Submitted by Taps Coogan on the 28th of November 2019 to The Sounding Line.

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Preeminent China scholar and Lauder Professor of International Relations at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Arthur Waldron, recently spoke with The Epoch Times in a wide ranging discussion about the deteriorating situation in Hong Kong as well as human rights abuses and organ harvesting in mainland China,

Some excerpts from Dr. Arthur Waldron:

“The problems in Hong Kong, including the riots, all go back to the absolute… hard line refusal of the authorities, that includes the Hong Kong government and the Chinese government, to engage, even to recognize, the grievances of the people of Hong Kong who were promised certain things in 1997 and 1984 before that, which have not been delivered. China was attempting to extend the reach of its secret police into Hong Kong and the people of Hong Kong stood up. If the Chinese had followed the promises they made in 1997, the only people marching in Hong Kong would be… people walking to a polling place to vote…”

“One of the features that we have seen in Hong Kong… is the close collaboration between the Chinese Mafia, or the Triads, and the government… This is how is worked in the Soviet Union too… There is close collaboration between organized crime and government, particularly when dealing with non-central places… The Triads provide violence and Hong Kong, until recently, has been trying to somehow bring this to and end without killing people, without hurting people… If you decide that you are not going to consult the population that you are ruling, than the only way to keep them in line is to keep them scared. A properly regulated police force, which is what Hong Kong had until recently, is not enough to keep people scared. If you have Triads jumping on people and kidnapping people… then people become quite terrified…”

“I think the special status (of Hong Kong) is over. I hope not, but I think it is over. I think that reconstructing what we had before is impossible… This five or six months has essentially taught everybody in Hong Kong that the Chinese communists are dangerous, odious, and absolutely not to be trusted. So where previously, a lot of Hong Kong people were sort of sympathetic or happy with the way things where, now you’ve got 7.5 million people for whom Hong Kong is home who hate the guts… of the Chinese communists and will go on hating the guts of the Chinese communists for the rest of their lives…”

“It’s going to hurt (the Hong Kong) economy and it’s going to hurt their standard of living, because what China would like would be to run the place (Hong Kong) without any freedom, and yet have special treatment from the United States, which is not extended to the rest of China. But if they extend their system to (Hong Kong), I think we have no choice but to be consistent and deal with Hong Kong just the way we would deal with Guangdong or something… If the communists had simply done what they’d promised they would do, none of this would have happened.”

“China is, I would say, the worst rights abuser of any major country in the world today. They have two ongoing programs which may or may not fit the legal definition of genocide, but which are very much what you or I would say is the intuitive definition of genocide. This is a country where thousands of people are executed legally. This first (program) is organ harvesting chiefly from.. House Christians, Buddhists, now Muslims… There are many reasons for this but one of them is these people’s lifestyles is such that their blood tends to be pretty clean, whereas if you use prisoners for organ transplants and you test their blood, you’ll find that the person’s got syphilis, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, hepatitis C… Tens of thousands of people are being killed every year to provide involuntary organ donations and this has now been established beyond reasonable doubt… The other (program) is the anti-Muslim campaign. Particularly in (East) Turkestan where they are rounding up millions of people, incarcerating them, and then doing this bizarre thing which is to try to make them somehow into Chinese or somehow make them stop being Muslim… They have crematoria that they’ve built up there in (East) Turkestan. I don’t know what they’re for exactly. We have very little information… They have so effectively sealed of (East) Turkestan that you can’t really find out…”

This poses a question for us in the West, because you may have grown up, as I did, with this phrase “never again.” But we did not expect that we were actually going to confront a moral issue of this complexity and no one knows what to do and right now no one is much of anything. I suggest we just simplify the slogan and take away the “never” and just have it be “again” because as I see it… this is the way people are. Even as organs are being harvested and people are being killed, you have people like Elon Musk, and motor companies, and everything, investing billions of dollars in China. We should not be doing that. That should be against the law. Our economic system and their economic system should be separated from one another. This is very hard to do… but if we are going to be able to stay the United States and America with the ideals we have, we are not going to be able to team up with the present day equivalent of the Third Reich…”

There is more to the interview, so enjoy the full video above.

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