Leaving Hong Kong would be a “wise choice” for the city’s prominent pro-democracy activists rather than face prison or worse, says former chess world champion turned democracy campaigner Garry Kasparov.

Garry Kasparov talks to FCC first-vice president, Eric Wishart.

Speaking at an FCC webinar on August 27, Kasparov – himself exiled from his home country of Russia – said he hoped that a new wave of democracy movements around the world would make it safe for activists to return and rebuild Hong Kong.

Kasparov, who at the age of 22 became the world’s youngest ever chess champion, is a vocal human rights activist and was one of the first prominent Soviets to call for democratic reform. He was an early supporter of Boris Yeltsin’s push to break up the Soviet Union.

A fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kasparov left his home in Moscow to live in New York following a crackdown on dissidents in Russia.

He was speaking in a week that saw two Democratic Party lawmakers – Lam Cheuk-ting and Ted Hui – arrested in connection with last year’s pro-democracy demonstrations.

Kasparov, chairman of the Renew Democracy Initiative, said he hoped to see a “new wave of democracy movements” that would bring dictatorships to an end. This, he said, could herald a new era for Hong Kong.

When asked whether pro-democracy activists should seek exile, Kasparov said when he “recognised it would be jail or worse”, he left Russia.

He added: “The prominent people who believe they can play a role in rebuilding Hong Kong, I would say probably it’s a wise choice (to leave). China’s regime is not at the stage where they care about creating martyrs. You stay there, you fight, you’ll be in jail – you mentioned mainland China – maybe you will die.

“So I think it’s important that the core of this group is preserved because there will be a moment – maybe sooner than we think because as we can see in Belarus, these regimes are not stable and Putin now is experiencing great problems. Hopefully now … you see this the trend is going back to the eighties like a pendulum of history when we have a new wave of democracy movements around the world and when we’ll see these dictatorships are losing the momentum that unfortunately they gained on the geopolitical stage. Then I wish there will be enough people in Hong Kong to come back.”

Describing himself as “an incorrigible optimist by nature”, Kasparov said he believed “that China will also be free”.

Kasparov spoke about his desire to see President Donald Trump lose the November election. He discussed Trump’s close relationship with Putin – “please don’t call him president – he is what he is: a dictator” – comparing it to a KGB handler and his asset. He said he suspected that Trump’s connections to Russia “started much earlier than 2008/2009 when Russian money saved his crumbling empire from collapse”.

However, he was adamant that he would not visit Hong Kong in the future.

“I think that Hong Kong might not be on my travel list… I doubt very much in the foreseeable future I’ll be able to set my foot on Chinese soil or the soil controlled by the Chinese Communist Party,” he said.

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The prospect of an indigenous Australian becoming prime minister or “anywhere near” is a long way off, according to award-winning journalist and author, Stan Grant.

Discussing the recent announcement of US Senator Kamala Harris as presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s running mate, the broadcaster said that while there were similarities between America’s struggle with racism and that of his own country, the chances of an Aborigine taking high office were remote.

“It has taken over 100 years for an indigenous person to make a federal government minister. There are now a few more indigenous represented at state and federal level, but we’re a long way from getting to the point where an indigenous politician would get anywhere near becoming prime minister in Australia,” he said, adding: “It’s something I can’t even envisage at the moment.”

Talking to CNN anchor, Kristie Lu Stout, he said the appointment of Harris, the daughter of African-American and Asian immigrants, was an “extraordinary achievement” and “a reflection, I think, of America’s journey”.

Grant, who recently became the first indigenous host in the 59-year history of the ABC Four Corners documentary program, shared his experiences of racism growing up and discussed what the Black Lives Matters movement means to indigenous Australians.

He said Americans and Australians share a history of institutionalised and structural racism that limits opportunities in life and places first nation people on the margins of society. The killing of George Floyd during his arrest in Minnesota sparked a global outrage that kicked off protests in several countries. For Grant, who has been at the forefront of the fight for the rights of indigenous Australians for decades, it was a pivotal moment.

“That experience of George Floyd and Black Lives Matter spoke to me very personally. It spoke to our shared history,” he said.

Grant told of his own experiences of racism growing up in Australia, where, as part of a group of Aboriginal school children, he was told by his headmaster that he’d never amount to anything. After relocating to Canberra, he and his siblings found themselves “in a world that was overwhelmingly white”.

And those in power in Australia are still overwhelmingly white, Grant said, pointing to institutions from government to media. Yet he said even today, to discuss racism in Australia was “a difficult conversation”.

“It’s a country where people come to escape history, not to confront history,” he said. “Yet if we don’t do that as a nation then we are forever diminished. You cannot keep people in chains forever and not think that at some point it isn’t going to come to the surface, and that’s what we’re seeing in the United States.”

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A win by Democrats Joe Biden and Kamala D. Harris in November would likely not change America’s tough line toward China, but the tone would soften and the U.S. would seek more allies against Beijing, according a panel of experts at an FCC webinar.

The three August 12 panelists – political scientist Mary E. Gallagher, journalist Lingling Wei and Asia expert Bonnie Glaser – all agreed that although presidential hopeful Biden was unlikely to dramatically change some policies if he were elected, his administration could move to stabilise the frail relationship.

The three were speaking the day after Biden announced Senator Kamala D. Harris as his running mate. She is the first Black woman and the first Asian American to appear on a major-party presidential ticket.

Relations between the United States and China have soured since President Donald Trump took office, resulting in a trade war, tit-for-tat expulsions of journalists, and more recently, sanctions over the new national security law in Hong Kong.

Wei, an award-winning correspondent for the Wall Street Journal who herself became a casualty of the deteriorating relations when she was expelled from China earlier this year along with colleagues, warned that Trump’s final days in office posed a major threat to relations with China.

“I think Beijing welcomes a Biden administration. The next 90 days… are going to be the most dangerous time for China,” said Wei, the co-author of a book on Sino-U.S. relations, Superpower Showdown. “The South China Morning Post story about Xi Jinping instructing the Chinese military not to fire the first shot, I think that’s really a sign of how nervous the leadership is about this whole relationship completely getting out of control. They’re trying very hard to show restraint.”

Gallagher, a professor at The University of Michigan, has been director of the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies since 2008, said: “I think it’s a super exciting ticket and I love that a black Jamaican Asian child of immigrants is the safe choice for Joe Biden. One thing that will be different and I would certainly advise is to stop thinking about China as the Soviet Union. It is nothing like the Soviet Union, it is not going to disappear. When we talk about the Cold War, it ended when the Soviet Union disappeared. China is not going to disappear.”

She added that she would advise the Biden administration to “stand up to China on human rights issues and freedom of expression and freedom of speech”.

Biden would not be seen “on a daily basis hammering China” in the way that Trump has, said Glaser, adding that a sustained dialogue mechanism would likely be restructured under Biden in an “effort to resurrect some cooperation with China”.

Echoing Wei’s warning over the run-up to the November election, Glaser said that U.S. pressure on China would increase now that Trump has declared he no longer has a good relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping.

“Now he’s really taken the gloves off, and this has enabled other people in the administration to do things, for example, regarding Xinjiang and Hong Kong that the president was not on board with when the trade negotiations were going on. In that period, we’re going to see a lot more ramping up of pressure,” she predicted.

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Hong Kong has become a political football between China and the West, according to author and Asia scholar, Kishore Mahbubani.

It would be a “huge mistake” for China to try to eradicate what makes Hong Kong so special, he told an August 10 FCC webinar, and China must act with restraint as the West weighs in on the row over the national security law.

“Hong Kong has become a political football … when players play football they get a lot of fun kicking the ball but after a while the ball breaks down. It’s important for Hong Kong to steer itself out of being a political football as soon as possible,” he said.

Prof Mahbubani, a distinguished fellow at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore, said that although Hong Kong was a “piece of treasure” to China, the people of the city “should not force the leaders to choose between the interests of 1.4 billion people in China and 7 million people in Hong Kong”.

When asked if he thought China was trying to eradicate Hong Kong’s culture and identity, Prof Mahbubani warned it would be a “huge mistake” on China’s part.

“Even though the Chinese have tried very hard to get Shanghai to grow as a financial centre, you can see that Shanghai just cannot keep doing what Hong Kong is doing. Hong Kong is really at the end of the day a piece of treasure for China and it will be huge mistake for China to destroy that culture, that separateness.

“For the same reason, I think it’s also a huge mistake in the West – the United States and U.K., and all – to continue using Hong Kong as a political football. It’s in the global interest for Hong Kong to be one step in, one step out as part of the One Country, Two Systems framework. We should globally recognise that it’s good for China, good for the West and good for the rest of the world,” he said.

Prof Mahbubani’s latest book, Has China Won? analyses the tensions between the United States and the world’s second largest economy. In it, he argues that the real question – “one that never surfaces in America” – is whether the United States can lose.

“America has got so used to winning the idea of losing doesn’t come up,” he said, adding that 100 years of growth into the world’s largest economy had made the country complacent. His book, which he said he hoped the Trump and subsequent Administration would read, would help them to “at least think about the possibility of being number two”.

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