One country, one system: Hong Kong’s protests

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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. Changes to Saudi Arabia's so called guardianship laws might suggest that the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman wants to advance women's rights. It is a modernization push, but it's mostly aimed at foreigners and filled with contradictions. And there was a time that parents and grandparents didn't really get Facebook or why youngsters wanted to be on it. Now that the elders are there in force, the kids are staying away. That's okay. Facebook also owns the platforms they're flocking to. But first, In Hong Kong this weekend, yet more mass protests and a worrying rise in violence. Fifty days on from the first huge marches, the territory's nameless, leaderless protest movement is escalating. Tens of thousands took to the streets chanting slogans such as Free Hong Kong and this is the revolution of our times. Amongst the protesters, the mood was defiant.

Why are we here? Because we stand and protect the freedom that we deserve.

And I think the whole.

Movement just.

Showed the world that Hong Kong is not China.

Today, China's mainland government held a press conference in Beijing to give its response, an extremely rare move.

It's very unusual for the central government to, if you like, speak for the Hong Kong government. It does away with the fiction that Hong Kong is a kind of perfectly self governing territory.

David Rennie is our Beijing bureau chief.

This was the government in Beijing wheeling out two spokesmen for the bit of the central government that deals with Hong Kong and Macau, the former British, Portuguese colonies. So we had these two spokesmen, Yang Guang and Xu Luying, and they were answering questions from the Chinese state media, but also some foreign media on weeks and weeks of very, very large, sometimes violent protests.

And so is it ominous that they even took to the microphone at all?

It is pretty ominous because for the first several weeks of these large protests, the censorship machine kept news of what was happening in Hong Kong from the mainland public. What's happening now is that the state media is turning this into an attack on hostile foreign forces, black hands, iron, unpatriotic radicals in Hong Kong who are trying to damage Hong Kong's prosperity and stability. And the problem with the central government making those accusations out loud is that they're giving themselves no room to back down. And so that really has people anxious in Hong Kong and around the world that we could see quite a nasty crackdown coming if these protests don't stop, because they're now toning this into a test of the central government's authority.

So you mentioned that in the press conference there is talk of the black hand, this notion of foreign influence. I mean, how much do you think that's a part of this? And how much is that just a useful bogeyman?

It's absolutely part of the propaganda message. The evidence is actually the other way, actually. President Trump himself has praised the Chinese leader Xi Jinping for his restraint. That said, keep an eye on the US Congress, because the US Congress actually has an extremely powerful weapon that it could use if things get much, much worse. In 1992, the US Congress passed a law that basically treats Hong Kong as a bit like a Western country when it comes to things like trade tariffs, visa rules. Hong Kongers have a completely different legal status to mainland Chinese. If things got really, really ugly. Troops on the streets, Congress has it in its power to tear that up and to basically expose Hong Kong to all of the same tariffs and visa restrictions that any other bit of China face.

As you say, these protests have been going on for weeks and weeks. Why has Beijing decided to raise its head above the parapet now?

So the protests have changed quite dramatically in nature over the last ten days or so. We had had this situation where you have these large protests, which during the day were often very peaceful. Grannies and children in push chairs. And then after night fell, you would get more trouble. People throwing bricks and bottles and tear gas from the police. That was sort of settling into a pattern. Everything changed about nine days ago. Two big things happened. One was that the protesters attacked for the first time. The Central Governments Liaison office in Hong Kong threw black paint on the coat of arms of the People's Republic of China on the outside of that office. That sounds a bit kind of esoteric, perhaps outside China, but in China, that's the kind of behavior that gets you locked up for a Very, very long time. It's a direct challenge to Communist authority. The other big thing that happened was there was a protest in a small town near the Chinese mainland border where some mysterious dozens of toughs in white shirts attacked protesters very, very violently. Those guys in white shirts are widely believed to be gangsters from organized crime syndicates, the Triads. And they were believed to be in collusion with the central government authorities because the police melted away and disappeared. And as long as the gangsters were attacking protesters, the police were nowhere to be seen. That has really hardened opinion in Hong Kong. The idea that Hong Kong is a civilized, Western style country with the rule of law and a police force you can trust has been really savagely undermined by this idea of collusion between that police force and organized criminal gangsters. And that came up at the press conference. Journalists asked the central government whether it was true that there had been that kind of collusion. And they said no. And they stood up for the police and they praised the police professionalism and said that the illegal behavior was on the protesters side. So the two camps are very, very firmly dug in now.

And so in this extremely rare press conference, what was the sort of overall tone? What's the take home message that Beijing is projecting?

It was a mixed picture. So you had very firm lines of criticism for the hypocrisy of the Westerners who seemed to be praising the protesters but condemning the police when the police used tear gas. And you had very strong support for the embattled Chief Executive of Hong Kong, Carrie Lam, Central government, expressing its firm support for her, although they said that her government had mishandled the original cause of all these protests, which was a law proposing to extradite people from Hong Kong to mainland courts. I think there will have been some sighs of relief in Hong Kong. A lot of people in Hong Kong were watching this live and their greatest fear did not happen. Their greatest fear was that there would be some declaration of martial law or a state of emergency, or People's Liberation army troops were going to be kind of ordered onto the streets. And a journalist did ask whether the PLA might be deployed, and the spokesman, Yang Guang sidestepped it. He just said that the law has an article that allows the army to be deployed, but he didn't really go there. And so, in fact, the tone of the press conference was in some ways less ferocious than some of the editorials that we saw a few hours earlier published by the state media in Beijing.

And so is the mere existence of this press conference a warning shot in itself, do you think?

I think what it really is is a very worrying signal that the central government is not leaving this to Hong Kong. This has become nationalized. This has become a confrontation between the people of Hong Kong and the central government in Beijing. And the bad news about that is the central government never loses any argument and it will do what it takes to win.

But it would seem from the reports that the protesters themselves feel very empowered. I mean, where does this escalation go?

I think the words that you hear are more sort of despair and anger and frustration and distrust. I'm not sure that the word empowered is kind of bleak enough. I don't know that that many people on the streets of Hong Kong think that they are going to win. They're not under any illusions about what the government in Beijing is capable of doing. I think that the social contract between the people of Hong Kong and the central government is breaking down. You saw appeals to that social contract from the press conference. These officials saying that what really counts in Hong Kong is prosperity and stability. And we call on the people of Hong Kong to stop these political arguments and contentions and concentrate on developing their economy. That was the promise. That was the deal when Britain handed Hong Kong back in 1997, that if the people of Hong Kong kept quiet and didn't cross the red lines of challenging communist authority, they would be left to make money. That isn't enough. The social contract is breaking down. And the problem is the Beijing government isn't going to offer them a better one. So this is uncharted territory.

David, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you.

Rahaf, how does it feel to be in Canada?

In January, Rahaf Muhammad landed at a Toronto airport. It was far north of her intended destination. The 18 year old Saudi woman had hoped to end up in Australia after escaping her allegedly violent family. But she was stopped en route in Bangkok. Saudi authorities pressed Thailand to send her home. After several days in an airport hotel, she was granted asylum in Canada. As with all women In Saudi Arabia, Ms. Mohammed is subject to guardianship laws which make many aspects of life dependent on the permission of a man. But the Crown Prince, Mohammed bin Salman, wants to relax that system. This month, Saudi officials said they may loosen the restriction on traveling abroad, the law that put Ms. Mohammed's escape in jeopardy. Do these reforms show that the Saudi leadership is serious about improving the lives of women? Or is it all for show?

A woman in Saudi Arabia cannot marry, cannot issue a passport, cannot travel abroad, cannot take a job or open A bank account without the permission of her guardian.

Madawi Al Rashid is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and a vocal critic of the Saudi regime. Her citizenship was revoked in 2005.

So she needs the signature of a male relative who happens to be her father. And then if the father is deceased, then it is the brother. And if that's not possible, then her husband. And if that also is not possible, any male relative who's appointed as her guardian.

So one's own son could be one's guardian?

Yes. It's important to think about the political context in which this is taking place. Saudi Arabia under Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had very, very bad publicity. One of them is the question of the runaway girls. And these are very young women, usually just above the age of 18, who escape from the country and end up as stranded asylum seekers in airports around the world. This is extremely bad because it punctures the narrative that Mohammed bin Salman wants us all to believe mainly that he is empowering women, he is providing new jobs for them, and he wants to attract global investment by making Saudi Arabia look more acceptable to an international investment groups. My guess is that it will be abolished soon, especially in the area of travel. But there remains important questions about women's rights in courts that deal with divorce, in the custody of children, and many other areas that both men and women are deprived from.

One of the most well publicized of Mohammed bin Salman's social reforms came in 2017, when the ban on women being allowed to drive was lifted.

What does it mean to you as a Saudi woman to be able to drive in your own country? It means a lot.

It means that today I'm an independent person. I can drive my kids to school, I can do the grocery, I can.

Do the basic things that anyone could do.

But the lifting of the ban came at a price for those women who had protested for change.

There's a real sense of celebration here.

The women I've been talking to are excited.

They know that other women who campaigned for this are in prison. But you can't take this night away from them.

This is the irony here is at the same time as the Saudi government is decreeing a number of reforms to benefit women and that women have long demanded, it's also cracking down on the very women who have been demanding these things.

Greg Karlstrom is our Middle east correspondent.

So over the past couple of years, the government has arrested more than a dozen prominent women's rights activists. They've been accused in the media of treason, of sedition. They are going through a very long legal process right now. Some of them been held without charge for the past couple of years. And so the government is trying to make it clear that while we are imposing these reforms and we are decreeing these reforms, they come from us, and they're not something that activists are allowed to demand. And we are going to impose these changes at our own pace.

So in terms of loosening the rules on guardianship, specifically foreign travel, how has that news gone down in Saudi Arabia?

Well, the way that news came out, it's not been made official yet. It was leaked out first to Saudi media and then confirmed to foreign reporters. The Saudi government, I think, is worried about the reaction to this decision. It's going to be more controversial than letting women drive or any of these other reforms, because it really will, to some extent, emancipate women from the control of men. And so rather than simply decreeing it, the government has floated a trial balloon. They're trying to gauge reaction. And they've said that if they do finally impose this decision, it won't happen until the end of the year. So they're giving plenty of time to see what the response is. The response, certainly on social media, has been positive. There's been some criticism, again, that this is a limited change to the guardianship system and not completely abolishing it. But the response online has been positive, again, because so many people have been arrested over the past few years, not only women's rights activists, but also conservative religious clerics, the sorts of people who might criticize this, that there is not much space, even if you oppose this decision, to speak out against it publicly.

So what's the driving motivation behind these changes? Does it indicate serious engagement with women's rights, or is there more to it?

I think there's definitely a public relations component to this for the Saudi leadership. They are trying to attract investment. They are trying to position Saudi Arabia as a destination for tourism and a hub for entertainment in the region. And they can't do that if the kingdom is seen as being backwards on issues of women's rights or other social and cultural issues. And so there's a very strong PR incentive, which is also tied to the broader economic reforms that the Saudi government is trying to impose as part of its Vision 2030 plan. We saw just in the past couple of weeks, Nicki Minaj, the American rapper, was supposed to headline a major music festival in Jeddah. She backed out a few days before the event, citing Saudi Arabia's record on women's rights, on gay rights on other issues. And so decisions like this, which has nothing actually to do with Nicki Minaj's criticism, but decisions like this, I think are meant to assuage foreign investors, foreign entertainers, the sorts of people that the Saudi government is keen to attract right now.

And so how far do you think these social reforms will go?

Well, in the guardianship system, the crown prince has said that's up to Islamic scholars and he's tried to avoid making any pronouncements on it one way or the other. But I think given the trajectory over the past couple of years, with slowly chipping away at it, I think it's possible within the next few years that the system could be removed altogether. But what we've seen again in Saudi Arabia is there's a difference between changing the legal system and changing attitudes, changing the culture. And even on some of these cultural changes, like concerts or allowing music to be played in public, there's been some pushback. It's been two steps forward, one step back, because not everyone in Saudi Arabia is on board with these changes yet. So the legal system, fine, that's being changed, that's progress. But how that actually affects the lives of Saudi women, particularly in more conservative or rural parts of the country, I think we have to wait and see on that.

Greg, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you.

Back in 2003, a nerdy second year student at Harvard created Facemash.com, a website ranking the attractiveness of his Harvard classmates.

Harvard made Mark Zuckerberg delete Facemash, but little did either of them know that it would go on to become a website known as Facebook.

James Tozer writes for Graphic Detail, the home of the economist's data journalism.

Facebook quickly spread to other college campuses. The difference between that and Facemash was that you could create your own profile and then post on other people's profiles as well. From there, it became wildly popular, spreading first around colleges in America and then throughout the developed world, and then increasingly to developing countries. But now Facebook has come full circle. The very college students and teenagers for whom it was founded are now avoiding the platform. And it's struggling to add young users, even as old people are flocking towards it in ever larger numbers. And according to Emarketer, a consultancy that looks at polling numbers for how often people use various Digital Platforms, a 60 year old American is now more likely to use Facebook than a 16 year old is.

So why are old people flocking to Facebook?

Well, I think one of the brilliant things about Facebook is a almost Everyone is on it. So it has enormous network effects. So if you want to track down an old friend or someone you haven't seen in years, it's the best place to go to. And it's also very good at enabling communication. Everything is based around simple messaging. You've got the newsfeed as well, where you can post occasional updates. It's great for keeping track of birthdays that you've forgotten. So it was always a sort of natural extension, I think, for parents and grandparents, as their kids were on it and they wanted to keep up with, you know, maybe relatives they haven't seen in a while, or old friends. Gradually, more and more people came towards it.

So as Facebook got older, so did the average age of the people using it. But why are young people not using it as much now?

Well, I think part of it is youthful rebelliousness. I think teenagers are reluctant to have grandma peering in on their social lives. Part of it, as well as the user experience and the sort of content that the platforms offer. Facebook really stresses communication. It's about posting messages and occasional updates. But it was very slow to adopt the sort of more ephemeral formats that Snapchat and Instagram introduced, such as stories where you post a little update of what's going on in your day and then that vanishes. Instagram and Snapchat became much better for sort of taking a snap of your breakfast or a beautiful sunset, which is the sort of thing that teenagers seem to be more enthused.

But Facebook owns Instagram as well.

That's right. It bought it in 2012 for a billion dollars, which is increasingly looking like one of the smartest acquisitions ever. And Instagram's been extremely good at hoovering up young people, even as Facebook has been losing them. That's not to say that there aren't any old people on Instagram at all. There's a group known as instagrands who are increasingly flocking towards it. But it's much better at picking up young people than Facebook is. Even as Facebook, the network might face kind of long term difficulties of young people abandoning it and it becoming a little bit of a ghost town. Facebook, the company should be fine because Instagram is growing very quickly around the world. And it also purchased WhatsApp, which is extraordinarily popular. I think it has 1.5 billion users.

Around the world, so it doesn't have great reason to worry if quite a few of the young people are coming off of Facebook's native basic platform, because it'll pick them up some other way.

Facebook's entrenched its position very cleverly because it has multiple platforms now. It obviously has its original social network. It's spun off Facebook messenger as a separate app. It has Instagram and It also has WhatsApp, the world's biggest instant messaging app. And between those, that means it now has four of the five biggest communication apps in the world. From their point of view, the real thing that matters is the bottom line, how much money they're squeezing out of them. Facebook doesn't break down its revenues by which platform they come from, but most analysts think that Instagram share of revenues is increasing. Facebook's overall earnings seem to be increasing at a reasonably steady rate. Instagram's share of those is increasing. It hasn't even started getting revenue from WhatsApp yet. It's likely to introduce adverts into WhatsApp next year, which will allow it to start gaining some revenue from that. So, yeah, even if Facebook does struggle to onboard young people, it's in a pretty good place as a business.

What about your personal view here? Do you still think Facebook's cool?

Well, I think I'm spectacularly unqualified to say whether Facebook's cool. I think among my generation, so people in their late 20s and early 30s, the sort of people who were the very first to join Facebook, Facebook is still very much the number one and useful for catching up with friends. But I had a rather eye opening experience last week when one of our interns informed me that he never used Facebook in his life and was entirely based on Instagram and Snapchat. So I think the day where it becomes so uncool that nobody uses it is perhaps not that far off.

James, thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you.

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@exterator.com radio. Offer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.