Lam to the slaughter: Hong Kong’s shocking U-turn

Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. Most parents think that having a child genius would be a blessing. Ask the parents of one and you'll hear a different story. We speak to a mother who reveals the private agony that comes with being an exceedingly clever kid. And the Latin language is commonly seen as the progenitor of Italian, French, Spanish. The story isn't as clear cut as that. A look at how modern Italian developed reveals that it's more about politics than the rules of language evolution. But first, it was a decision that astounded many. On Saturday, the leader of Hong Kong's government, Carrie Lam, announced a suspension of the contentious extradition bill that had prompted massive public protests. And yesterday, demonstrators who want the bill scrapped altogether poured into the streets again with renewed determination. Organizers gave an unverified estimate of close to 2 million of the territory, 7 million people. The climb down over the bill might be seen as an embarrassment for China's leader, Xi Jinping, but it could also just be a tactical and temporary retreat.

It's been an astonishing weekend.

David Renney is our Beijing bureau chief.

To a lot of people's surprise, having hung very, very tough and said that there was no chance of a U turn, the chief executive of Hong Kong, you turned.

After our repeated internal deliberations over the.

Last two days, I now announce that the government has decided to suspend the legislative amendment exercise.

And on Saturday, Carrie Lam announced that she was suspending a very controversial bill which would basically allow people from Hong Kong to be sent to mainland courts to face trial. And that had already led to two enormous protests on Sunday, the 9th, and then the middle of the week, Wednesday, which turned violent. Then on Saturday, she suddenly said that the bill was being suspended with no timetable for bringing it back in the next day. Yesterday, nearly 2 million people marched anyway. And this time they were saying that they wanted the bill completely withdrawn. And they also want Carrie Lam to resign. And so a really gigantic political humiliation for the government of Hong Kong.

So it seems then that the people of Hong Kong have been empowered by the bit of Carrie Lam's climb down. Why do they still turn out in such numbers?

I think it's important to celebrate what is a spectacular win for people power. Incredibly kind of organized, disciplined, kind of moving crowds we saw yesterday. But not to get too carried away, Hong Kong is not about to become more democratic. Hong Kong's seven and a bit million people are not about to regain the new Freedoms from Beijing. This is a moving, impressive, successful, but entirely defensive protest to keep those freedoms that the people of Hong Kong still enjoy. And so they have seen off this bad bill, but there will be others. And the fact of the matter is, although Beijing would hate this description, Hong Kong is a colony of mainland China, just as it used to be a colony of Britain. And the government of Hong Kong does what it's told, both in public sometimes, but certainly behind the scenes as well.

So why this climb down on the part of Carrie Lam, then? If this is not the people power exerting itself and it looking like Hong Kongers have some power, then why shouldn't we celebrate that?

So you can take it in order. Carrie Lam said at her own press conference on Saturday that she was doing this not because the bill had been a mistake, but that perhaps it had been badly explained. She also pointed to the protests on Wednesday, which involved a smaller number and really quite severe police violence. Police violence we've not seen before in Hong Kong. The police clubbing people on camera, using pepper spray on peaceful protesters, shooting people at short range in the face with rubber bullets. Really shocking scenes. She said that that degree of chaos couldn't be allowed. And so she was, for the good of kind of stability, pulling back this measure. The truth is, though, that Carrie Lam is only one player, and ultimately it's Beijing that calls the final shots. The local press in Hong Kong have reports that Carrie Lam, in fact, had a clandestine meeting just across the border in the mainland on Thursday with a man called Han Zhong, who is the vice premier in charge of Hong Kong affairs. Very senior member. He's a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo. The speculation, although she will not confirm that she met Han Jung, is that basically after that meeting, Beijing decided, you know what? We have enough problems. You can look across the list. They have a slowing economy. They have a trade war with Donald Trump. You had members of very senior members of Congress in America saying that they might revisit Hong Kong's special trading relationship with America if its freedoms kept being eroded. This looked like just one problem too many on the Chinese central government's in tray.

So you think it's simply a pragmatic choice at this point and not a sign that Beijing's power over Hong Kong politics is weakening in any way.

I think it's an example that when Beijing has a huge list of problems to deal with, it can choose pragmatically to let one of them go. And so it, in kind of a familiar fashion for all kinds of democracies. You throw an unpopular leader under the bus and I think there's a really painful, ironic lesson there for Beijing, which is that the same sort of U turn and throwing an unpopular leader under the bus would not be possible on the mainland. So one of the things that Beijing hates about Hong Kong is that you can get a million or 2 million people on the street, that they have a raucous, more or less free press to criticize them and some members of their legislature elected democratically who can become popular. All of that for Beijing is fantastically irritating and fantastically provocative and they'd like to do away with it if they could. But actually it's those feedback mechanisms that have just enabled them to do a U turn. If Xi Jinping, the Chinese Communist leader on the mainland had come up with a plan like this, I don't think that he could have done this kind of a U turn because his prestige is, is inviolable. You cannot have a U turn for a policy that's identified with Xi Jinping. But because Carrie Lam is not the same level of kind of personality cult. You don't have Hong Kong school kids studying, Carrie Lam thought as Chinese school kids have to study, Xi Jinping thought in the classroom, they could do this U turn.

So you think this therefore is the end of this discussion, at least about this bill? Carrie Lam gets, as you say, thrown under the bus. The protesters are placated. This is the last we'll hear of this particular point.

Beijing's headaches aren't over just because they've suspended this bill. If you wanted a sign of that, look at this very charismatic 22 year old activist, Joshua Wong. He was just released from prison today because he'd already served a month of the sentence linked to a previous pro democracy protest. As soon as he comes out, he gives interviews in Cantonese to the local press, in English to the international press. What we ask for is such urge Carrie Lam, the evil chief executive should.

Withdraw the extradition amendment.

But then in Mandarin Chinese to Taiwan, the democratic independent island that China claims as a province of its own, where the Hong Kong protests have played into Taiwanese politics, strengthening the hands of Taiwanese politicians who say that China cannot be trusted. And you could see this nexus of kind of pro democracy suspicion of Beijing that is only going to carry on and is not going to go away just because they've suspended this bill.

And so from the protesters point of view, can they sort of just declare victory and go home?

No. So even if at some point Carrie Lam either announces early retirement or doesn't run again for another term. There are plenty of things that Beijing would like Hong Kong to do that will really change its nature, make it much more like another Chinese city. There's a bill currently waiting to roll which would make it a criminal offence to appear disrespectful of the Chinese national anthem. That's to do with when the anthem is played at soccer matches. There's often sort of booing and stuff. In Hong Kong, there's a really serious bill that's been on hold now for 16 years, which would basically eliminate a lot of political freedoms. An anti sedition bill. There's some suspicion that Beijing really would love to impose that on Hong Kong. Protesters must be hoping that by this gigantic pushback against the extradition bill, they have made that impossible for the moment. But this is all defensive. They're trying to preserve what they have against a China that really does not see any reason to give Hong Kong any long term path towards democracy.

David, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

In societies that prize intelligence, genius would seem to be a blessing. But it has a daughter. Many gifted children are also desperately miserable. As Albert Einstein wrote in 1952, it's strange to be known so universally and yet be so lonely.

I came to the subject with no preconceptions whatsoever. So I was all ready to find that it was a great blessing.

Maggie Ferguson writes for 1843, our sister lifestyle magazine. She recently interviewed a number of gifted children and their parents.

But the more kids and the more parents I spoke to, the more I found that actually it was making life extremely difficult for young people. They were struggling with making friends. They were bored stiff at school. Some of them struggled with other conditions like hypersensitivity to colours, to textures, to noise. So my overall impression was that for most children, it is not easy to be gifted.

But what makes a child gifted? Most experts reserve the term for children who demonstrate three characteristics.

One is that they tend to master some kind of discipline. It might be maths, for example. Very, very young. The second thing is that they do this without pushy parenting. And the third thing is they have such a strong desire to be able to master the things they're interested in. It's called a rage to master.

And since the early 20th century, one of the principal means for measuring intelligence has been through testing one's IQ, or intelligence quotient. By definition, most people score somewhere in the middle.

They work on a kind of bell curve system whereby 100 is always the average and about 2/3 of people are between 85 and 115 and then 2 in 100 are below 72 in 100, above 130 and then above 145 is just 1 person in 1000. And those were the kinds of people I speaking to.

One Such boy is 11 year old Tom.

I know it sounds cliche, he's a lovely kid. He just cares so much about everything and everyone and he just happens to be very, very, very, very bright.

That's Chrissy, Tom's mother.

I think the stereotype of a gifted child is, is that kind of young Sheldon type. And he's not that. He's not arrogant in that he's thinks he knows everything. He knows that there's so much to learn and he just wants to learn it. He just cannot stop. It's almost like he is just addicted to it. But it isn't just maths, it is every subject.

By the age of five, Tom had a keen interest in astrophysics and hypothesized on black holes. Instead of playing outside with other kids, he wanted to stay in and solve equations. His childhood has not been a happy one.

When he did get tested and we found out it was actually quite devastating because I couldn't really see a bright side to it.

How do you mean?

I think all you want for your children is for them to just be happy and I guess fit in and in a way to hear that he had this supposable gift. It's not a gift, there's no gift about it. Where do you go with that? You know, how does he fit in with his peers? How does he fit in with school?

Chrissie told me that Tom is a sociable boy but struggles to relate to others and to find stimulation.

He described it as, it's almost like a watertight vat and it's just getting more and more full, more and more full and there's no outlet.

Tom's gift has also given him mental health problems.

I would say probably when he was 5 or 6, he was in quite a dark place and that's when he first started saying he didn't want to live. Which yeah, devastating is an understatement. And then there's not much you can do because the doctor basically said, well yes, given his level, that's not very surprising.

Tom's mood improved for a period after he changed schools, but it didn't last.

Recently he has kind of reached a bit of a dark place again. And it's more, it's existential depression, which apparently is common in gifted People where he's just questioning everything. So it's not just he's miserable about his life, it's questioning existence and it's questioning. But you know, at the end of the day we all die. And there's no argument, is there? What do you say? Apart from can you just think about watching the symptoms? So, yeah, it's hard, it's been hard with him. There was one thing that he said that stuck in my mind. He said, it's almost like somebody has strapped weights to me and it's just, it's just dragging me down. It's not, it's not, it's not letting me go. And it's hard, it's hard to watch him be just incredibly sad when he should just be, he just should be a happy 11 year old.

Chrissy and Tom are far from alone. Maggie was struck by what she called the private agony of child geniuses and their families.

The parents were united by what I would almost call a sense of shame. They really found it very difficult to talk about having gifted children. They were so terrified of other parents being critical of them or being jealous or thinking that they were making up the fact that they had gifted children. What united the children is a great difficulty in making friends and a great overwhelming sense of boredom at school and frustration. There's no provision for giftedness certainly in state schools in this country, none at all, but also very often in private schools. So they have children who are bored stiff. And that boredom, as one psychotherapist who specializes in extreme intelligence said to me, it's a real suffering, it really is really painful for these children. The other side of the coin is that if you are found to be very gifted, that doesn't necessarily guarantee success either. There's an American academic called Raj Chetty who talks about lost Einsteins, these masses of children who never reach their full potential. So there's this case in the 1920s that Lewis Terman, an American psychologist, studied 1500 children with very high intelligence. And when others followed up that group 70 years later, they found they'd accomplished no more than their socioeconomic status would have predicted.

For 11 year old Tom, his exceptional intelligence is not the only thing that will make him shine later in life.

He sees it as it's only a gift if he does something with it, otherwise what's the point? Which is true. I mean, you've got how many people out there as adults that have, you know, high, who cares? I mean, what difference does it make unless you're doing something with that? I mean, it's focus. He's got focus and he's got drive that will get him somewhere. I mean, he has had an aim since he was five to be a. I've got to get this right. Theoretical astrophysicist and cosmologist. He's got that drive. That's where he wants to go.

Like all kids, gifted children need encouragement and stimulation early in life. And as Maggie found, that might come in part from each other.

What can make these children very happy is to meet each other. So Child Genius is a television program where 20 unbelievably bright children from all over the UK are brought to London and compete against each other until eventually you have a child genius for the year. And one of the people from Mensah described me how she'd been there in the green room with them. One of these kids put up his hand and said, who's interested in astrophysics? And there was this great rush of like 17 children going to the corner of the room, and they were really, really happy. So I. I think that if you can somehow, through organizations like Mensa, get to know other children who are in the same boat, that's likely to make you happy.

Maggie, thank you very much for your time.

Not at all. Thank you very much.

The June July issue of 1843 is out now. There are currently over half a million podcasts on the market, some better than others, and many cover all sorts of niche interests. But a new podcast launched this month surely corners one of the least active markets out there. It tells us something about how languages evolve and can even come back from the dead.

So the Vatican will now be podcasting at least partly in Latin. I'm trying to, I guess, keep Latin alive.

Lane Greene writes Johnson, our column on language.

When I was at a Mass recently at the Vatican, where Pope Francis was himself giving the Mass, it occurred to me that Latin really is alive in a way. He was speaking Italian for the majority of the Mass and then did the formal bits in Latin. And the thing is, Italian really is Latin plus 2000 years. It's not like those family trees you see in the dictionary where Latin begets Italian and Old Germanic begets modern German in the same way that your mother begat you, because it didn't happen that way. In fact, it would be like your mother becoming you. Latin changed ever so slightly every day. Many, many tiny changes, mostly too small to notice. But if you give history 2,000 years, you get an entirely new language. And that's where the Romance languages come from. It's Latin spoken with an Accumulation of a million small mistakes.

I mean, you tend to think of Latin, the original article preserved for all history. It doesn't sound as if you're saying it's that way.

Well, I think that's right. Basically, if you want to talk about the original, we're taking a snapshot. There's no original, because Latin also came from something else. We take our snapshot roughly in the Classical Roman Empire, Roman Republic era, Even by the sort of three hundreds, we see people are making mistakes in their written Latin. And there's a sort of third or fourth century document of spelling mistakes that show us that the way people were speaking it was starting to change, that syllables were disappearing, for example, or one consonant was becoming another. So we see people writing, don't write calda, you ignorant. Write calida like a good Roman. But indeed, the word was just changing. It was losing that unstressed I sound. And it was becoming the modern Italian for hot, which is calda. It never stopped changing. We just took a snapshot at around, you know, one AD and said, this is proper Latin.

So when did Italian become the. Well, it become the language, the formal language, the written language we know today.

Well, it took a couple of steps. First, you got great literary examples, and so those are largely the writings of the 12 and 1300s, when in particular Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio become this sort of literary figures, all writing in the same Tuscan dialect. And because their work was so admired, when a few centuries later, the first grammarians sat down to write a grammar of this sort of new Latin, they still called it the vulgar tongue. They said, well, let's base it on the prestigious works of these three writers. And his grammar was influential. And more and more people in the peninsula started writing in Italian.

So how did Latin survive in any form?

Because sort of poorer people, which included almost everybody, they went on speaking the vulgar Latin that soldiers brought with them when they conquered places like Spain and France and the north of Italy. And those dialects naturally diverged, but they kept the same writing system that's premised on the idea of sort of high classical Latin as peak antiquity. So they kept writing in a way that was frozen, but the spoken language and the written language just diverged. And eventually, given a thousand years, you get two different languages. And certainly given 2,000 years, they're very clearly different.

I suppose I know the answer to this already. This kind of evolution is still ongoing. Will continue.

Yes. When I was in Italy not long ago, I saw a few of the books on the shelf of the type that you spot in any English speaking bookstore, which is don't write this way, right that way. And A Dark Future for Italian. That was a book by the head of the Academia della Crusca, the sort of regulator of the Italian language. So concerns for the fate of the language are just as universal. As language change itself, it's always changing. There will always be people who are worried that the changes mean decay or disruption, but they're going to happen anyway. Italian will become, as Latin did, a completely new language one day. But at the same time, the Italian language people love today is a malformed, deformed Latin that Cicero would not recognize at all. And so it just goes to show you that the future speakers will be just as proud of their language as we are of today's Italian.

Thanks for joining us, Lane.

Thank you very much.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com radiooffer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.