Transcription
I'm gonna go to Handy first. I want to understand what you're concerned most about when it comes to this weekend. We set this segment up and talked a little bit before you, before we just came on, right now, about YouTube and about Facebook and Twitter and this disinformation campaign. How much of that campaign is being felt on the ground, Henny?
You know, actually very little. I mean, the support for the protesters is still very strong in Hong Kong. You saw a march of almost 2 million people, very peacefully, in Victoria Park last weekend. And we all hoped that we would see a less passive stance from the Hong Kong government, more of an olive branch. It was the perfect opportunity, and when that failed to materialize, I think the sentiment here turned very pessimistic again.
And Handy, you just spent so much time talking to CEOs and other people in the business community. Obviously, Alibaba delaying their IPO in Hong Kong. What do you, what are you hearing? I mean, what do you think a month from now, are there gonna be businesses that have actually left the city?
The rate things are going, you know, I don't think you'll see businesses leave the city, but there is much more of an awareness that everyone, every business, is potentially collateral damage here. Cathay has very little leverage when it comes to China. The Chinese airlines are 35% shareholders. All Cathay's flights to Europe go over the mainland. So Cathay is the poster child of having so little leverage. But look at HSBC, which was an option on globalization. How can you feel good about investing in HSBC today when they are the most affected by this process of de-globalization? So everybody is agonizing in this city. And we are already kind of in Tsarist territory in the depth of the stock market, in the way hotels are lowering prices, tourists have stopped coming. Somebody was telling me yesterday, you can stay in a four-star hotel overnight for less money than in a love hotel. This is, you know, a horrible hit to the economy of Hong Kong.
Hey Rob, play it out for us. Do the dominoes go through the permutations? How does this end?
Well, I think that right now, what you see is the protesters are really in the driver's seat. You know, for so long, the Chinese Communist Party has been able to have their cake and eat it too by essentially putting the screws to Hong Kong, but at the same time, having access as a window to the Western capital markets. I think as we get deeper into the fall, we're going to find out what is the staying power of the protesters. You know, some of the, some of the people's aren't police have been infiltrated into Hong Kong to cause chaos, but quite frankly, they're too small numbers to actually have anything to do with 1.7 million protesters. So as long as the protesters have the city's support, I think this will continue.
Hey Henny, since you also are on the ground thinking about this, I mean, how much do, do the protesters, does the city worry about the Chinese government intervening? And and and not just intervening, what is the view about the US, the Trump administration, and the US government, and whether it should either intervene or be putting pressure on the Chinese government one way or the other?
You know, the fear in Hong Kong is that Trump will revoke Hong Kong's special status, were exempt from all the tariffs they put on China. But when a handful of protesters start pleading to Trump to get involved, most protesters think this is a disaster. Most protesters don't support waving the British colonial flag. You know, but the government needs to ask why did these demonstrations so quickly morph from being about rule of law to being about democracy, universal suffrage? And it has to do with the fact that the Chinese inherited the British formula for stability, which was to work through a handful of property tycoons. And what was once a formula for stability has now become a formula for instability. Any government needs to address these underlying issues.