock, and he really established a lot of these things, including the first public housing and this hands-off attitude, which was praised by many economists, including Friedman, as an example of supply-side and no overreach by the government. So yeah.

00:08:15 Andrew Keen: To what extent, though — in terms of this quote-unquote (it's my term, it's probably a bad term, it's going to get me into trouble) — enlightened colonialism, to what extent was it a racialized colonialism? I mean, Hong Kong is of course famous for its cultural diversity, but was it mostly white Anglos in charge and Chinese people working for them?

00:08:38 Simon Elegant: There was an expression for many years in Hong Kong called FILTH — "Failed In London, Try Hong Kong." So the fascinating thing about it, though, is that many of these people who really would not — you know, the first rank in terms of rank and class and merit in the UK — are a whole different kettle of piranhas, let us say. But many of those people came out, and they were often well regarded. The one example I do know well because I studied it for this book is the police force. So the father of my hero, my protagonist is a a guy called Liam Fitzpatrick, who's one of the many Irish, Irish Brits who came over and staffed the police force and did a pretty good job. Many of them in those days spoke pretty good Cantonese. I met them when I was a kid there — it was pretty impressive. They didn't have a choice, but it wasn't a case of [imposition]; they seemed to find their métier, whatever it was, and it worked out pretty well. There were of course many cases of the Chinese not getting promoted, and that's still legendary. But yeah.

00:09:35 Andrew Keen: I'm a big fan — I'm sure you are too — of the movies of John Woo, the father in many ways of Hong Kong cinema. I saw recently A Better Tomorrow, a movie about a Hong Kong gangster and his brother, a police officer. What was the police force historically in Hong Kong? Was it of mixed ethnicity, or was it mostly still Anglos controlling everything?

00:10:03 Simon Elegant: Well, first of all, City on Fire is a reference to a Ringo Lam movie. So yes, I'm definitely a fan of him too.

00:10:09 Andrew Keen: Yeah, no, I know.

00:10:11 Simon Elegant: And — yeah. It was totally controlled by the Brits, so in fact the Cantonese used to call the police "Ah Sir." "Ah" is just the kind of polite particle — I've lost the word — the particle in Cantonese used to preface a title. And "sir" is "sir." That was very much it, yes. As I say, even the lowest-ranking officer — there were very, very few Chinese allowed to be officers until probably the eighties, when they suddenly realized they'd better allow them in because they'd be running the police force by 1997.

00:10:47 Andrew Keen: So how did Hong Kong look to the Mainland, to the Chinese Mainland? Of course, many historic resentments of the Chinese against the Western colonialists for one kind of crime or another, including the importation of drugs. Did Hong Kong have a special place like Taiwan, or was it different?

00:11:10 Simon Elegant: It was well, it was very different. And, you know, if you did a survey pre-1997, many people would call themselves Hong Kongers and not Chinese when directly asked. So there was a distinct identity. This is the problem that led to the demonstrations and the massive protests — they regarded themselves as separate, not really Chinese in the sense of being Mainland. Hong Kong is often compared to New York in the sense that Hong Kongers take no prisoners. They're very proud — they're famously rude. And one of the subjects of withering [scorn in] many films, as a matter of fact, was the country-bumpkin kind of mainlanders. Of course all that has changed a lot, but they definitely had a separate identity, yes. They regarded themselves as such, and that's one of the things — one of the major things — that led to the protests.

00:12:00 Andrew Keen: But — I actually meant the question in reverse. What was the view of Hong Kong from the Mainland? Did it have a special place in the mythology of resentments from China towards the West, towards the colonial powers, or is it just another —

00:12:21 Simon Elegant: Oh — I see what you mean now. The way that Taiwan is, yes, very much so for the leaders, in my experience — not so much the ordinary people, because they regard it as a place to go, a place of entrepreneurship. And it had been, as far back as the eighteen nineties, when Sun Yat-sen — the quote-unquote founder of the Chinese revolution — fled there from the Qing authorities. There was — for a long time — it had been a place where Chinese rebels and dissidents went to escape Mainland oppression. And, you know, there's a calculation that 70% of the population plus is either descended from refugees or from China or are actual refugees. But for the government in Beijing, it was very much at the top of the list to be ticked off. The last few places that were left, Macau had been given over. That was Portuguese, and then the last one, obviously, is Taiwan. So for them, on the on the resentment hit list, Hong Kong was probably number two after Taiwan. Yes.

00:13:23 Andrew Keen: What was Hong Kong's role or place during the Chinese civil war? You mentioned Sun Yat-sen — was it a power center of the anti-communists?

00:13:38 Simon Elegant: No. I mean, it's a bit complicated because World War Two is right there in the middle. And then once World War Two had ended, effectively Britain was so busy trying to re-administer the place and not be invaded by the triumphant communists, and negotiating that as well. There was a moment when it looked as though they would just come across the border when they reoccupied when they occupied Guangdong. So no. And before the war — the civil war was in China — I don't think Hong Kong was particularly relevant in terms of refuge for either side, actually.

00:14:12 Andrew Keen: Was Hong Kong occupied by the Japanese during the war?

00:14:16 Simon Elegant: Very much so, yes — with much slaughter and rape and barbarity and starvation, and a lot of Brits in concentration camps, or whatever you call them, who died. Yeah.

00:14:27 Andrew Keen: Coming to these negotiations: so the British acquired a veneer of legality, acquired a lease — although one could argue they never really had a right to it as a European power. You noted that Margaret Thatcher negotiated this — not a weak woman, not someone to be fiddled with when it comes to deals. Why did Thatcher, why did the West, do a deal on this? It's it's always easy, of course, in retrospect given the consequences of that deal since Hong Kong has become, reunited or reintegrated into China. But what was the western thinking behind this deal and, and the Chinese thinking, of course, as well?

00:15:13 Simon Elegant: Well, the Chinese knew they totally had the upper hand, and there was literally nothing that Britain could do. The Americans had made it pretty clear all along that there would be no US Navy ships in Hong Kong Harbor — it was hopeless. There was just no way that could be defended. So even the formidable Thatcher was negotiating — as Trump said to Zelensky, you've got no cards. Britain, I think, did a fairly decent job over an extended period of decent diplomacy to negotiate what it got, which was the so-called one country, two systems, which was all fine. And to be honest — the fascinating thing is, if the Hong Kong people themselves had agreed to have these national security laws passed, which they hated because they would have made them effectively the same as China — well, they did. But if they'd left it alone, they would not have been effectively occupied by Beijing this early, and they would have kept the illusion, at least. I mean, Hong Kong still has a free Internet. It still has a separate currency, which is one of the main reasons it's so successful — Chinese firms can list there and raise capital overseas. It's fantastically useful. That's why it'll never really be subsumed into the mainland — you can't really trade the Chinese yuan, much as they talk about it, whereas the Hong Kong dollar is fully internationally tradable. So it's still incredibly useful for China, and it'll stay that way.

00:16:48 Andrew Keen: I want to talk about Jimmy Lai as well — perhaps the best-known Chinese dissident — and your thoughts on him, and the book itself. The novel City on Fire is about the Hong Kong rebellion against the Chinese. But are you suggesting, Simon — in a way I love this phrase, I'm sure nobody else does — that Hong Kong was for a while at least half pregnant, successfully half pregnant, both part of the Mainland and not part of the Mainland?

00:17:21 Simon Elegant: It was. And I actually wrote a story when I went back after the takeover — after the demonstrations ended and the Chinese had taken over and passed the law, in Beijing, by the way. They didn't manage to get the legislature in Hong Kong — it's called LegCo — to pass it. Obviously LegCo passes the law; it's not elected, it's appointed. But yeah — half pregnant is an interesting phrase. I would say that after the takeover, from the people I talked to, it was even stricter — and it still is. Mind-boggling though it may seem, it's probably worse to be a dissident now in Hong Kong than it is on the Mainland.

00:18:00 Andrew Keen: Speaking of dissidents — we did a show with Gal Beckerman, the New York Times writer, who has a new book out on how to be a dissident. One of the examples he gives is Tank Man, the man with the shopping bags who stood in front of Chinese tanks in 1989 on Tiananmen Square. Tell us about the dissidents of Hong Kong and how they inspired you to write this book, City on Fire. Was it equivalent to what happened in Beijing in 1989?

00:18:38 Simon Elegant: No, I don't think it was equivalent at all. I mean, first of all, they had the right to protest, and especially when it started, the police were not necessarily — one of the great transitions was how the protests became a matter of pitting the police against the students. Chinese society has a veneration of students. It's one of the reasons, for example, that Mao Zedong was the librarian at what was then Peking University, because it was right next to Tiananmen Square. But as soon as the communists came to power, they understood about protests and students, and they moved it fifteen kilometers outside of the city because they didn't want any bloody students coming up and protesting in front of the center of power. But that veneration goes very deep — especially at the beginning, when some of these young people, as young as 20, were leading the protest movement in Hong Kong, and some of them were beaten. A lot of them were beaten and —

00:19:33 Andrew Keen: A couple — but before we get to the beatings, what were they protesting about?

00:19:38 Simon Elegant: They were protesting about the attempts by the government in Hong Kong, at the behest of Beijing, to implement a quote-unquote national security law, which effectively would have made — and which now does make — any offense they wanted to a violation of national security. So they could put anyone in jail. It would have shut down all freedom of speech and so on, which was supposedly guaranteed under one country, two systems. There were various manifestations, but that was the fundamental thing they were protesting against.

00:20:07 Andrew Keen: And that began in the late twenty-teens. Is that right?

00:20:11 Simon Elegant: 2014 was the first big eruption of protest — they occupied Central for three months, I think, blocking roads and so on. But no, as I say, it started as early as 2004, with the first time the government tried to pass this law. The reaction was so strong from ordinary Hong Kongers — grandmas, everything. This wasn't just kids, by any stretch of the imagination. And the then chief executive had to resign eventually because of those protests. So it went on for fifteen years.

00:20:46 Andrew Keen: And what about Jimmy Lai? The reason I bring him up — I heard an interview with his rather tearful son on the Ezra Klein show. You probably heard that one too. How important is Lai symbolically or politically in the resistance, among the dissidents against the Chinese?

00:21:04 Simon Elegant: I mean, what he did is quite extraordinary. He converted to Catholicism — I can't remember how long ago, about fifteen years ago. His godfather is, in fact, a former colleague of mine at the Far Eastern Economic Review, the Hong Kong-based magazine. And I think there's an element of — I wouldn't say martyrdom, I think it'd be insulting to him to say that — but I think he felt that he deliberately sacrificed himself. He could have easily — well, he definitely could have left. I mean —

00:21:34 Andrew Keen: he was a wealthy publisher. He could have gone to live in London, Paris, New York — wherever he wanted.

00:21:40 Simon Elegant: Absolutely — and had houses, and decided to stay, and knew the consequences. It's painful for them now. There's been talk that he'll be released, but the Communist Party is not famous for being forgiving or forgetting, either one. So I'm not optimistic about his future. It's often said that his sentence amounted to a death sentence, because he'd die in jail.

00:22:05 Andrew Keen: As I said, Simon — until Jeff Bezos made his decision at the beginning of the year, you were the China correspondent of the Washington Post. You have a couple of novels before, but you're not a fiction writer, at least professionally. I mean, your job was as a —

00:22:21 Simon Elegant: I wish I could be. Don't make any money at it, but, yes — go on.

00:22:24 Andrew Keen: Well, you probably make more than most. Why did you decide to write a novel about this resistance to the Chinese? It's a novel of Hong Kong. Is it a polemic? Did you want to dress up a polemic in fictional terms? Or — what was the thinking behind this book?

00:22:45 Simon Elegant: Well, a couple of impulses. I've always loved mysteries, and I wanted to write one. And I thought it'd be fascinating to do one that was the opposite of a polemic. I specifically did not wish it to be a polemic. That's why the protagonist is a policeman himself. And what's more, he's not Chinese. He's a colonial remnant in the sense that he's white but grew up in Hong Kong speaking Cantonese with a stepmother — his father died, and his stepmother is actually Chinese. So he's perfectly fluent in both languages, attended Hong Kong schools, has no real connection to the UK anymore, but is obviously still Caucasian, so stands out in a post-1997 police force. I mean — fiction, drama, is conflict, and that's a conflict. There are many conflicts, but I thought it'd be really interesting. The other one is that his sister is deeply involved in the protest, and in danger of being arrested. And that's distressing to him — a big part of the novel revolves around his dilemmas to do with that. So no, definitely not a polemic. I went there to report this, to talk to people on the ground, and I just thought it was the most astonishing human story. Even though a million people were protesting sometimes, families were divided — brother and sister, father and son, children and parents — divided over what to do, because Hong Kong has always been pragmatic, and many voices in Hong Kong were still saying, don't be bloody fools. The Chinese will just come in. You'll make a mess of the city. It'll be the end of us as an economic power. It'll be the end of our jobs. You'll destroy our home as we know it. And they had a good argument — don't forget them. But the epigraph of my book is the quotation that many protesters used as their own motto, a quotation from the Hunger Games movie: "If we burn, you burn with us." They were never confused about the fact that they were heading for a fall and destroying their own prospects for the future.

00:24:48 Andrew Keen: So it's much more morally complex than, I think, Gal Beckerman's new book on how to be a dissident, in which he basically argues that we all have — or should have — a moral obligation to become dissidents.

00:25:05 Simon Elegant: Yeah. I've been fascinated — all through my reporting in China, and also throughout Southeast Asia and other places — by the character of the dissident. I mean, you mentioned Jimmy Lai; I'm not talking about him here, let me make that clear. But I've been fascinated because people put themselves in danger. The last time I was in Hong Kong, I won't say who it is, but I talked to a dissident who was speaking out publicly and effectively courting arrest. He knew it, and I asked him: why are you doing this? I don't understand it. And the nature, the character, of people who do this thing — as you must know from reading the same thing from everyone, from Sharansky in the USSR, whoever it is — they're fascinating, complex characters. And —

00:25:48 Andrew Keen: Yeah — and to be clear, Beckerman acknowledges that some of these dissidents — Solzhenitsyn comes to mind — are not always politically very palatable characters.

00:25:58 Simon Elegant: Right. Yes. Indeed.

00:26:01 Andrew Keen: They're certainly not necessarily liberals or even Democrat.

00:26:04 Simon Elegant: No, I — I don't know what Jimmy Lai's politics are, to tell you the truth, but I know he's got amazing conviction about it. I've spoken to people —

00:26:12 Andrew Keen: He has amazing conviction, but you don't know what those politics are.

00:26:16 Simon Elegant: No — I mean, conviction about what his duty is in the face of —

00:26:20 Andrew Keen: Right. I mean, if one is to generalize about these protests — I know they're very complicated, and you had a front-row seat, so you appreciate their complexity even more. And the book itself is about the novel itself is about the moral complexity. But what are they defending? The old Hong Kong? Are they trying to establish a third way between Western democracy and, Chinese authoritarianism? Do they look, for example, to Singapore as a model or Taiwan, perhaps?

00:26:50 Simon Elegant: I think Hong Kong is more like Singapore now than it was before 2019, but Hong Kong, again, is another separate kettle of whatever it is — not piranhas, but goldfish maybe. As I've just said, I don't think the protesters knew, really. There were a couple of people who were leading, the heads of the protest, but a lot of it was organized through anonymous apps. It was very hard to know where the head of the snake was, and that drove the police crazy. They were constantly trying to infiltrate, and the protesters I talked to were very aware of that. But as I say — to go back to that phrase, "If we burn, you burn with us" — I don't think they were trying to establish anything. They were trying to stop, and they had been quite successful over a period of fifteen years in stopping the government from implementing. But it was getting to the point — even in my judgment — where somebody was going to be killed. People were shot, but no one had died. And it could have gotten very, very ugly, or indeed the People's Liberation Army would have just marched in. As it turned out, in the end everybody in Hong Kong knew the consequences of protesting after the change in law, and it also coincided with COVID. So people just didn't protest anymore, because they knew they'd be sent to some horrible prison in Qinghai, some far-off western province of China, never to be seen again — or worse. I go into that issue in the book. So no, I don't think they were trying to establish a third way. I think they were desperately clinging on to the rights they had come to expect as their own, and to being proud of their hometown. But it's a puzzling, contradictory thing, in many ways.

00:28:36 Andrew Keen: How were the protests seen outside? I mean, obviously the West — they certainly weren't as much front-page news as Ukraine or maybe even the protests in Iran, which ended much more bloodily. How were they viewed on the Mainland, in Singapore, in Taiwan?

00:28:55 Simon Elegant: Well, I've talked to people — it's easy to forget, because of course on the Mainland it's so quick, but there was a thing called the white paper protest, the Baizhi protest, right around COVID. And the government there, as I mentioned earlier, they understand perfectly well that students are idealistic, that they'll get out in the street and protest and look for their rights. And they did, for about a week, or maybe five days. It's easily forgotten now because there have been a few other things going on in the world. But the mainlanders that we and many other reporters talked to directly cited the protests in Hong Kong as an inspiration. So it did have an enormous influence. There's a wonderful thing — and there still is. You can suppress a people, 1.2 billion people, but you can't suppress them entirely. There's a wonderful book called The People's Republic of Amnesia by Louisa Lim, who says that the efforts of the government in China are to completely make people amnesiac and not remember Tiananmen. But still — those young kids who were interviewed on TV by CNN. There's a wonderful parallel because there's a famous picture of CNN interviewing someone on a bicycle, cycling, as I mentioned, from Peking University — you had to cycle fifteen kilometers to get into the city. And they said to him, why are you doing this? And he said, "It is my duty." Then they interviewed someone on the streets of Shanghai in 2020, a young lady, and she said the exact same thing. It's enough to give you goosebumps. The idealism is so wonderful — and so futile, in a way. I think that speaks to exactly the spirit in Hong Kong. It inspired me extraordinarily. It was idealistic and wonderful and completely futile and maddeningly —

00:30:45 Andrew Keen: — in vain. That's sort of romantic and heroic. What about the interests of Beijing, of Xi in particular? We've done lots of shows on him, one with the author of a book called The Party's Interests Come First, about the life of Xi's father and the suffering he grew up with. What do the authorities in Beijing want with Hong Kong?

00:31:09 Simon Elegant: As far as I could tell — which is not very far, because they're famously opaque, but talking to the usual suspects, the academics who study the government both inside and outside of China — I think they just want to get on with things and not be bothered by Hong Kong. And it was more of a stone in their shoe than anything else. They finally got exasperated and put their foot down. That's a bit of a mixed metaphor, but you see what I mean. Because it is extremely useful economically, as I say — a separate currency in which they can raise money from outside of China, which Chinese companies can list in, especially after China decided they didn't want any more Chinese companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange or in London. There were issues of compliance — they could be forced to disclose things. Effectively, for the purposes of understanding — everything in China, including every large corporation, is under the control of the Communist Party, and anything that interferes with that is not to be allowed. So they're very happy to have somewhere they can list and get people to put money in. Everything from tech companies to biotech. So that's the reason Hong Kong will maintain its economic status. As I say, I don't think they wanted anything to happen. They were just exasperated by all these people getting on the street and demonstrating, and by the complete incompetence of the Hong Kong authorities. In particular — we don't need to go into it — but there was a very bullheaded chief executive [Carrie Lam] who refused to back down, who unbelievably mishandled it. If she'd compromised a little bit, I think the protests would have died down of their own accord.

00:32:56 Andrew Keen: Speaking of movies — last week we saw the James Bond film Tomorrow Never Dies, from 1997, which imagines Britain is still a great power in the South China Sea, which it certainly isn't. Do you cover in the book, or do you touch on, the Western response to what was happening in Hong Kong? As someone working for an American newspaper, someone who travels extensively, are you disappointed with the response of the Western powers — Britain, of course, America — in terms of these demonstrations?

00:33:34 Simon Elegant: I'm certainly not disappointed. As I said earlier, I don't think things have changed since really 1945. Effectively, Hong Kong was always a hostage to fortune, and Britain knew it. The US knew it. Everybody knew it — there was no way it could be defended. It's completely indefensible militarily, and there was no will either — which is more important, in a way, than a few destroyers or —

00:33:55 Andrew Keen: I mean — and again, I don't really remember, because I didn't cover it with the detail you did — did the American president at the time, or the British prime minister, say anything about what was happening?

00:34:08 Simon Elegant: I mean, there were statements about the wonderful protesters and so on, but it was about as much value as Trump's asking Iranians to come out and keep protesting. People weren't murdered in the streets by the 10,000, but they were empty statements, and everyone in Hong Kong knew that too, as I say. So no, I'm not disappointed, because I don't think there was anything to be disappointed by — they didn't have the recourse to power. I mean, Taiwan is a very, very different issue. It's, you know, whatever it is, a hundred miles off the coast — and the greatest amphibious invasion ever made was across the Channel, which is what, twenty miles? Eighteen miles? I can't even remember.

00:34:51 Andrew Keen: You mean from the mainland? That was a very —

00:34:54 Simon Elegant: — close-run thing, by all accounts. So, going across, anyway — Taiwan —

00:34:57 Andrew Keen: There's no Hollywood ending, at least to Hong Kong, maybe.

00:35:01 Simon Elegant: I don't think —

00:35:02 Andrew Keen: I won't give away the ending of City on Fire, because we want everyone to read the book, which is out this week.

00:35:07 Simon Elegant: Absolutely. No, I don't think there is. I think sometimes the wheel of history turns and it crushes an entire city or an entire population, and it's just too bad. I mean, 250,000 people have left Hong Kong. They've taken advantage of the visas offered to people born before 1997 who are eligible for the kind of half-passport Britain gave, called the British [National Overseas].

00:35:30 Andrew Keen: And so they've mostly gone to The UK?

00:35:33 Simon Elegant: Almost entirely because they can get free entry there, and it's very difficult to go elsewhere.

00:35:37 Andrew Keen: I wonder what Nigel Farage thinks about that.

00:35:42 Simon Elegant: Yeah. There's an old joke in Hong Kong that what Britain really needed was to have Hull, or somewhere, swap its entire population with Hong Kong and see how that worked out — because —

00:35:52 Andrew Keen: — maybe Lancashire, where you went to school, Simon. A few years ago we had another foreign correspondent, Peter Hessler,

00:36:02 Simon Elegant: Go on.

00:36:03 Andrew Keen: an American in China, on the show to talk about what life is really like in Xi's China. He's an acclaimed writer. His latest book was Other Rivers: A Chinese Education, focusing on schooling in China and his experience of sending his daughter to school in China. I know this is probably a bit of a dumb, unfair question, but what's life like now in Hong Kong? How much time did you spend there researching this book? I assume you have lots of friends there.

00:36:36 Simon Elegant: My sister is still living there, yes. And I do have friends — and, as I say, family. I spent, I don't know, maybe two or three months there for this book, but I go back a couple of times a year. You mentioned Singapore earlier. If you stage it right — and unfortunately, the government of Hong Kong is still struggling with how to do this — but Singaporeans have accepted the same compact effectively, with a bit more freedom (and I'm sure people will write in and complain about this). They've had the same government for the entirety of their independence, and the deal is basically: the government makes sure you're relatively uncorrupt — well, in Singapore's case, completely uncorrupt, because of Lee Kuan Yew. It's the same deal Hong Kong now gets. They put money into education. They put money into public housing. Beijing is having to slap around the local government because they're quite incompetent, unfortunately, in Hong Kong. But effectively, you are allowed to get on with your life. You're allowed to send your kids to school normally. As long as you don't step out of line, there are jobs and so on available to you. That's the deal, and that's what life is like. So on the surface, you don't see much — it looks like the same place.

00:37:47 Andrew Keen: When you go and talk to people outside, where they're not worried about being listened to, what do they say to you about life in Hong Kong?

00:37:57 Simon Elegant: They more or less say what I just said. There are people who have left — a lot of people cleared out, a lot of them younger people with children who could afford it. There are a few buckets for Hong Kongers now. There are people who can't afford to leave, or who were born after '97 and don't have the option to move to Britain — because you had to have been born while Britain was still in control to be eligible for the passport. And then there's a whole bunch of people who could leave, often with young children. Even during COVID — when I visited and spent three weeks in a small hotel room to get in, for my sins, as you would say — you'd go past the one line of people getting on the plane that was leaving, a BA flight to London. That was mostly people in their late twenties and thirties with young kids. Those are people who had the option to leave and didn't want their kids to be raised wearing the little red scarves of the Young Pioneers. Those people have left. So the people who remain either have enough money to leave Hong Kong on a regular basis, or have no choice, and they'll just have to accept the reality. And the reality is, they need their children educated. They can't afford a private education, so they just have to — there's a very well-made film [whose title escapes me] which was made more or less ten years before the takeover, the passage of the national security law, that anticipates all this. Everybody knew exactly what was coming, and the ones who are stuck there just adjust to it. That's life.

00:39:23 Andrew Keen: That is life — or it's certainly life in Hong Kong. You've written this book, which is certainly not sympathetic to the Chinese. It's a novel that deals with the moral complexities of being a dissident in the twenty-teens —

00:39:38 Simon Elegant: I'd just say that it may not be sympathetic to the Chinese — the Chinese Communist Party.

00:39:42 Andrew Keen: I take your point.

00:39:44 Simon Elegant: I do like to make that distinction.

00:39:46 Andrew Keen: Yeah — I'm certainly not suggesting that you're coming at it from Beijing's point of view. But in terms of writing this book, might you be concerned that you won't be allowed back in? What would you have had to say in City on Fire to be banned from Hong Kong?

00:40:02 Simon Elegant: I have no idea. I'm hoping they just think it's a stupid piece of fiction and ignore it — which is possible. I don't know. It's not being distributed there, as far as I know. So we'll see. As I say, I was actually at pains to make it complex and not one-sided for anyone. The hero is a policeman who's struggling with exactly the dilemma we talked about — a stable society, a stable, productive group of people who live a good life, educate their children, get on with it, versus forces basically of chaos and destruction, who are idealistic to the point that they'll bring the whole house down about their ears and everybody else's. And this is directly addressed in conversations between the protagonist and his sister. He's saying to her, "What the hell are you doing? You're going to destroy Hong Kong." So I would have thought it's pretty fair to both sides. I don't think the Hong Kong authorities will think that, though, and I don't think the booksellers there will feel like taking the risk. So —

00:40:59 Andrew Keen: And it's certainly not grist to the mill of the China hawks in the US either, is it?

00:41:04 Simon Elegant: No, I don't think — I mean, yeah. I think that mindset has taken over DC, as far as I can tell, to the point where —

00:41:11 Andrew Keen: And in both parties, not just in —

00:41:14 Simon Elegant: Yes, absolutely, in both parties. The pendulum has swung so far in the other direction — evil China and all the rest of it. It's absurd in many ways, too. I mean, it's correct to some extent as well, but yeah, this pendulum definitely needs to swing back to the middle. And some of my friends — experts, reporters, and so on — are trying to do that, to remind people. Many of the links that are really important — I taught for a while in Beijing at a place set up by the Jesuit colleges in the US, Loyola, Georgetown, that kind of thing. Those students would come over. When I was teaching there, there were maybe 150 a year. I'm not even sure — I think the program is still going, more or less, but it may be closed. And it's across the board: Yale, Penn (University of Pennsylvania) — all these centers now have almost nobody coming, and that's a real disappointment. Because if you don't have any communication, especially among the younger people — not to mention just learning Chinese in China and understanding that it's not a bunch of mad communist zealots — it's very bad for both sides. And frankly, it's going to lead us directly to the famous Thucydides Trap and possible conflict.

00:42:25 Andrew Keen: Yeah. So the book is about not just the moral complexity of the protests in Hong Kong against the Chinese, but also the complexity of life in Hong Kong. As I said at the beginning, you were the Washington Post correspondent in China until Jeff Bezos decided —

00:42:43 Simon Elegant: — if I may say so, I was the bureau chief in China for Time magazine and for the Washington Post.

00:42:50 Andrew Keen: Well, anyway — Jeff Bezos was helping you, and you were enlightening American readers of the Washington Post about the complexity of Hong Kong. You're anything but a China hawk, as you've made clear. Was this a wise move, in your opinion? Obviously you didn't benefit from it — but for Jeff Bezos to shut all these foreign bureaus, so that Americans know even less about China now in May 2026 than they did last year, because nobody's covering it for the Washington Post?

00:43:29 Simon Elegant: Can I — I'll answer that in a second, if I could just jump back. Can I say that, apart from the moral complexities and all the rest we've talked about, the book is a cracking crime novel? The book is basically a mystery about a murder and the policeman who has to solve it, and the dilemmas he faces. It's also about a protest, but if I may just say so, for people who —

00:43:51 Andrew Keen: Fair enough — you're pushing back, which is good.

00:43:54 Simon Elegant: — might pick it up. You know, for me —

00:43:57 Andrew Keen: — for me, I — this is more of a politics —

00:44:01 Simon Elegant: — than a literary show.

00:44:02 Andrew Keen: But I was particularly intrigued to talk to you because — sure, maybe you're half pregnant — you wear lots of hats simultaneously in this book. I don't know whether the metaphor extends, but —

00:44:13 Simon Elegant: I do. To answer the other question — I'm baffled. "Eliminated" was the word that appears on my last paycheck. I think most of us were.

00:44:22 Andrew Keen: Eliminated? You need to turn that into art. You were formally eliminated — you should put that up for auction.

00:44:29 Simon Elegant: Yeah, your position. Exactly. I mean, firing — I think there were maybe 35 to 40 of us, one of the biggest foreign staffs. It wasn't just China. But yeah, it's completely inexplicable, and nobody can really understand what the thinking was, if there was any, behind it. I think the initial thing was to get rid of everybody. There were a few people left. I'm — let us say — an older gentleman, an old fart, that old. It doesn't matter so much to me, but there were plenty of people with mortgages. It was a completely unthinking exercise in cost-cutting that made no sense in terms of the newspaper. I'm going to DC to do an event at, actually, Politics and Prose — which is the T-shirt I'm wearing — a lovely bookstore in DC.

00:45:12 Andrew Keen: Yeah. I know very well.

00:45:14 Simon Elegant: Every person I've talked to has said to me, "I've canceled my subscription because of these idiocies that went through." I mean, it's doomed. There's still plenty of great people who work there, especially in national security, but — this is the second time around. It's completely inexplicable, except perhaps if you want to destroy the newspaper.

00:45:36 Andrew Keen: I know you've written some pieces for the New York Times recently — you wrote something on Macau. Where would you advise Americans to keep up on China?

00:45:46 Simon Elegant: Oh, you mean in terms of news?

00:45:48 Andrew Keen: I mean, given that the Post has shut its bureaus down, where's the best information about China and Hong Kong for US-based, English-speaking people?

00:45:59 Simon Elegant: For my money, both the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times do a great, great job, and they cover it in different ways. Luckily, they complement each other. They have the resources, and those two alone — there are plenty of specialist publications, but if you're a general-interest reader and want to keep up with what's going on, they're both excellent, really excellent.

00:46:18 Andrew Keen: And finally, Simon — as you say, this is a novel, a crime novel, rather than a book of nonfiction. This is your third novel, as you noted at the beginning. What did writing this novel teach you as a journalist, someone who's spent his career writing nonfiction?

00:46:41 Simon Elegant: I think that's pretty easy. Basically, it's the same thing Hemingway said — not that I'm comparing myself to Hemingway, but Hemingway famously said two things, among others. One of which is: it's an excellent education for somebody who wants to be a novelist to be a journalist at the beginning, but you've got to get out after a few years. Don't spend too long, or you'll be too rigid. And the other thing he famously said was that seven-eighths of a book — the research and the knowledge of the author — should be under the water like an iceberg. Only the tippy-top should be visible, but the weight of the knowledge is underneath. Otherwise, the whole thing will topple over. And by God, when I first wrote the book, it was 128,000 words. By the time I got to the third or fourth round of slashing with the editor's blade, it was 75. So that's the lesson I learned: don't jam in your entire notebook just because you reported it. And obviously, writing fiction is seeking a different truth from writing articles in newspapers, and I loved it. I just finished another thriller.

00:47:50 Andrew Keen: And I know you've got a follow-up. Are we using some of the same characters? When you say seeking a different truth, Simon, what do you mean?

00:47:57 Simon Elegant: I mean that reportage is very different from what we try to portray in novels — the complexities of human beings, and the truths we try to get to through that, rather than through a newspaper article. Even an excellent magazine article that goes on for five or ten thousand words, in The New Yorker or whatever, is just a different way of approaching it. I think fiction goes more directly into your heart, and somewhat bypasses the brain — into your soul, if you wish. I'm a big fan, obviously, of fiction and the truths it can convey, rather than the literal truths of reportage.

00:48:33 Andrew Keen: In other words, to bring back my rather dumb metaphor — in nonfiction you can't be half pregnant, but in novels, you can.

00:48:44 Simon Elegant: I think you can be many things, yes — many states, which is what human beings usually are. I'm not sure about the pregnancy, but yeah, we're complex creatures, and that's the fascination for me of writing fiction: getting to that truth, rather than the best, literal-minded, excellent — even interviews or anything like that.

00:49:00 Andrew Keen: Well, Simon — you put up with my dumb questions. The book is anything but dumb. It's a wonderful read — propulsive, essential. It's out this week: City on Fire, a novel of Hong Kong, by Simon Elegant. I won't even make any elegant jokes, Simon. Thank you so much.

00:49:16 Simon Elegant: Thank you.