Hong Kong’s protests are touted as a freedom movement by the activists there and by the West media fanning the fire with biased reporting and news coverage. The violence and criminal activities (generally occurring during and after a peaceful demonstration) were suppressed and the freedom demands were highlighted. Of course, in today’s advanced network world, fake news or distorted news reporting can not fool all the people all the time. Now with ample real-time real street videos, we see the real situation of Hong Kong protests turning into riots almost like movies, well planned and directed, with weapons, gas bombs, masks readily made available to the few violent activists at each peaceful demonstration or directly to an unauthorized demonstration orchestrated for violence. The Hong Kong Government seemed to be powerless letting the police to be clobbered by the masked rioters. Finally, Hong Kong is considering a law to forbid wearing mask (and combat mask) in public place.

The ignition point of the three months long Hong Kong unrest was originated from protest against an extension of criminal extradition law (Hong Kong already has with many countries) to include Taiwan and Mainland China. The need of extension was triggered by a murder case that a Hong Kong citizen murdered his girlfriend in Taiwan and fled back to Hong Kong to avoid prosecution. Why this extension was opposed is actually very simple because Hong Kong is a center of international spies who obviously are afraid of extradition law extended to China. It is ridiculous that Hong Kong as a part of China has criminal, mind you capital offense criminal, extradition with many countries but not with mainland China. Of course, this is the result of British colonial rule of Hong Kong. What is wrong with this extradition law modification? How did it affect young students as young as fourteen? Could we imagine that happening in the U.S.?

Sure, Hong Kong has been a free port enjoying plenty of freedom in trade and finance during the British rule but not political freedom. There was no democracy, no election, not voting for the governor of Hong Kong. By 1997, when Hong Kong was forced (by expiration of a war treaty) to return Hong Kong to China, British strengthened the Hong Kong Basic Law, thus Justice System was tenured with British citizens, city government was established with an elected council. British cleverly made the Chinese government to accept and maintain the then “current” status of Hong Kong for fifty years in the name of “peaceful transition and protection of Hong Kong People’s rights. China agreed. Thus today Hong Kong is ruled by Hong Kong People, its executive leader is elected by the Hong Kong Council System. You would ask why Hong Kong people are protesting? Actually, the reasons can be summarized in three points.

First, the most crucial point is that the wealth gap in Hong Kong is the greatest in the world. 93% of Hong Kong’s land is owned by four family enterprises, enterprises that would make Trump look like a inconsequential property developer. Hong Kong housing expense is highest in the world; millions of people cramped in small apartments, some sharing in day and night shifts. With China rising in economic development and Hong Kong’s neighbor Shenzhen and Canton prospering, it makes the proud Hong Kong people depressed with unemployment problem and oblique future. This is the hidden element in Hong Kong unrest and the unrest is manipulated by internal (wealthy) and external (political) forces to release the anger on “freedom fight”.

Second, a strange point is that Hong Kong people have too much freedom but not getting any practical benefit. Hong Kong protesters enjoyed more protest freedom than any other place and protected by an extremely lenient justice. (British judges) Hong Kong people have the greatest financial freedom in terms of investment and doing businesses but the majority of Hong Kong citizens are struggling seeing their living standard used to be miles better than their relatives on the mainland China across the Hong Kong Bay deteriorating daily. The tourists from mainland China are notorious in their spending making Hong Kong people jealous unless they were traders making tons of money off the tourists. Hong Kong has freedom to use and teach the Hong Kong dialect in schools and use their colonial textbooks (English not Mandarin). (It would never be permitted in the U.S.) Hence the children are taught with a confused world knowledge making the young people totally confused with an obsolete pride as a colonial citizen facing the giant wave of Mandarin power. Hong Kong used to be the Hollywood in Chinese movies (Cantonese) but now it is taken over by Mandarin movies produced by Mainland China. Some smart Hong Kong people learned Mandarin but those being taught by the legacy school and teachers are lost and worried for their future. China should have legislated laws to reform the Hong Kong school systems. Perhaps it is not too late to do that. Just imaging, in the U.S. if we would allow schools to teach everything in Spanish or Arabic-Islamic language, what would it do to our society?

Third point, mostly used by the anti-China foreign countries is that China is an authoritarian system not suited for Hong Kong. Funny thing is that China was too rigid in keeping her words of letting Hong Kong people to rule Hong Kong and let them to evolve (a guarantee of Hong Kong self-rule under China’s constitution of “one country multiple systems”. The problem is that Hong Kong is a small island prospering under a condition not because of its resources or people but because China was cut off from the world and only had Hong Kong as her lifeline to the world economy. The West decided to open to China for her huge market and labor dividend. Then things were changed; China embraced capitalism with some control. China rose rapidly, making Hong Kong gradually losing its influence and value. China actually tried to protect Hong Kong from Shanghai and Shenzhen overtaking Hong Kong as a world financial and trade center. However, competition is part of freedom, all human societies desire to have competition in various degree. Freedom to compete does not just belong to the society already enjoying it. So China’s Rise should not be perceived as a threat to Hong Kong, but it is just like it is to the U.S., U.K., Germany and Japan.

If Hong Kong people, especially youth, understood the above three points, the solution should not be violence nor independence (as unrealistic as San Francisco or Manhattan wanted to declare independence) but embracing the rise of China to be a real Chinese to get on the freedom train which is accelerating. It does not take a historian to notice that Chinese people were always freedom seekers (especially the Cantonese, most Hong Kong People’s ancestry; Chinese immigrants to California and other parts of the world are examples). Now China had shed her two century of disgrace, invasion by foreign powers. China established a republic growing and reviving gingerly with her thousands years of culture and lessons learned from modern history. History will tell that Chinese people will seek freedom in her own way not by any color revolution instigated by a foreign country. The Chinese are too smart now to fall in a trap to split China into pieces, rather they will propose projects like the Belt and Road Initiative to benefit the world and themselves, leading the world to peace, prosperity and harmony.
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Ifay Chang. Ph.D., Inventor, Author, TV Game Show Host and Columnist (www.us-chinaforum.org) as well as serving as Trustee, Somers Central School District.

The topic on wealth gap has appeared a number of times in this column. The present title has extended the issue in twofold, one is to analyze the nature of the century old wealth gap problem in the U.S. and in China fast rising recently, and second is to poke the question who cares about the problem and how may the wealth gap problem be cured. Very recently, McKinsey Consulting Company has published a sizable report(August, 2019), entitled, The Economic Impact of Closing the Racial Wealth Gap, authored by Nick Noel, Jason Wright and Shelley Stewart III, who have studied extensively over one hundred research papers and books in the literature on the wealth gap issue. It is no surprise that their report finally focused more on ‘racial wealth gap’ than a general wealth gap issue simply because there are an overwhelming number of articles devoted to discussing racial discrimination and comparing the economic status of blacks and whites in the U.S. It is also no surprise that the McKinsey authors deferred discussion on solutions of how to close the wealth gap to future reports or studies simply because there is hardly any meaningful proposal for curing the wealth gap problem.

The title subject has been picked not because the author has thoroughly understood the wealth gap problem or he has a perfect solution up in his sleeves; rather he believes that we cannot deal with such a big social issue in a closed state of mind. We must think outside of the box (as McKinsey consultants often say) to look at other situations and observe what is happening in the world regarding wealth gap issue. In particular, China is a worthy case to compare with.

China has as big an economy as ours. She started as an orthodox communist country, through experiments, several failures, partially adopting capitalism and now rising rapidly and continuously as the number two economy in the world. Guess what, China has made some people very rich in a short period of time, raised hundreds of millions of people out of property and obviously created a wealth gap problem of her own. As a socialist country, China, has stressed to move gingerly to guide her economic development but undeniably, over the four or five decades of time, China has transformed from a poor country where everyone was equally poor to a State that a wealth gap is obviously visible. Not as subtle as wealthy Americans, the new wealthy Chinese eagerly showed off their riches, for example,  by having 50 exotic and expensive foreign cars parading in their daughters’ weddings. If an American society were concerned with wealth gap, shouldn’t the Chinese society worried about the wealth gap problem as well? Will a socialist country have a cure for the wealth gap problem?

The author believes that the Chinese people do worry about their wealth gap issue and may likely have a cure . That is why the McKinsey report motivated the author to analyze and compare the wealth gap issue in the U.S. and China and to discover who cares and how the problem may be cured in the two greatest countries? The above McKinsey report focused on the racial wealth gap issue and attributed to four factors: 1. Community Context, 2. Family Wealth, 3. Family Income, and 4. Family Savings, which were causing and aggrevating wealth gap because of the nearly three century old social phenomenon - racial discrimination of blacks by the whites in the U.S. Many statistics, the McKinsey authors cited, do support the argument that racial discrimination did contribute to the wealth gap in America. But what about the wealth gap among the whites? Some data (2015) showed that the richest 10% of white household held 121 times of wealth of the bottom 10% whites. So one may conclude that the racial discrimination may be still a culprit for wealth gap for black  Americans (even after several human rights laws such as Equal Opportunity Act have been enacted), the real problem is sure in our capitalistic economic system - a system supports the wealthy keep getting wealthier fast! Hence the wealth gap grows!

China’s wealth gap problem only surfaced after she adopted capitalism and opened up to the West. In her transformation, two factors contributed to wealth gap in China, one is intrinsic to power corruption and one is intrinsic to the capitalist system China adopted. To the former, the Chinese government is now clamming down hard on the corrupted officials and their business cohorts. The effect of ‘corruption cleansing’ is showing in the communist party clearly as well as in all levels of the government. To the latter factor, unfortunately, there is neither obvious solution to borrow from the West nor enough understanding of the capitalist system to come up with a quick cure without suffocating the economy. The industrialization in China has brought workers to the cities leaving villages and farm land less productive, hence remaining poor. The cities are gaining wealth and forming wealth gap with capital concentrated in a few hands and leaving many workers struggling with rapid rising of the cost of housing, education and healthcare which are typical problems associated with a society having a severe wealth gap.

In the U.S. the wealth gap problem is many century old brewed by capitalism; the government and sociologists do care about the problem but the problem persists. In a human society, it is fair to equate productivity to wealth building but the issue is that as human society advances from labor intensive production to machine intensive and later capital intensive industries, the wealth building process is skewed to favor capitalists. Will capitalists voluntarily offer to reduce the wealth gap? Apparently not in the U.S.. In fact the capitalists are controlling our government (*through Presidential and Congressional elections) with little inclination to cure the wealth gap problem.

On the other hand, China had forcefully leveled the wealth distribution after the People’s Republic was established by the Chinese Communist Party (CPC) in 1949. In addition to the two factors discussed above, China’s wealth gap problem has a third element, that is, China has a serious geographic factor in wealth gap. In vast parts of West China, mountainous and desert areas, the people there were very poor compared to people in coastal regions.(*This is different from the U.S. where 65% of blacks are concentrated in 16 states mainly in the Southeast and East. The 16 states are not necessarily poor states like the west of China due to poor geographical conditions) The Chinese government has definitely focused on this element with her policy of investing heavily in the West as seen by the infrastructure development the government has made and continuously committed to make to connect the West to the more developed regions.

Therefore, while China may also have a wealth gap problem raised from adopting capitalism, at least, at the moment she is doing the right thing to try to even out the wealth gap between her wealth coastal provinces and the rest of her country. (*Chinese coastal regions are paying a lot of taxes to fund the infrastructure development of the poor West China.)  As we know that the wealth gap problem is created by the capitalistic system, let’s hope that the U.S. with her deep foundation of capitalism can work with China having a background of socialism to figure out a reasonable cure for the wealth gap problem without destroying productivity which apparently thrives with capitals.



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The issue of government applying surveillance technology on its citizens is a controversial one, even in the name of national and/or society security. Surveillance is often touted to be effective with minimum impact on privacy and individual liberty, thus it can be justified. In recent years, the technology breakthrough on voice and facial recognition, biomedical identification methods and integration of data across multiple systems collected over different social conditions, for example, from transportation (land, sea and air), geography (cities and nations)and social events (shopping, sports and gathering) have  created big data useful for solving crimes and maintaining security. However, the forces that protest against surveillance are generally based on more than invasion of privacy and violation of human rights and personal liberty, particularly political rights.
 
Ever since Edward Snowden blew a whistle on NSA in 2013, the government surveillance issue has become a public concern, between nations and among citizens in the U.S. The U.S. Congress has allowed the government to access commercial customer data on a need basis which means the government can have access to private data collected by IT, telecommunication or social media corporations in the name of national security. Today the general public is basically resigned to the idea that if one was not a criminal or not plotting anything evil against the government or the public would have no fear of government’s access of your private data. Therefore, this sentiment is generally prevalent about government surveillance; most ordinary citizens should have no fear. In fact, the surveillance technology has grown to be a significant industry today with public surveillance systems mushroomed in public schools, towns and institutions. This happened along with several school and public shooting incidences occurred.
 
Video camera is still the most prevailing surveillance device in the world. According to a report by the Business Insider and Comparitech, the city having the most public cameras is Chongqing City in China, 165 cameras per 1000 people (note: Chongqing is a complex mountain city with over 30.5 million people and a complex multi-level highway system). Second place is Shenzhen, 159 cameras per 1000 for 12.5 million people, 6th place London, 68.4 per 1000 for 9 million people, 10th place Atlanta, 16 per 1000 for less than 0.5 million people, 9th place Beijing, 39.5 per 1000 for 20 million people, 11th place Singapore, 15 per 1000 for 5.6 million people, 13th Chicago, 13 per 1000 for 2.7 million people and 14th Urumqi, 12.4 per 1000 for 3.5 million people. From the above data, one can draw the following conclusions: 1. Per-capita public camera usage has a big jump when population exceeds 7 or 8 million. 2. Beijing as a capital of 20 million ranked much lower in camera surveillance compared to other big cities such as Chongqing, Shenzhen, Shanghai and London. 3. Urumqi, a predominant Muslim population is less under surveillance than Atlanta or Singapore, which dispels the Western media’s portrayal of Urumqi being a highly suppressed city in China.
 
The effect of surveillance has a pro and con interpretation. The anti-authoritarianism is battling the authoritarianism in the interpretation in that the former claims that the latter around the globe are accelerating their efforts to institutionalize cultures of surveillance and control. However, the positive effect is clearly seen in surveillance such that the more surveillance efforts do improve more safety and security all over the world, as people, domestic and foreign, living in Shenzhen, Shanghai and many big cities in China and in the U.S. have testified in interviews by media. The nay-sayer often cites civil right and political right violations but with few concrete evidence and proof. Another corollary data, although not specifically quantified, is the increasing number of private surveillance devices used by citizens; it is clear that the higher crime cities in the U.S. do use far more surveillance cameras, burglar alarms and motion and thermo-sensors in their private residences than anywhere else. Therefore it is comical that the U.S. would use surveillance to mock China as an authoritarian police state while one actually does not see more police force in Chinese cities than in US cities. For example, the recent Hong Kong violence clearly demonstrated that the Hong Kong police was far too mellow in dealing with violent protestors compared to that in the U.S., U.K. or France. The Chinese Central Government, in honoring “the one-China-two-systems”, essentially leaves the Hong Kong matter to Hong Kong people to resolve.
 
However, we do hope that the violent acts in Hong Kong were recorded in cameras so that the criminals who had burned and damaged properties would be put to justice. In fact, the research division of the CIA wants AI enhanced facial recognition technology that can identify people from hundreds of yards away, using integrated data of multiple types of identifiers, such as voices, faces, movement patterns, height and gender as well as using cameras on distant rooftops or even on drones to enhance the government’s ability to monitor enemies and potential criminals. According to a report on the Internet, China’s All Seeing Eye, by Naomi Klein, 5/29/2008, China was developing a face recognition software using a software development kit licensed from a US defense contractor. Now China has developed the most advanced facial recognition technology. The West is accusing China for using the surveillance technology to control her people but China claims that she is using it to assure State security and maintain law and order. Putting this kind of government or official rhetoric aside, what the people feel is not too different in the U.S. and China, that is, if you were not a criminal or not plotting against the government, you would have nothing to fear from the State surveillance. This is the sentiment of the majority of people in either China or the U.S.
 
With the overall advances in technology, Internet (5G), computer, and sensing and data capturing devices, it is now more possible to expand and integrate the previously separate recognition and identification systems involving biometrics, ID cards, CCTV, driving records pertaining to vehicles, licenses and toll charges, transportation data involving ticket purchasing and passport, and communication involving phone calls, social media and any communication (email and computer conversations) intercepts to produce a comprehensive integrated and effective surveillance and monitoring system. Such a system permits data-sharing across several system/data boundaries which were less penetrable in the past. This includes all government centralized activities through CIA, FBI or the like and all ‘innocent’ consumer or citizen daily activities; all data are collected in the effort to make the society safe and secure.
 
Therefore, as long as the rampant world terrorism, drug epidemic caused crimes and random violent killings in our streets, schools and cities exist, it compels us to accept government surveillance as a legal protection, in the U.S. or in China, just like we must pay a premium to buy an insurance policy for protection against car accidents, fire hazards, sicknesses or death.