There's 5.8 billion people that live under some form of totalitarianism or autocracy. Many of these people are super educated. 90, 100 million people in the Chinese Communist Party overseeing 1.3 billion people. China seems pretty entrenched. Am I missing that? What is unique about them where they can stay in power? When I was talking to people down a mine in Shanxi or wherever it was, the one thing they always talked about, everybody loves their family and wants their kids to do well. It's a universal thing. And that's the one point where I thought the Chinese Communist Party might be vulnerable. And they're very, very conscious of it. You know, when you've got 30 percent of the population and 120 million people or something like that graduating every year, it's crazy difficult. That's an enormous thing. And that's the one place they're vulnerable. You can have all the maglev trains and the highways and all high speed trains that you want. But if you don't get jobs to the kids, you're going to be in trouble. Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci. Joining us today is Simon Elegant. He's the China Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, but he's out with a new book, City on Fire, a novel of Hong Kong. Am I right in saying that Hong Kong, the name means fragrant harbor? You are exactly right, yes. Okay, and why? What is fragrant about that harbor? Well, that's the joke normally is that it used to be a stinking mess, but they reclaimed so much land that there's hardly any room left between the island of Hong Kong and the peninsula of Kowloon. And it used to be so if you fell into it by accident, you'd die of some weird disease. So it was very unfragrant. I think they've cleaned it up a bit now. All right. But that's an ancient word, Fragrant Harbor. Okay. You spent years covering Asia. some of the region's most consequential political and cultural shifts. So before we get into the novel, tell us about your background and what drew you to Asia. Why did you end up going there? Sure. I was actually born in Hong Kong, and I grew up there partly because my dad was a reporter as well. He actually, believe it or not, seeing his house come full cycle, he opened the Newsweek Bureau there in Hong Kong to cover and covered the cultural revolution in China, a big mess, mostly by listening to the radio in those days. And it kind of comes full cycle when I probably should update you that I am no longer the China Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, because I, along with many, many of my colleagues, got canned by Mr. Bezos. But that was a couple of months ago. It's a different issue. Another story for another time. Yeah. So my dad was based there for Newsweek and then the LA Times. And I guess it just got into my blood, both Asia, China in particular, and journalism, being a foreign congressman, it looked like a lot of fun. So, yeah. I mean, that is an amazing city. So I'll just fully disclose you. I lived there for about four months in 1998. Oh, okay. Wow. And so it was a couple of years after the handover. I was living in the Island Shangri-La Hotel. So you know exactly the location I was living in. I sure do. Because I was there as a corporate. And we were working on Chung Kong Center for Mr. Lee Ka-shing and a few other things. And, you know, look, I love that city. I try to get back there at least once or twice a year. Wow. Okay. But you took what I think, I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like this was one of the more, the backdrop for this very exciting novel is one of the most volatile periods in the history of modern Hong Kong. This is the 2019 protest movement. Why that era? Why that setting for this? What were you trying to convey? I mean, I was there reporting it. I did some stories on the ground and I just got fascinated by, I mean, effectively, I had stopped being a reporter for a while. I was the bureau chief of time in Beijing. And I love journalism, but it can get a bit, how should we say, bricklaying. It develops into an element of bricklaying. It can be a bit humdrum. And I didn't want to leave China, so I did other things. I started a restaurant with a friend. I did some teaching, that kind of thing. But when I went back to these extraordinary protests, which is basically the city trying to throw off their fate. I mean, they were destined to be ruled by Beijing, and they didn't want to. They wanted to keep their rights and so on and so forth. freedom of speech, stuff like that. They'd got used to it. And it was coming down. Basically, the city was crushed by the wheel of history, unfortunately for them, but they were resisting. And they knew it. Everybody I talked to was extraordinarily idealistic. And I just thought, yeah, it's just not going to fit in it. There's a different truth to be had and a different way of approaching that truth. And that, I think, benefits better through fiction. I hope to, I knew, I guess I could write a regular novel, but I thought I love crime novels anyway. And I thought I could have a pretty great way of approaching it. And I mean, the book is a mystery. There's a policeman who solves the crime, but there's also the whole dilemma. His younger sister is deeply into the protests. I mean, I think that's a good half of the book is why the protests are happening, especially when they're basically futile. They know they can't win. So I just thought there was a much better way to get it there. But to me, we're fascinating and very moving, very emotional aspects of the situation for Hong Kong as people. Is this book available in Hong Kong? No. Booksellers will take it. It's not available in Hong Kong because of the censorship laws in Hong Kong. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Well, as far as I know, I haven't checked officially. I did check with the booksellers themselves, I mean, you know, unofficially to see if they take it and they just wouldn't stock it, basically. It hasn't even come up, actually. But yeah, they're petrified. I mean, they just passed a law saying that restaurants had to comply with the national security law. how exactly that that's going to be in put into effect but i mean it's you know it's beyond farce there city still relatively free you think or not really no not at all i mean it's become a chinese city when i was there in 1998 it was still in my mind a british city that had chinese characters on the roadsides it's not that anymore uh no they haven't done that and And superficially, it looks much the same. And well, you would know this, Anthony. The reason that it's so still successful economically, despite the fact that Shenzhen, for example, and Guangdong have a greater GDP, but Hong Kong has one precious thing which will always make it, which is they have a separate country. And Chinese companies can IPO there and raise money from the rest of the world. It's incredibly useful, especially because China's already decided they don't want anybody to. they've withdrawn they've made most of the companies withdraw their listings in the nyc and so on so that will make it their separate currency and their ability to raise a lot of money for their because a lot of people still want to bet on china right so but other than that it's extremely unfree nobody dares to say anything at all i mean i was there reporting a story for the post maybe a two a month and a half ago and i spoke to a guy who was speaking i mean i interviewed him a gentleman and a film director who was speaking out. And it's one of these peculiar things. I don't know how many people you've run into who are dissidents and prominent dissidents And you say to them what is in the character of somebody like this He courting almost being arrested He has not been arrested yet The story never ran It fascinating to me but he really the only one And one other person was there was the head of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. And she's been speaking out a bit, but even she has been, it's just too extraordinary. You know, you'll be put in jail for a really long time. And that's probably the best result. I feel like when I read the book and having known the city as well as I know the city, certainly not as well as you do. I was reading a crime novel, and that was a great thriller, and I would recommend anybody to pick this book up and read it, but it also felt like an elegy to a Hong Kong that no longer exists, Simon. Was that part of it? Absolutely. I mean, I was born in the place. I lived there. My sister still lives there. I've got family there. I've got friends, obviously, and as I said, there is a very, an elegy. Yeah, I mean, a goodbye, you know, a sad and very emotional-filled goodbye to some extent that Hong Kong for the foreseeable future is gone. I mean, already people, you know, 250,000 people have taken advantage of the British national overseas thing to emigrate to God knows where in Britain, Hull. And I mean, not that I have anything against Hull, but some of the, you know, where the places in Britain where even some Brits might acknowledge that the weather's pretty awful and conditions are not anything like Hong Kong. So they often people with children because they didn't want their kids raised to be brainwashed in the school and turn into little, you know, little red pioneers. And so that is very, very sad. It had a it had a great thing. I think I get into it in the book that they had an extraordinary arrangement with this benign administration by the Brits who did a pretty good job of just backing off. You know, Milton Friedman admired the economic arrangement a great deal. It just worked. It worked really well. So they ended up with a fantastic corruption-free civil service. They have the longest-lived people in the world, longer-lived than the Japanese. They had a great medical system, medical insurance, probably. And it just was a place that worked that people were pretty happy and extremely, as you know, productive, really good entrepreneurs. Yeah, so it is sad. Yes, I would say that's definitely accurate, that there's an element of goodbye to that. Thank you for tuning in to Open Book. And if you haven't already, please hit the subscribe button below so that you're the first to know when our new episodes drop each week. We've got a lot more coming. And now back to the show. If you're an expat, so you work for an American bank, you're an expat, and you want to put a kid in school over there, you're getting the doctrine of China in that school? So you're getting a little bit of CCP propaganda nonsense in force, but only a little bit. but they have international schools. So they've got a Hong Kong international school. Various Brit schools are set up there. So there's a restricted element. But anybody who goes to the regular day-to-day, which my protagonist does because he's a Caucasian, but he was basically raised as another Hong Konger. Those people are getting the full bore, history, everything shoved down their throat. That's one of the places they targeted first as teachers. They really enforce that. They understand this stuff. Anthony, they're really good at the communist party. They really get what they have to do and what they have to stop people from doing. Yeah, I think we in the West really didn't understand how good they were at it. We thought they were coming our way 30 years ago. Okay, let's go to the protagonist, this gentleman, Killian Tong, Superintendent Killian Tong. He's a disgraced police officer seeking redemption. So who is Killian and what does he represent in the broader context of the crisis that's going on in Hong Kong? He is, as I have said, his father was one of the many Brits who, there used to be a phrase, I don't know if you heard it when you were in Hong Kong, called filth, which was failed in London, try Hong Kong. And a lot of, I mean, one of the extraordinary thing about Hong Kong was a lot of, quote unquote, second rate people came out from Britain, but they seemed to do very well in these. And one of the big places was the police force. So his father is one of those people who came out pretty late. I mean, they were still taking people from Britain in the early 90s, and they were still having difficulties transitioning. You know, they'd only just started having Chinese offices 10 years before. I mean, it wasn't there. It was called Asia's Finest. And so his father, who died, died when he was young and left him in charge of his stepmother, who was Chinese. So he was basically raised as a full Hong Konger, speaking, you know, properly speaking Mandarin and Cantonese. And he's in the force, and there's a terrible incident because everybody in the force has to rotate through, quote-unquote, riot duty. In other words, protest suppression, whatever you're going to call them, riot squads, because there aren't enough people in the police to... The demonstrations are so great, you know, a million people on the streets sometimes at one time, crazy numbers, 20% of the population. So the police had to cycle through other offices so they wouldn't have enough money to control the crowd. So, yeah, there's an unfortunate incident. He's basically exiled, set away to what counts as a Siberian Hong Kong, which is such a small place it's not far. And he's trying to – there's a murderer, and he's asked if he'll take care of it. So that's his road to getting back in the force. I feel like there's something about his story and Hong Kong itself that when you were writing it, it felt like it was near history. But then as the story unfolded, everything about the story is more or less true, Simon, meaning the facts on the ground are linked almost perfectly to the story that you wrote. Am I right about that? I mean, is that accidental or what happened? No, not accidental at all. No, I deliberately want to, I mean, the climax of the book is the day that the national security law is passed, not in Hong Kong. I mean, I guess for your readers, most people obviously don't follow this that closely. But this struggle between the people of Hong Kong and the pretty incompetent local government trying to do what Beijing wanted them had been going on since 2004 when they first tried to pass this law. And the protests were so strong that the chief executive, the head of the administration, had to resign at the time. So they'd resisted for 15 years at this point. And basically, Beijing was getting pretty exasperated because they really didn't. They just wanted to be left alone, but they didn't want to endanger this issue that I talked about earlier, the golden goose of the IPO and basically the position that Hong Kong played. So, yeah. So it was very much very conscious. Obviously, I changed the name of the chief executive and stuff like that. But other than that, it was very deliberate. Yeah. All right. So I want to, for our viewers, and we have a lot of young viewers, and I want to go out and read your book, but I want you to give them a little bit of this national security law that was imposed on Hong Kong and passed on June 30th, 2020. tell us a little bit what it criminalizes and how dangerous it is and what Amnesty International said about it. It said it was dangerously broad and that virtually anything could be deemed to be national security. So give us a little summary if you don't mind. Sure I mean effectively you right There hardly any need to give more of a summary than what you just gave because it criminalizes anything and anything they want effectively So even I myself am concerned I'm a permanent resident in Hong Kong by virtue of having been born there. I've been there a couple of times recently. I'll be interested to see what happens the next time I go. I don't think they'll pay attention to a piece of fiction because it's smart for them to ignore it. I mean, if it was a, you know, but in theory, I can, I guess, you know, be, be come under the national security, anything and everything that they deem to be encouraging questioning of the government or the government in Beijing. And they are now almost more, you know, more royal than the king kind of thing. You know, plus royal que le roi. They're more Chinese than Beijing because they're trying desperately to prove that they're loyal to Beijing, especially after they've spent 15 years mucking this up in the eyes of Beijing. And in the end, as I said, the national security law had to be passed in Beijing, not in Hong Kong, because the LegCo there couldn't do it. So, yeah, it's really super broad. And anything you do where you get out of line, And I think I just mentioned that they've even said now restaurants. So I'm not sure how that applies to cooking skills, but anything they can designate as a violation of national security. You think that a novel can preserve a place that a state is actively trying to erase? Well, it can maybe, I hope, preserve a little chunk of the place, maybe. I mean, there are other older books in Hong Kong. You know, obviously James Clavel and very, you know, John Le Carre wrote it. And I think a very interesting book, although that was more about the most of them have been more about the Brits. And I deliberately did talk to a lot of Hong Kong Chinese and tried to try to look at it from their side. I mean, there's a TV series recently that was called The Expats. And I think that's one of the things that's happened often. I mean, there have been some brilliant nonfiction books that preserved a chunk of the town. a former reporter colleague of mine in Beijing called Louisa Lim wrote a wonderful book called The Improbable City there's a bunch of good ones but I don't think there are so many in English that do that and now you can't do, there's some very good movies as you know they have a wonderful movie industry but yeah I would hope to preserve something of it I say this as delicately as I can, let me see if I can say this let me step back there's 5.8 billion people that live under some form of totalitarianism or autocracy. Many of these people are super educated. Many of these people have VPNs. There's, you tell me, 90, 100 million people in the Chinese Communist Party overseeing 1.3 billion people. And single party systems typically have a 75-year life expectancy. If you look at Japan or Mexico or Malaysia as an example, those would be three examples. They sort of expire and they devolve from a single-party system. But China seems pretty entrenched, right? I mean, am I missing that? What is unique about them where they can stay in power despite the tension that you describe in the novel and the tension that was certainly felt in 2019. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. But I mean, maybe it's more profitable to look at why single-party systems collapse rather than try and give them a lifespan, which is really, I don't think there is a natural lifespan. I think if you look, Singapore might be a really good comparison. You know, they're still going since basically as a single-party, well, not even basically. There's only one party that rules Singapore. The deal is there that you don't make too much of a fuss. You let us run things. We even have elections, which, you know, China did experiment with that. But the deal is the contract, if you want, between the people and the governing party is as long as you give us not bread and circumstances, but as long as you give us good education and the ability to have work. And more importantly, what people I found is certainly in China. And this is where it would be difficult for them. Health care, too, though, right? Or no? Health care. Well, not in China anymore. No, no. And that's one of their great feelings. But opportunity for your kids is the one thing that when I was talking to people down a mine in Shanxi or wherever it was, the one thing they always talked about. If there's ever a situation, it's not so much themselves, because people can put up with an awful lot. But that's the natural, you know, Italians and Chinese are maybe more than anybody else. But everybody loves their family and wants their kids to do well. It's a universal thing. And that's the one point where I thought the Chinese Communist Party might be vulnerable. And they're very, very conscious of it, especially now. It's a very tricky situation. You know, youth unemployment, they have to do a Trumpian thing and stop reporting the statistics because they're up to like their own reported statistics were, I don't know, 25, 30 percent. You know, when you've got 30 percent of the population and 120 million people or something like that graduating every year, it's kind of it's crazy difficult. And that's why you've had this huge reaction from people wanting to, quote unquote, lie flat. And that's an enormous thing. And that's where I was going to report next. And that's the one place they're vulnerable. You can have all the maglev trains and the highways and all the high-speed trains that you want. But if you don't get jobs to the kids, you're going to be in trouble. If you could put this book, City on Fire, into the hands of one reader anywhere in the world, who would it be? And what do you hope the book does to them? ah well may i say in parenthesis or just firstly is i you know the book is not a kind of polemic on the side of one side or the other that's the reason i picked a policeman i think policemen do tough jobs and often do them pretty well and they it's easy to get them to be vilified and these were what happened in hong kong was they it became tribal and the police began to hate the protesters and vice versa so the one person you know that's a tough one i'm not sure there's anybody who would read it even if I gave it to them as part of the it's part of the setup that they have to read it too because I think a lot of the people I might want to give it to would say would throw it away but you know uh maybe the chief executive the chief executive the current chief executive of Hong Kong is a former head of the police force maybe it'd be nice to get it in his hands to say that people think about these things and people you know they're not cockroaches as the police are calling them during a protest and that there are many sides to a story and this is the other side. Well, I think that's the message. I mean, so I don't know who it would be, but that's the message of hope in the book that, hey, we're all human beings and perhaps there's a little bit more flexibility could actually get you further. That's the irony of it. The repression can get you far. I'm not saying it can't, but more flexibility might get you further and it might also open up a portal into more economic innovation. We find that the The repressive regimes have to steal the intellectual property. And if you look at what happened with the Chinese hardware and the Chinese software during the Iran war, they were knockoffs on the Americans. It wasn't really completely improvised the way the Americans are capable of. I almost feel like the First Amendment right has this secondary causality of allowing us to create economic innovation. We tell the second grader he can speak and think freely Simon He goes on and makes Facebook or Anthropic I love to I really hope you right I did not know that I know that there have been problems with some of the performance, especially obviously all the way from Venezuela to Iran, especially the anti-aircraft missiles and stuff like that. Yeah, no, they had battlefield. Listen, they had troubling battlefield malfunction. Okay. I haven't seen the details. It could be very useful in the Strait of War moves because of Iran being a satellite of China, but they did experience battlefield malfunction, which I think would cause them to hesitate to be aggressive in other areas of the world. But that's just my surprise. Maybe it will. I mean, as you know, as Mike Tyson says, everybody's got a plan until he gets punched in the nose. Well, I've been punched in the face more than once, Michael, both literally and metaphorically. Well, the thing about the Chinese, I'm sure you do understand, is that they will be learning an enormous, I mean, never underestimate them. They will definitely be learning for this. I'm a Chinafile. I go there and speak. I'm a Chinafile. I want to respect their culture. I obviously would like more openness as an American and a Westerner. I'm not saying that, but I'm not going to leave the entire culture behind because we may have a different system. I think that would be a mistake for all of us. I think it'd be a huge mistake. And I think one thing is really, I used to teach for a while. So all the Catholic colleges in the U.S., like what Jesuit colleges specifically, like Loyola and whatever, Georgetown, that kind of thing. They had a center in China, and I taught history there for a while, and it was fantastic. I mean, there were some kids who clearly had hangovers every time they came in on the year off. Imagine that. Imagine that in college. Somebody had a hangover. But there were enough that were interested. And actually, the course that I taught was called, because everything in Chinese history is only really interpreted through the arrival of the West. So from whatever it was when the Dutch first turned up, everything in China is about that, because they're still trying to figure out a way to deal with the fact that they're not basically the only power in the world. And they're still working out how do they do that. But the problem I was going to say is that these undergraduates, that course, when I was teaching it, the entire number of kids was maybe 150. I don't think the program exists anymore. There were so few. And same with Yale or Penn or whatever. They all had programs, and they're pretty much all gone, which means no people studying Chinese, no people hanging out with their Chinese roommates. It's just really bad for the U.S. and for China. Okay, we're down to the five words here, Simon. Are you ready? I'm going to read you a word. Okay. You're going to give me a one or two sentence, okay? We all plucked this from your book, all of us here, on the open book production team. So if I say the word protest to you, Simon, what do you say? I say could be demonstrators, could be protesters, could be rioters. You know, that's kind of the part of the book is it's ambiguous and there are many ways of looking at it. And it's a complex situation. So when I hear protests, I hear there's an unfairness and somebody obviously wants to speak out against it. When I hear the word family, I think of something. What do you think of when you hear the word family? Obviously, I think of my kids and my wife and so on. Yeah, I think of my family. But yeah, again, a very, I think I just mentioned earlier that Italians and Chinese are probably similar in many ways, actually, but we won't go into that now. Yeah, I think the family comes first is a huge thing for Chinese, often because of history. The same reasons that, you know, you go to an Italian hill town, all the houses look like forts. They had to protect themselves, especially. Anyway, yeah, that's right. I think of China. I think of Chinese and the veneration of family and secondary education. Obviously, that's the other big thing. Well, I mean, one of the big impressive things about your book is the center of Chinese culture is the family. Is that fair to say? Absolutely. Yeah. I'm going to say the word West. And you think of what? Well, I think of what I just said, which is everything in China is about its reaction to the arrival of those little Dutch, Portuguese, excuse me, boats in the 1600s. And they're still trying to really cope with the fact that, you know, they existed for 2,000 years as the only game in town. Everyone revolved around them. Simon, your last name is Elegance. You didn't say Guilo. You didn't say Guilo because you are an elegant person, Simon. Okay, I'm going to say the word East. Uh-huh. Mysterious? No, I shouldn't. The cliche would be, yeah, I don't know. You know, we're taught nowadays we're not allowed to say Oriental anymore. We have to say Far East and so on. But yeah, you know, for me, to some extent, that means home. I was born in Hong Kong. I've lived in Asia my entire life. So for me, a fascinating place full of wonderful people. And I hear the word philosophy, too. There's a philosophical tenet about the East that we at least should all appreciate and admire. Okay, the last two words, Simon Elegant and then I'll give you the last word Hong Kong well I was gonna say home but I would have to say now I would say some word some variation of the word sad and oppressed because it's go to end up that way and much like I mean you know I'm working on a thriller right now that's entirely set in China and it's the thing that strikes me when I try and write about this and I'm trying to keep the philosophizing blather out of it because it's a thriller but you know Basically, in Hong Kong and in China, you're talking about the infantilization of 1.2 billion people. These people are not allowed to write novels. They're not allowed to make movies beyond like a rom-com. They're not allowed to make TV. So you're talking about the oppression of an entire pool of talent. It's really sad and disgusting, actually. Well, it's one of the reasons why the West does have intellectual advantages. You know, Lee Kuan Yew would have said that, that we are drawing from all over the world. and we can, because of the freedoms here, you have the intellectual. And remember, the Chinese, they don't like stars. And when people become high-profile stars, they disappear. And so this is sort of a... And this also does have an impact on the creativity, you know? Absolutely, it does. And there is no creativity right now. I mean, I could go on about the creativity thing and the issue of stars. I mean, particularly the... But that is, again, I hate to say it, two and a half thousand years of the Mandarin class. They never liked entrepreneurs. If you were a merchant, you are very much third rate. They're interested in stability, not in growth. And that is the biggest thing to them. And that remains the case. That's why if you found, say, Alibaba, you're the founder of Alibaba, you can disappear for a year while they remind you who's the boss and who's right. And then you come out and basically move to Tokyo because Tokyo is a huge new place for Chinese exiles. yeah it's a booming place yeah all right well sir it's an amazing book i hope you come back for your next one i'm looking forward to read that as well title of the book is city on fire a novel of hong kong written by simon elegant and as i told simon before this recording started if i had that last name simon god only knows what kind of happened to me but in any event i really enjoyed the conversation thank you so much for being here it was a great pleasure to talk to you anthony good luck Thank you.
