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Amanpour

Organizing Vows to Keep Up Protest; Will Beijing Budge?; A Crisis Desperate for a Happy Ending; Imagine a World

Aired September 29, 2014 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN HOST (voice-over): Tonight: Hong Kong is China's Hong Kong, says Beijing. But a protest leader tells me the

struggle against a fake election will continue.

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DR. CHAN KIN MAN, THE CHINESE UNIVERSITY OF HONG KONG: But we shouldn't look at a democracy movement as a battle. It is a war. As long

as the spirit of democracy is alive, we are not, and we will not be defeated.

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AMANPOUR (voice-over): Plus as allies keep pounding ISIS, bestselling author Neil Gaiman tells me about his heartbreaking visit to a Syrian

refugee camp.

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AMANPOUR: Good evening, everyone, and welcome to the program. I'm Christiane Amanpour.

And it's already got a name: Umbrella Revolution. The growing pro- democracy protest in Hong Kong, where hundreds of thousands poured into the streets again Monday after raising a defensive wall of umbrellas this

weekend against riot police wielding tear gas and pepper spray.

The violence drew even more people into the demonstrations, which have been choking off traffic, disrupting business and forcing schools to shut

down. It is the largest test of Chinese authority since Tiananmen Square.

Although Hong Kong operates under the principle of one country, two systems, China is seeking to stamp its own system onto that business hub.

And all of this started when Beijing announced this summer that it would approve all candidates for Hong Kong's next elections.

Pro-democracy activists cried foul; they want real elections and now they're calling for Hong Kong's current chief executive, CY Leung, to step

down.

Today the police pulled back. China seems to want to let Hong Kong authorities deal with this for now. And earlier I spoke to a leader of the

Occupy protest movement, Dr. Chan Kin Man, who told me the street protest could end this week. And while they're not looking for violent

confrontation, they are looking for political concessions.

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AMANPOUR: Welcome to the program, Mr. Kin.

Can you tell me how long the Occupy movement will stay in the streets?

CHAN: Well, we hope the people can clog the streets for at least a couple of days until October 1st. And then we will announce another stage

of action. It might not be Occupy, but it will be a way for people to really express their idea about a genuine democracy in Hong Kong.

AMANPOUR: Now the police, it seems, have not been so evident today, after a lot of tear gas and pepper spray over the weekend.

Have they been called back?

CHAN: Well, it's been a shame that the police used tear gas to people, disperse the demonstrators when in fact the demonstration was in a

very peaceful and orderly manner. It is totally unacceptable for the police to use such a brutal force.

But are -- you have to appreciate how far Hong Kong people is, how determined Hong Kong people is in fighting for democracy. People are not

afraid. So now the government is backing down. We don't see any tear gas today. Even more people gather together in the streets.

I'm talking about hundreds of a thousand people, took to the street today.

AMANPOUR: You say the government is backing down.

Do you believe that politically they will back down and answer your demands for true universal suffrage?

Do you believe they will cede to your demands?

CHAN: Well, we understand that it will be quite difficult for Beijing to withdraw its decisions made concerning our constitutional reform in the

short run. But we believe that it is quite realistic, if we can first ask our chief executive, CY Leung, to step down. We believe that he's the

major obstacle for our processes in the reform.

So now people invest a very strong demand asking him to step down. And we believe it is a realistic goal in the short run.

AMANPOUR: But, Mr. Kim, even if he steps down, that surely isn't going to change Beijing, as you've just said.

So what's the point of him stepping down?

And what is your strategy to achieve universal suffrage or are do you not expect that to be given to you?

CHAN: No, if he, at the end, will step down, then a new government will then replace him. And it provides a window for us to start over again

because of the constitutional process.

And we'll -- we do not know whether we can obtain our goal in the short run. But we shouldn't look at a democracy movement as a battle. It

is a war. As long as the spirit of democracy is alive, we are not, and we will not be defeated.

And we believe that the spirit of democracy is alive in Hong Kong. If you come here, look at these young people, and also even middle-aged

people, they just initiate this movement by themselves.

It's really encouraging, seeing so many people taking to the streets; we have a very high spirit here now.

AMANPOUR: You do actually look amazed and grateful for so many people in the streets, because it wasn't always like that when you started Occupy.

There was a certain proportion of Hong Kong's residents that didn't agree with coming out onto the streets.

Have things changed now?

CHAN: Well, in fact, after the use of tear gas to disperse the crowd, I guess the community was very angry about it. Everyone in town -- not

saying everybody. I'm saying most people in town believe that it is just overuse of police force. And so we gain sympathy from the public.

But to be realistic, we don't expect people to occupy the streets in Central or other area for weeks. We are realistic enough to set a goal

until October 1st. People have to, you know, continue to do so until that date. Another date we will announce another state of action for people to

participate.

AMANPOUR: All right. Well, that's two days from now and October 1st is your national day.

But what really is your message to Beijing?

And in the end, isn't it in Beijing's hands?

CHAN: Well, because the final decision in fact is made and will be made by Beijing, so it will be very meaningful for us to appeal to Beijing

on the national day.

And I hope that Beijing can honor her promise, because is written in our basic law that Hong Kong people will be given high degree of autonomy

as well as universal suffrage. We don't want something fake.

AMANPOUR: Are you at all afraid that Beijing, which has stayed out so far, and -- but it does call your movement illegal -- are you at all afraid

that it will revert to a heavy-handed crackdown like in 1989, in Tiananmen?

CHAN: Well, of course, this is an illegal direct action. But people are willing to show that it's legal responsibility and that's why this

movement is so moving.

Now people will remain peaceful and when we are in trial, people like me, who are organizer, will not hire any lawyer, you know, to defend us.

We will just make a political statement to explain why we had to do it because we want to do it for next generation.

We want to do it for the well-being of our communities. And Beijing, I don't think they will turn Hong Kong into another Tiananmen Square,

because it will be very costly.

If they send troops here to Hong Kong, then there will be no more one country, two systems. There will be no more international financial

center. And they have to end the costly dialogue with the Kuomintang in Taiwan.

And it might also invite censorship from U.K. or U.S. governments. You know that -- you know that China relies on the fast-growth economy to

keep social stability, and I don't think China could afford, you know, facing this kind of censorship.

So I don't think they will be stupid enough to send troops to Hong Kong.

AMANPOUR: Thank you very much indeed for joining us tonight.

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AMANPOUR: As the protests were growing, the influential "Economist" magazine put this on its cover. "Xi who must be obeyed," how one man now

rules China. Now "The Economist" China editor believes that Beijing just won't budge.

James Miles joins me now to discuss where this protest could be heading.

Welcome.

JAMES MILES, "THE ECONOMIST": Thank you.

AMANPOUR: So you heard the last thing Dr. Kim said that he doesn't think there will be an intervention because Beijing just couldn't afford

that.

Do you agree? Is that "The Economist's" view?

MILES: Well, I think China would try its hardest and be persuading the Hong Kong government as strenuously as it can to avoid that particular

scenario. It knows that the risks here are enormous. This is the most complicated outbreak of street unrest that China has faced since Tiananmen

Square.

It of course has faced a number of other outbreaks of street protests here and there around China. But this one has peculiar characteristics for

China. It's in an internationally important area of the country. The world's eyes are watching Hong Kong. If a mistake is made in the handling

of these protests, then China, as Dr. Chan just said, will suffer some consequences in terms of the handling of Taiwan and, indeed, the

arrangements for Hong Kong in the future.

AMANPOUR: Did he mention Taiwan and others have. Presumably China has a lot at stake here, though, its own red lines in terms of domestic

political upheaval and what somebody like Taiwan or elsewhere might take from this.

MILES: Well, there's a clear red line here. And that's very important to recognize, because protesters have come out on the streets of

Hong Kong before. They did in 2003; that was triggered by opposition to plans to introduce an anti-subversion law in territory. In the end, those

protests caused that law to be shelved.

Then a couple of years ago, students were out protesting, this time against plans to introduce what was called patriotic education in schools.

Again, plans were shelved.

But now we're at this red line. There is no way that China will accept the notion of a fully developed Western style democracy in Hong

Kong.

AMANPOUR: Can it make it such a way that it wouldn't be a Western style democracy -- I mean, could it call it something else to save face

because clearly I don't know what you make of Dr. Chan saying that we believe that we have the leverage to get our chief executive, CY Leung, to

step down?

MILES: Well, I wouldn't rule out the possibility that CY Leung might have to step down eventually. He wasn't the first choice of Beijing for

this particular job.

But at this stage, given that the demonstrations this time are illegal, unlike those to other big outbreak --

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AMANPOUR: And he even admitted it, it's an illegal direct --

MILES: -- China, I think, would suffer, as it feels, that a considerable loss of face if it were to back down in the face of these

demonstrations. Therefore I think it's highly unlikely that they would push Mr. Leung out. And even if they do, they certainly wouldn't then

revise the electoral plans that they have in place.

AMANPOUR: So do you think there's a lot of wishful thinking on behalf of these students?

I guess the real question is how important is the outpouring?

Are they people who China can just dismiss?

Is it just students?

Are there more people in -- who really matters in terms of tipping the balance in Hong Kong?

MILES: Well, that's very interesting because what's clear about these demonstrations is that students are at the heart of them. We've all been

talking about Occupy Central. There's this group of people led by academics at key universities in Hong Kong.

But in the end, what brought these protesters out was students, university students as well as secondary school students have been

boycotting classes for the last few days. And students have a very special place in Hong Kong culture and, indeed, in Chinese culture generally. They

are held in considerable respect.

And it was partly because of that that the authorities in Beijing in 1989 during Tiananmen Square hesitated in their handling of this. And I

think we could be facing a similar sort of situation again.

AMANPOUR: And meantime, back to your cover here, talking about Xi Jinping, the leader in China, people thought there would be some reform

there. But I mean, you're clearly -- I mean, this is a one-man game there.

MILES: Well, he's accumulated power more rapidly than we've seen any other leader accumulate power since Deng Xiaoping, possibly since Mao

Zedong, who died in 1976. So he's an extraordinarily powerful man. And he has a lot of -- a lot at stake in this -- in this particular situation.

He was in charge of the Hong Kong portfolio before he actually became Communist Party leader at the end of 2012. If mistakes are made in Hong

Kong, he stands to be blamed for it. So I think that's another reason why we're unlikely to see him back down.

AMANPOUR: And how bad would it be for today's super-powerful Chinese leader to say, well, OK. I mean, it's some form or another, why don't you

just go ahead and have a real election?

How bad could it be for China?

MILES: Well, the risk as he sees this is that this could spread. He's taken over at a time when China's middle class has grown to huge

proportions; this is a new force in Chinese society. It's looking ahead at the next few years to slowing economic growth, to less of the benefits of

this frothy double-digit growth that China's experienced over the last 10 years.

And he worries about their demands: demands for greater control over their own daily lives, the same kind of demands that people in Hong Kong

have and the risks that this could spread over the border, I think, is really preying on his mind right now.

AMANPOUR: James Miles, thank you very much for coming in and helping us understand.

And while thousands of protesters have, as we've seen, flooded the streets of Hong Kong, you might thing the incendiary images of the protest,

like these taken by our own Ivan Watson and his team, would filter back to the mainland via social media.

But think again. In the last few days, Instagram, which is the popular photo sharing app, has suffered outages inside China, which means

no images of the pro-democracy movement across the water.

With Facebook and Twitter already blocked, many Chinese have depending on Instagram as a window onto the world beyond.

Now after a break, we'll turn to another flood, this one of refugees streaming from Syria in the wake of the ISIS onslaught. Master storyteller

Neil Gaiman joins us with his personal account of a humanitarian crisis desperate for a happy ending.

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AMANPOUR: Welcome back to the program.

Now as the United States and its Arab allies continue to bomb ISIS targets in Syria and President Obama says that the U.S. underestimated the

rise of the militant group, witnesses on the Turkish-Syrian border say that warplanes haven't done much to stop ISIS from advancing towards Turkey.

In addition to the 9 million-plus Syrians who've already fled their three-year war, another 200,000 have escaped the ISIS onslaught in the last

week alone, according to the reliable Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, which is based here in London.

It's easy to ignore the human toll of this horrible disaster, but my next guest, the bestselling author, poet and filmmaker, Neil Gaiman, and

his 2 million Twitter followers, have been galvanized into action by the plight of these refugees.

I spoke to him earlier just as he returned from his painful first-hand look at the camps.

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AMANPOUR: Neil Gaiman, welcome back to the program.

NEIL GAIMAN, AUTHOR: Thank you for having me.

AMANPOUR: Great to see you and not just to talk about your books, but about the new adventure that you've taken on, visiting the Syrian refugee

camps in Jordan.

GAIMAN: It was completely accidental. The UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency people, had just seen how incredibly effective my social

media was and they'd asked me to retweet some things for them.

And I did. And then they came back to me and said, you know, your people are actually -- they're donating. They're getting active. We're

seeing them reading the pages. They're not just clicking.

Would you be interested in following this up?

And because I'd been retweeting their stuff and seeing what they were doing, I was fascinated.

Going out to Jordan, where well over 600,000 people have come in, which is the equivalent of about 30 million showing up in America, or about

6 million people showing up in England.

AMANPOUR: For you, it was personal, right?

I mean, you have refugees and a survival story in your own family.

GAIMAN: I absolutely do. I have -- the American branch of my family exists basically because three sisters survived the Holocaust and wound up

in a refugee camp. And the oldest of them fell in love with the camp commandant.

AMANPOUR: Did you have any notion about your own refugee history before you went to these camps?

GAIMAN: I'd just started investigating, talking to my 94-year-old cousin, Helen, who was one of the survivors. And she was telling me the

Holocaust history, which was nightmarish. And so going out and seeing the camps it suddenly became incredibly personal, just the idea of absolute

displacement.

I mean, right now we've got over 51 million refugees, the most we've had since World War II. Suddenly World War II seems very close.

AMANPOUR: What was the hardest thing for you?

How did you see how other people reacted to what you were seeing?

GAIMAN: The hardest thing for me was actually relating to the UNHCR, the U.N. refugee agency people, who are out there administering the camps.

I was there for three days. I was there for three days, talking to people and interacting and it nearly broke me.

By the end, I was talking to camera and talking about what I'd seen and I was not crying by an effort of will. These people there every day

and every day they are interacting and dealing with people who have experienced things so far beyond what you or I have experienced that it

makes our world seem mundane.

And they carry on. And I said to them, "How do you do it without breaking?"

And they said, "We break. And then we come back in. And we do it again."

AMANPOUR: What about your books? You're coming out with a new one, "The Sleeper and the Spindle."

Is this affecting your writing?

GAIMAN: Weirdly it is. I don't think it's in "Sleeper and the Spindle," but it's turning up. I've done a retelling of "Hansel and

Gretel."

AMANPOUR: The children who are lost, right?

GAIMAN: Absolutely, children who are lost and really setting it in a war zone, which, in the early Grimm's versions, there was a famine in the

land and there was war, which was causing the famine.

And taking it from talking to some of these Syrian refugees, who ran out of food, telling me about getting permission from their imams to eat

cats and dogs, because all the other animals had gone, eating grass, drinking swamp water. And on this, this is Hansel and Gretel now.

AMANPOUR: The last time you were here, you talked about reading as so massively important to, you know, inspire people's imaginations, to

keep them not just creative but also on the straight and narrow.

GAIMAN: Absolutely. I think -- I mean partly I think because of the amount of empathy that reading generates. It's the only way to get out of

your head and into somebody else's.

And at the point where you're seeing the world through somebody else's eyes, you can understand that things could be different. If the only eyes

you ever get to see it through are your eyes, you may think that you are trapped. You may be stuck. Things don't change.

AMANPOUR: When you talk to the parents in these camps that you visit and you say, are your kids reading or are you reading to them, did they

think you are nuts? Or did they -- do they, you know, understand where you're coming from?

GAIMAN: You know, one of the things that actually gave me hope was going in at Azraq camp, the new camp they've built, and seeing that they

have little libraries in there -- and seeing the kids sitting there, drawing, reading and thinking, OK, there is hope.

Libraries really do give us hope.

AMANPOUR: That's a wonderful way to end.

Neil Gaiman, thank you very much indeed.

GAIMAN: Thank you.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

AMANPOUR: So a little ray of light in a world increasingly under the threat of darkness.

And after a break, imagine another hopeful sign, this one in the form of a cartoon family who, for a quarter of a century, has broken all the

rules of polite society and made us laugh and think at the same time. "The Simpsons" invade China -- next.

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AMANPOUR: And finally tonight, we told you earlier that the images of massive protest in Hong Kong are nowhere to be seen in China. But a unique

American form of subversion will soon be available there, streaming 24 hours a day.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP, "THE SIMPSONS")

AMANPOUR (voice-over): For the first time ever, people across China will soon be able to watch "The Simpsons" online, thanks to a new licensing

deal. With its unique brand of high and low humor, it's been entertaining millions for 25 years. The show's political irreverence and slapstick

hijinks appeal to children and adults alike, from American presidential elections to Scottish independence, little is off limits for the longest-

running American sitcom. And now Chinese censors, beware. This fare is coming your way.

HOMER SIMPSON: Look at him sleeping. He's like a little angel that killed 50 million people. Yes, you are! Yes, you are!

AMANPOUR (voice-over): As Hollywood turns its eyes more and more to the burgeoning Chinese market, it seems only natural for "The Simpsons" to

scale the Great Wall. Or maybe they already have, as "The Simpsons" executive producer put it, now we can reveal that Springfield, the

Simpsons' hometown, is actually in Guangdong province.

SALLY SIMPSON: The Great Wall of China was begun nearly 2,000 years ago in order to repel barbarian invaders.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Hope these pogo sticks will finally make it over.

All right. Everyone take a break and come back Monday. We try fresh ideas.

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AMANPOUR: And that's it for our program tonight. Remember you can always contact us at our website, amanpour.com, and follow me on Facebook

and Twitter. Thank you for watching and goodbye from London.

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