Symbols’ status: arrests in Hong Kong

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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. Frontline Medical workers everywhere are suffering amid a shortage of protective equipment. Masks, face shields, gowns. Manufacturers of all sorts are making more. But supply isn't the only problem in getting the kit into the right hands. And in Brazil, telenovelas are more than hugely popular entertainment. These soap operas perform an educational service, too. COVID 19 has halted their production for the first time. When the cameras roll again. How will these shows deal with the pandemic? First up, though, in Hong Kong, more than 7,000 mostly young people have been arrested since the eruption of pro democracy unrest last June. But no action by the police has caused as much shock as this weekend's roundup of some of the territory's most venerated campaigners. The 15 arrests included lawmakers and lawyers accused of involvement in last year's mass protests. Among them was newspaper owner Jimmy Lai, who was arrested at his home and driven away in a police van. Another was Martin Lee, barrister and former legislator, often called the father of Hong Kong's pro democracy movement.

Speaking after his release on bail, the.

81 year old said he was proud to have walked the road of democracy with the territory's young people. The detainment of some of the figureheads of the protest movement might be intended as a deterrent against future mass gatherings. But given the fervor of last year's demonstrations, it could have the opposite effect.

The protests that broke out in early summer last year carried on throughout the summer and the autumn, and then they peaked in November with some very violent clashes between protesters and the police.

Caroline Carter is our deputy Asia News editor.

In November, there was a local election and the protesters deliberately calmed things down. Before that, the last big March was on January 1st, which was just before the coronavirus came into Hong Kong from the mainland. And with people so fearful about the disease, it's been impossible for many people to come out on the streets and protest. But the sentiment and the anger is still there. And so now the virus seems to be largely under control in Hong Kong. People are wondering what form the protests might take next.

Why have these recent arrests caused so much more concern than all of the prior ones?

Amongst the 15 people arrested on Saturday, some of them are the founders of the Hong Kong Democracy movement. They're moderate, some of them are very old. They're generally peaceful. And some of these people have spent their lives as part of the political and legal establishment here in Hong Kong. So one of the people arrested is Martin Lee, and he's generally regarded to be the founding father of Hong Kong democracy. He's 81 years old. He's a barrister, he was a legislator, and before the handover, he helped to draft the Basic Law, which is the law of Hong Kong. The other probably most famous figure who was arrested was Jimmy Lai. He's a very wealthy man. He runs a media company that publishes a newspaper that's very critical of the Communist Party. So their arrest probably seems more shocking than thousands of young people who were arrested last summer. And there was also such a long lag between the events that they're being charged for, which were in August and October. And there are arrests now. So I think it took people by surprise.

And what is it that these 15 are accused of?

The charges against most of them relate to protests that took place in August and October last year during the large scale protest movement. So under Hong Kong's Public Order Ordinance, even small gatherings without approval from the police can be deemed to be unauthorised, which means the people who attend them risk being arrested. And so the maximum penalty is three years in prison. But most people can expect to get off with a fine. I understand.

And what do you think the motivation is for targeting these high profile people?

Amongst the 15, there's different sorts of people. As I said, there's legislators, some were barristers, some are younger activists. Jimmy Lai is this media tycoon. He and Martin Lee, particularly, are well known to have traveled to America to speak to Western politicians and ask them to kind of pay attention to what's happening in Hong Kong. And these arrests seem designed to warn people in Hong Kong that nobody is above the law. That's been said by policemen in Hong Kong, and the sentiment was echoed by the Chinese Foreign Ministry. Some people in Hong Kong believe that the Chinese government ordered these arrests, and that could mean that they're meant as a signal to Western governments that China will not tolerate any interference into its politics.

But why make these arrests now if this has been the feeling from the start?

So the police say it's just taken a long time to gather this evidence, and it's possible that the coronavirus epidemic here might have slowed that down. It's even possible that the police are now worried about the protests flaring back up, and this could be seen as a deterrent to that. And so there have been other signs this week of pressures on the pro democracy movement. Senior Communist Party officials increased calls for the Hong Kong government to pass a national security law known as Article 23, which is designed to counter the threat from radical violence and foreign interference and pro independence forces. And in the same week, Beijing seems to have lost patience with the behavior of opposition politicians in the city's Legislative Council, who since October have been making it impossible to pass any legislation. And there's a few important bills that are stuck with legco. And until that becomes unblocked, it's going to be impossible for the government to pass a bill such as Article 23.

And so these are arrests that perhaps authorities might have been reluctant to do when the protests were really burning late last year, earlier this year. Do you think this is a sign that in the COVID 19 era, Beijing. Well, and Hong Kong's authorities themselves are willing to put more pressure on.

So I think it's impossible to know exactly where these instructions came from, but it seems unlikely that the police would have done this without some assessment of the political implications. Beijing's stance towards Hong Kong does seem to be hardening, and the world being distracted by the coronavirus could help. But in terms of Hong Kong politics, I think a crackdown like this on the opposition movement has been on the cards for a long time.

And so as Hong Kong passes through the worst of the pandemic and life gets more like it used to be, what prospects do you see? For even more unrest. Truly, these arrests this week will have only inflamed tensions.

Yes, I think that's right. Everything that the police or the mainland government do infuriates people and makes them want to come back out into the streets. At the moment, there's particular laws in place to do with social distancing and coronavirus that makes it even more difficult for groups to assemble. But these arrests have not beheaded the movement. You know, these people weren't the leaders of the movement. So I think it's possible that protests will start up again. I think it might be difficult to have the huge crowds that we saw last year. I think the police are probably better trained. So those large scale unrest will become riskier. The Hong Kong police here has warned of the threat of homegrown terrorism, so they've uncovered bomb threats, which is another direction the protests could be going in. More moderate Democrats are looking towards Legislative Council elections which are due in September, which is a chance for Hong Kong people to exercise their democratic rights. And we know that any suppression by the mainland government triggers more and more people to come out and vote. But the Democrats are very worried that the government will find ways to disqualify candidates that they like. And on top of that, there's always a risk that the government will find an excuse to cancel or postpone the elections completely. Either coronavirus or protests or some other unknown in terms of upcoming protests. Some Democrats are looking forward to the anniversaries of the beginning of the protest movement last year in June. And there's also July 1st when an annual pro democracy movement always takes place. And I think arrests like this is interference from the Communist party or the forcing through of unpopular legislation could all inspire greater numbers of people to come out then. So I think after a relatively calm spring, I think Hong Kong can expect a very tense summer.

Caroline, thank you very much for joining us.

Thank you very much, Jason.

For a lot more analysis like this, subscribe to the economist. To get 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds, just go to economist.com radiooffer countries, both rich and poor, are scrambling for vital medical gear.

We've got to do more to get the PPE that people need to the.

Front line all over the world. The kit needed to face the COVID 19 pandemic is in short supply. Ventilators for the critically ill. Chemicals used in tests and personal protective equipment or PPE such as gowns and masks. The lack of PPE has drawn protests from healthcare workers.

Dystopian Apocalyptic. I am seeing people die every single day. We don't have the cleaning supplies and.

Promises from governments to keep hold of.

What they have right now. Given the great need for PPE in our own country, our focus will be on keeping critical medical items in the United States until demand is met here.

Plenty of work is underway to unblock bottlenecks in supply chains to manufacture and ship the gear to those who need it most. This week, the car manufacturer Ford has begun making ventilators at a plant in Michigan. It's already committed other plants to making gowns, masks and collection kits for tests. But in the meantime, standards in hospitals are slipping as healthcare workers must improvise to keep themselves and others safe.

As supplies are running short, it seems that a lot of corners are being cut.

Patrick Lane is our deputy digital editor in Britain.

Health officials said on Friday that some of this PPE personal protective equipment may now be laundered and reused rather than discarded as it would have been. There have been some quite dramatic pictures going around. Some medical staff using bin liners for improvised protection. For example, in Italy, it was reported that doctors in some hospitals were going into eight hour shifts wearing adult nappies so that they would avoid having to change their PPE when they came out of ward to use the lavatory.

But this has been a discussion since the very start of the pandemic, and a lot of the producers and supply chains that provide this stuff have been ramping up. I mean, why has it proved so difficult to make the stuff and get it to where it's required?

Part of the reason is just the increase in demand is so huge. Normally, of course, markets respond, so as demand goes up, supply expands to meet it. But when demand is this great, it's just very, very difficult to do so. That's the first thing. But there's more to it than that. A lot of this equipment is internationally traded. So there's a recent study by economists at the Federal reserve Bank of St. Louis in the United States which reckons that 30% of COVID 19 essential equipment. So that's PP plus a bit more, plus ventilators and other stuff. 30% of that is imported and 9% comes from China alone. So it's not just a matter of ramping up local supply. In addition to that, the international supply routes themselves are clogged. So Flexport, which is a big freight forwarder, says that normally half of all air freight of all sorts travels in the holds of passenger planes. And on some routes it's up to 80%. Well, passenger planes are no longer flying or there are far fewer of them. So there's a bottleneck there. Well, can't stuff go by ship? Well, it can, and you'd think ships would be emptier. They are, but a lot of shipping lines have cancelled sailings or they drop ports from their itinerary. So there's another blockage there.

And I suppose as these supply chains and supply routes have been getting bottlenecked, that individual countries are battling to keep hold of what they can easily get hold of what they already make.

Yeah, that's true. At the beginning of this process, of course, some of the countries that now desperately need PPE were exporting it to countries where it seemed the demand was greater in the first place. What you're seeing now increasingly is countries trying to hold on to what they have or making more desperate attempts to acquire it from overseas. So there was a report that French officials had said that American buyers had redirected masks from China that were actually on the air in Shanghai by offering three times the original price. There's a lot of what you might call more orthodox trade policy being used as well. So the European Union has restricted exports of essential goods to non members. At the beginning of this month, Donald Trump ordered restrictions on American exports of ppe, which have been relaxed a bit, or they're not quite as harsh as it looked, if they were going to be, because he had to exempt Canada and Mexico because the supply chains crossed the border. And one of the difficulties with these export restrictions is that you don't know how other countries are going to react. So there's a risk of setting off a retaliatory spiral.

But it's also set off a lot of projects to try to get companies that don't normally make PPE, or indeed other medical equipment to start making it. How is that figuring into this?

There is an awful lot of this going on. In Britain, there are consortia trying to make ventilators or come up with new designs for ventilators. In the US you're seeing GM turn over part of a factory in Indiana to making ventilators according to an existing design. You've seen clothing companies like H and M and Inditex getting their supply chain to start producing masks. And there have been plenty of other examples like that.

But one of the questions from the start here has been how much, you know, a car parts company can make parts for, you know, medical grade ventilators and the like. I mean, is this doing much to.

Solve the problem at hand?

Flavio Volpe, who's the head of the Canadian Auto Parts Makers Association. He told me that it's all engineering in a way. So changing an engineering process, you can do it. It might normally take you six months. The problem is compressing that into perhaps a few days. And that's not easy. You're running the risk that things may not work and may fail or may not be ready quickly enough. It is difficult to manufacture something in a hurry that you haven't made before. There have been reports in Britain that NHS staff have said that new shipments of droplet resistant gowns have failed quality tests. There's an awful lot of goodwill. But turning goodwill into efficient, adequate equipment in time is clearly a very tall order.

And most of this discussion has been essentially about trade between sort of rich world countries without prejudice to what's going on in the developing world. I mean, these problems will surely be exacerbated there.

I think that's definitely true because rich countries up to a point have domestic production capacity of their own, or they're home to companies that might be able to step in to a certain extent. But poor countries will be pretty much entirely reliant on imported medical equipment, especially if they're small countries. And so they'll be acutely vulnerable to caps that other countries will put on their exports. So Chad Bowne at the Peterson Institute in Washington has calculated, for example, that 93% of Jamaica's imports of air purifying respirators come from the United States. Well, if those are cut off, then if you have a serious COVID 19 outbreak in Jamaica, where will these respirators come from? The answer probably is they won't come at all.

Well, a lot of this stuff, while certainly medical grade, is not sort of high end engineering either. I mean, what ways are there for sort of individuals to start to plug the gap?

There are an awful lot of efforts going on at a small scale all over the world to try and help fill the gap on a local level. People who are making things that could be used in local hospitals or local care homes, some of it would qualify as ppe, something like a face mask, where people are actually using 3D printers in some places to produce those, and some wouldn't. You know, for example, doctors or nurses might just need lots of changes of clothes at the moment, what you call scrubs. And across Britain and in other places, you know, scrub hubs have sprouted with volunteers making these basic bits of clothing at their kitchen tables.

So what do you say then, Patrick? We should get our sewing machines out and become part of the effort?

I might not be expert enough, Jason, but I know my wife's already got her sewing machine out and is cutting something out on the kitchen table as we speak.

Very nice. Well, thanks to her. Thanks to you, Patrick.

Thank you, Jason.

To follow all of the Economist's coverage of the COVID 19 pandemic and how it's swiftly reshaping the world, visit economist.com Coronavirus in Brazil, COVID 19 has managed something that neither a military dictatorship nor the Rio Olympics ever could, halting production of the country's famous telenovelas. On March 16, Brazil's largest free TV channel, Globo, shut its studios to prevent the spread of the coronavirus. It sent home thousands of employees and replaced ongoing soap operas with reruns. For the first time ever, our Brazil correspondent Sarah Maslin has been on the edge of her seat, wondering what will happen next to the industry.

A Brazilian telenovela is basically a soap opera. Dramatic, Sometimes funny, Sometimes romantic. They have a huge role in Brazilian culture, to the point that at 9pm on the biggest television channel, Teve Globo, you can have a quarter of the population tuned in.

And there's a good reason for that beyond mere entertainment.

Because Brazil has very low quality public education and massive TV audiences, telenovelas have become an important vehicle not just for entertainment, but also for education and a mirror on current affairs. Novellas help Brazilians understand issues in the public sphere. One of the most popular novellas in history was one called Avenida Brazil. They portrayed life in a poor favela and sparked conversations about race and class across the country when it premiered in 2012. They can also feel changes in everyday behavior. After organ donation saved a beloved character's life in a novella a few years ago, thousands of Brazilians started donating their organs.

And so if these novellas hold up a mirror to civilization, then they have to be reflecting something about COVID 19. I mean, how have the networks dealt with that crisis?

It's kind of obvious that they had to shut down production. There's so much kissing in novellas, they scrambled to re edit existing footage to suspend one show called Amorjimae, or Mother's Love on a Cliffhanger. Meanwhile, most networks that show soap operas have selected popular reruns to keep people entertained while they're stuck at home. And some actors are taking to Facebook Live to connect with their fans. Networks are also experimenting with kind of variety show formats where chefs might do cooking shows in their kitchens, or celebrities could tune in to quiz shows from their living rooms.

But the question remains how they'll actually deal with the pandemic and its aftermath.

And so on, right? So Globo's considering banning kissing and crowd scenes, at least for the first few months. After that, writers are going to have to decide to what extent the coronavirus enters the world of ongoing telenovelas. I had a fascinating conversation with Manuela Diaz, the writer of the novella Amor Jimae. She said she agonized over what to do with her characters. Was she going to let COVID 19 into the novella? In the end, she decided to spare her characters. The novella already deals with death and inequality, and she figured viewers would be sick of hearing about the virus. Instead, an environmental activist who has a child with one of the mothers will give a speech to the UN in which he warns that the world is unprepared for a pandemic. Pandemic. That's a lesson, obviously, that fans will already have learned.

Thanks for your time, Sarah.

Thanks, 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.