HONG KONG—When you fight for freedom, sacrifices have to be made. Even well-to-do hedge fund managers like Edward Chin of 2047 HK Monitor are not exempt.
Since he and other Hong Kong finance figures threw their weight behind the Hong Kong democracy movement in 2014, the cancellation of his regular newspaper column in the Hong Kong Economic Journal was only one indicator that the going would get rougher for him.
But this is not about his personal freedoms. It is about the freedom of Hong Kong and its future as Asia’s foremost financial center.
Read the first part of the interview.
You Describe the CCP as an Evil Empire
Do I think the Chinese Communist Party is an evil empire? Yes, evil in the sense that a lot of them they tried to hide away their wealth. This is in the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists report 2014. As much as $4 trillion in assets from top leaders are hiding in Cayman and British Virgin Island accounts. From paramount leaders such as Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin to Xi Jinping now: Everybody.
On the one hand they say: Love the country, love Hong Kong. But on the other hand these guys at the top, they are getting all the foreign passports and hiding their wealth. They honestly don’t know how long the CCP is going to last. They are not even confident themselves. They are very good at lying.
In Hong Kong, a lot of people believe in the core values of Hong Kong, like press freedom and the rule of law, which we were brought up with from the colonial days. They were never perfect, but at least there is a skeleton of a more democratic framework.
