Out on a LegCo: Hong Kong under pressure

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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. Much discussion about immunity to the coronavirus has centered around antibodies. But promising vaccines in the news also empower another weapon in humans, fabulously complicated immune systems. We train a microscope on T cells and have you ever taken a psychometric test for a job? You know the kind questions with seemingly obvious answers like do you pay attention to detail? The only obvious thing is that employers are relying on them more and. But first, Until last week, Hong Kong's Legislative Council was made up of members loyal to China's mainland government and outspoken pro democracy legislators. Not anymore. On Wednesday, the territory's authorities invoked a draconian new security law, declaring that four legislators would be stripped of their seats. The rest of the chamber's pro democracy members resigned in solidarity, chanting go Hong Kong. Stand together.

This is an actual act by Beijing to sound the death knell of Hong Kong's democracy fight.

The security law passed in June has served to suppress dissent in all its forms, targeting protesters, journalists and now politicians. Beijing is clearly tightening its grip. Today, Jiang Xiaoming, the deputy director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, hinted at coming changes to the mini constitution that grants the territory its semi autonomous status and a notionally independent judiciary. Reforms of all sorts aren't meeting much resistance given that the legislature now lacks a single opposition voice for the first time in decades.

So in July of this year, the Hong Kong government barred 12 politicians from standing in elections that were due to be held in September.

Su Lin Wong is our China correspondent.

But after that decision, the government cancelled the elections, saying that it was Covid related and it would be too dangerous for everyone in Hong Kong to come out and vote. But critics have been pretty skeptical about this explanation and think it's more to do with the fact that the government was worried that the pro democracy movement would see huge gains in the elections. How do you mean so after the elections were cancelled, it was decided that the Legislative Council, which is Hong Kong's parliament, would be extended for one year. But earlier this month, police arrested eight of the pro democracy politicians for their alleged involvement in a scuffle in the Chamber of the Legislative Council, or LegCo, as it's called in Hong Kong. And then last week we saw the purge of four LedgerCo members. And the reason given was their behaviour was unpatriotic.

But what's meant there by unpatriotic behavior?

So the four lawmakers have been variously accused of signing petitions against the National Security Law, pledging to block passage of the budget if they were to gain a majority in legco, and supporting American sanctions on Hong Kong.

And so how does the ejection of those lawmakers and then the resignation of all these other opposition politicians change the way Hong Kong will be governed?

Do you think the political opposition in Hong Kong is now effectively gutted and there's not a single opposition member in the Legislative Council anymore? So what that means is that the pro Beijing government is going to be able to push through whatever laws it wants. Hong Kong's Chief Executive, Carrie Lam has insisted that the Legislative Council will continue to operate in a way that is independent and separate from Beijing.

I wouldn't say that for members remaining in the Legislative Council, we will have a rubber stem Legislative Council. Each member of a Legislative Council has to account for his or her actions to the constituents.

But what is clear is that Beijing's influence in Hong Kong has been strengthened and not just in the legislature. Actually, just today we had comments from a senior Chinese official in Hong Kong saying that they wanted to reform Hong Kong's judiciary. That's very, very concerning because in some ways, Hong Kong's judicial system is the only thing left that separates Hong Kong from the mainland and makes it different to mainland China.

And what chance is there that all of these pro democracy legislators will be back? Or have we seen the last of them?

That's a really good question. And when I interviewed a few of the lawmakers who were disqualified and asked them this very question, they said they weren't even sure what was going to happen next week in Hong Kong politics, let alone in a year. It is becoming increasingly clear that those who resigned will be unlikely to be allowed to stand again. Some opposition lawmakers say that Hong Kong must continue to have some kind of political opposition. And one of the four lawmakers who was disqualified last week, Kwok Khaki, said that he will continue to try to fight for the pro democracy movement in Hong Kong. Even if that isn't within legco, I.

Would certainly promise that I would go.

Along with all the people in Hong Kong, continue to fight for the core values of Hong Kong freedom, democracy, justice and fair.

And we should never give up.

I wouldn't be surprised if we see a political opposition try to run again in next year's Ledge Co elections. Although there is a fear amongst some in Hong Kong that even the elections next year might be cancelled.

And one of the most remarkable features of all of this is how much the Hong Kong public got involved in this discussion. This enormous protest movement. What does that look like now? How has the public responded to the dissolution of the opposition?

So it's unlikely that many members of the Hong Kong public will be upset by the Democrats departure from LedgeCo. The pro Beijing people in Hong Kong find that the opposition lawmakers are often very disruptive in Ledgko. And for the pro democracy movement, there's been a lot of debate in recent years about whether there should be political representation for their movement in in the Legislative Council because LEGCO is structured in such a way that really makes it quite undemocratic and favors probation camps. So there's a sense amongst people in Hong Kong who do support democracy that by having lawmakers in Ledgco, that actually sort of gives the institution credibility that it doesn't deserve.

So the new Security Law is clearly tamping down the prospects of the kinds of protests we've seen for so long. But how else is it affecting life in Hong Kong?

I'd say the most obvious impact of the National Security Law in Hong Kong is that it's been deeply chilling and that has manifested in a whole range of different ways. There's a lot of fear amongst people and self censorship. So it's been really extraordinary to witness the academics and political scholars who I used to call up all the time and who would speak to me on the record. Now many of them will only speak to me off the record because they fear that the government could use the National Security Law to clamp down on them. Similarly, a lot of people have deleted their social media accounts or now post on social media under pseudonyms. And we've seen raids on newsrooms and local journalists arrested for reporting that they've done in relation to last year's protests. And with the news of Lechco having no opposition anymore, I think the future prospects for democracy in Hong Kong are incredibly bleak.

Su Lin, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks very much, Jason.

The Economist has been reporting on the fragile situation in Hong Kong since whispers of a new protest movement turned to a roar 17 months ago to keep across every aspect of the conflict, political to financial to cultural. Take out a subscription. Get a great introductory deal@exterator.com intelligenceoffer news came yesterday of another breakthrough in the fight against the pandemic.

Breaking news this afternoon, a new potential.

COVID 19 vaccine, a vaccine developed by.

Moderna showing a 94.5% efficacy rate. Early data show that a vaccine being developed by Moderna, an American firm, is almost 95% effective. Better yet, it can be kept at standard refrigerator temperatures for a month, unlike the deep freeze required by Pfizer and Biontech's vaccine candidate, which last week brought the world renewed hope and plenty of rejoicing.

Pfizer executives are calling it one of the biggest medical breakthroughs in the past 100 years. This is the news that we've been waiting to hear.

Finally, we all full of hope.

Happy Vaccine day.

Much has been made of antibody responses, a sign that the immune system has recently fought the virus or reacted well to a vaccination. It's an indication of at least temporary immunity. But scattered cases of reinfection by the coronavirus have raised concerns about just how temporary that immunity is. Here's the thing, though. Antibodies tell only part of the story.

We've heard from Public Health England some potentially good news about COVID 19.

Natasha Loder is our health Policy editor.

Public Health England is a government protection agency and they've been looking into the persistence of immune cells in COVID 19. And they found that these T cells are actually remain in the body for six months after the initial infection.

So T cells, not the antibodies that we've been hearing a lot about.

That's right. So antibodies are part of the immune system that develop to identify and latch onto different viruses. And they're very specific to the viruses that they latch onto and target. T cells are these cells that roam in our body. They can attack other cells in the body that are infected and destroy them. And so they can break the cycle of infection. All year, we've been hearing some quite worrying things about antibodies. We've heard that they drop rapidly after an infection. With COVID 19, we've heard that they vanish entirely, that scientists don't see them at all. And this has all prompted a lot of speculation about whether people actually retain any kind of immunity to COVID 19. This is really important to understand because people want to know whether they can get reinfected.

So T cells and antibodies work together to fight the Virus T cells and.

Antibodies are different parts of the immune system and they do different things and they act in synchrony. In fact, there are other immune system components we haven't even talked about. There's neutrophils, there's macrophages, there's B cells. It's a fascinating system. The important thing to think about is that in the early stages of the infection you do get a massive production of antibodies and they're what helps you get better, really. But they're not necessarily going to be the part of the immune system that retains the long term memory of the infection. If you've got T cells against COVID 19 lasting for a while, then even if you do get waning antibodies, these T cells are able to prime the immune system to produce antibodies in large numbers again. And that's kind of like how they work in synchrony.

So why all this attention focused on antibodies then?

We've been looking at antibodies not because they're the most important things in fighting off COVID 19, but because they're easy to measure. It actually turns out to be technically more difficult to measure and count T cells and that's why it's not done as readily. But what we don't know of all those people with T cells is whether they're all protected against reinfection from COVID 19.

And you mentioned the breakthrough made by Public Health England, the discovery that T cells remain in the body for six months after an initial infection. How did they reach that conclusion?

Since the start of the outbreak, Public Health England has been monitoring a cohort of monthly intervals. They've been getting blood tests and they've been monitoring thousands of staff. And there are a cohort that were infected in an early stage. And so they've been able to see how their blood looks month after month after month. They had about 100 people who were infected at the early stages of the outbreak. And so now, six months on, they can say actually they still have T cells. And as far as anyone knows, this is the sort of longest amount of time that we' managed so far to pick up these T cells.

And how does this finding fit into what immunologists already knew about T cells?

Well, despite the fact that people have been worrying a lot about COVID reinfections, we have actually seen relatively few of them. That fact fits in with the fact that in these 100 patients, at least, we're seeing that all of them have a form of long term immune memory that is T cells. And so I think it's encouraging the other thing that I think is important about this finding is that it was always suspected that T cells would be important. And it was suspected to the extent that in June, researchers who were developing vaccines were saying that they thought that the vaccine was going to need to stimulate the T cell response, not just the antibody response. And so when people have been talking about vaccines, they've talked about neutralizing antibodies and this and that and what different levels of antibodies they produce are. And these things are obviously important. You have to produce antibodies. But the vaccine makers at Pfizer, the researchers at Oxford, were doing things that made it clear that they thought that the T cell response was going to be really important.

So how has that in turn affected vaccine development?

I spoke with Adrian Hill, head of the Oxford Jenner Institute, a vaccine making part of the university, earlier this year. He said stimulating the T cell response is exactly what his vaccine is designed to do. And then Pfizer and Biontech actually were developing a different vaccine candidate and then swapped it in June when they found that second candidate vaccine actually stimulated a stronger T cell response. So the researchers who were talking about the T cell response were saying, what we want is vaccines that trigger this. And that is indeed what we're certainly going to get with at least two of the leading vaccine candidates.

Natasha, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you so much, Jason.

Every day on the show I ask questions of the Economist's team of international correspondents. But today I'd like to ask a question of you. Yes, you, dear listener, on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is strongly agree and 5 is strongly disagree, are you enjoying the show?

If you've ever been asked whether you strongly agree with a proposition that you care about your work or you enjoy working with others, you've probably done a psychometric test.

Philip Coggin writes Bartleby, the Economist's column on work and management.

Companies are relying more and more on these tests when it comes to whittling down job applicants.

So how did this come about? Why are companies increasingly using them?

These tests have been around in one form or another for about a hundred years. Initially, they were mainly focused on intelligence, so civil servants in Britain were selected with these tests. I took it all the way back in 1980 and I'm glad to say I passed. But from the 1970s onwards, there was a big psychological element added to them, and the idea was really to pick out people with the right characteristics that would suit a particular job. Thanks to modern technology and the Internet, many companies are flooded with thousands and thousands of applicants, whereas that wouldn't always have been the case in the days of postal applications. And they've got to be some way of whittling it down. And the hope is that by doing so you eliminate some forms of bias. People can be biased against people with foreign sounding names or against women rather than men. And the idea of a psychometric test is it eliminates that risk.

And you say it's kind of more of a psychological element. Now, what exactly are these tests trying to tease out?

Well, they're trying to find out what sort of personality you are. There's a range of things called ocean openness, conscientiousness, extroversion or introversion, agreeableness and neuroticism or anxiety. And you're trying to place people along that spectrum.

But isn't it possible to game these kinds of tests? I mean, the answers sometimes seem to suggest themselves.

Yes, you would think so. You know, if you're asked whether you enjoy working or you're conscientious, you're going to say yes, of course. I love being on podcasts with Jason. It's one of the highlights of my day. The people who devise these tests are aware of that, of course, and what they do is they keep asking the questions in different ways and pitting different potential answers against each other so that they can reveal if you're being inconsistent in your answers. And the hope is that in the end they'll get a true picture of what you're really like. So it might seem, for example, that call centre workers should be extroverts. They're spending all their day talking to people, but in fact, extroverts can be too chatty. They spend half the phone call asking about the children or the spouse of the partner and talking about the weather, when in fact they should be cutting the call short and moving on to the next person. So actually it's more assertiveness that's important for a call centre worker. You need to move on, get the person to get to the point of their complaint or request and then finish the call.

And so these tests are pretty much for narrowing down applicants, new hires, that's.

How they're often being used. But as well as that, they're also being used to test senior managers. And there you're looking for some potentially bad characteristics. So there's the dark triad, psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. So obviously you don't want people to be like that and may well be that the characteristics that they displayed as A junior manager won't be suitable as a senior manager. So someone who pays a lot of attention to detail, for example, can be unwilling to delegate, which is what you want when you become a senior manager. And someone who's in sales may be so keen to draw attention to themselves, that's how they've made a success of being a salesman, that they're not very good at sharing the limelight with their subordinates when they go into senior management.

And is the effectiveness of these kinds of tests quantifiable? Are they genuinely good at picking out the things that people claim they're looking for?

It's quite tough. There have been a lot of tests, and the experts that I've talked to have said that some of them have pointed to the success of psychometric tests in these studies. But you tend to publish the ones that do show success and not publish the ones that don't. The tests work best if they're combined with other factors, such as a structured interview or a test of your actual ability in certain areas. You know, your skills as an engineer, for example.

Right. Philip, thanks for that. On a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is strongly agree and 5 is strongly disagree, did you enjoy your time talking to me today?

It's 0.5. One doesn't even cover it. Jason.

Philip, thanks as ever for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple Podcasts and see you back here tomorrow.

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