Open Book with Anthony Scaramucci
The One Thing That Will Bring China Down - Simon Elegant
14 May 2026
Chapter 1: What are the global implications of living under totalitarian regimes?
There's 5.8 billion people that live under some form of totalitarianism or autocracy. Many of these people are super educated. 90, 100 million people in the Chinese Communist Party overseeing 1.3 billion people. China seems pretty entrenched. Am I missing that? What is unique about them? where they can stay in power.
When I was talking to people down a mine in Shaanxi or wherever it was, the one thing they always talked about, everybody loves their family and wants their kids to do well. It's a universal thing. And that's the one point where I thought the Chinese Communist Party might be vulnerable, and they're very, very conscious of it.
You know, when you've got 30% of the population and 120 million people or something like that graduating every year, it's crazy difficult. That's an enormous thing, and that's the one place they're vulnerable. You can have all the maglev trains and the highways and all the high-speed trains that you want, but if you don't get jobs for the kids, you're going to be in trouble.
Welcome to Open Book. I am your host, Anthony Scaramucci.
Chapter 2: How is the Chinese Communist Party maintaining its power?
Joining us today is Simon Elegant. He's the China Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, but he's out with a new book, City on Fire, a novel of Hong Kong. Am I right in saying that Hong Kong, the name means fragrant harbor? You are exactly right. Yes. Okay. And why? What is fragrant about that harbor?
Well, that's the joke normally is that it used to be a stinking mess, but they reclaimed so much land that there's hardly any room left between the island of Hong Kong and the peninsula of Kowloon. And it used to be so if you fell into it by accident, you'd die of some weird disease. But so it was very unfragrant. I think they've cleaned it up a bit now.
All right. But that's an ancient word, Fragrant Harbor. Okay.
Chapter 3: What personal experiences shaped Simon Elegant's view on Hong Kong?
You spent years covering Asia, some of the region's most consequential political and cultural shifts. So before we get into the novel, tell us about your background and what drew you to Asia. Why did you end up going there?
Sure. I was actually born in Hong Kong, and I grew up there partly because my dad was a reporter as well. He actually, believe it or not, seeing as how it's come full cycle, he opened the Newsweek Bureau there in Hong Kong to cover and covered the Cultural Revolution in China, a big mess, mostly by listening to the radio in those days. And it kind of comes full cycle when I...
I probably should update you that I am no longer the China bureau chief for the Washington Post, because I, along with many, many of my colleagues, got canned by Mr. Bezos. But that was a couple of months ago. It's a different issue. Another story for another time. Yeah. So my dad was based there for Newsweek and then the L.A. Times and.
I guess it just got into my blood, both Asia, China in particular, and, you know, journalism, being a foreign correspondent, looked like a lot of fun.
So, yeah. Well, I mean, that is an amazing city. So I'll just fully disclose to you, I lived there for about four months in 1998. Oh, okay. Wow. And so it was a couple of years after the handover. I was living in the Island Shangri-La Hotel. So you know exactly the location I was living in. I sure do. Because I was there as a corporate and I was...
We were working on Chung Kung Center for Mr. Li Ka-shing and a few other things. And, you know, look, I love that city. I try to get back there at least once or twice a year. But you took what I think, I mean, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I feel like this was one of the more, the backdrop for this very exciting novel is one of the most volatile periods in the history of modern literature.
Hong Kong.
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Chapter 4: Why did Simon choose the 2019 protests as the backdrop for his novel?
This is the 2019 protest movement. Why that era? Why that setting for this? What were you trying to convey?
I mean, I was there reporting it. I did some stories on the ground and I just got fascinated by, I mean, effectively, I had stopped being a reporter for a while. I was the bureau chief for Time in Beijing and I love journalism, but it can get a bit, how should we say, bricklaying. It develops into an element of bricklaying. It can be a bit humdrum.
And I didn't want to leave China, so I did other things. I started a restaurant with a friend. I did some teaching, that kind of thing. But when I went back to these extraordinary protests, which is basically the city trying to throw off their fate. I mean, they were destined to be ruled by Beijing, and they didn't want to. They wanted to keep their rights and so on and so forth.
freedom of speech, stuff like that. They'd got used to it, and it was coming down. Basically, the city was crushed by the wheel of history, unfortunately for them, but they were resisting, and they knew it. Everybody I talked to was extraordinarily idealistic, and I just thought, yeah, it's just not going to fit in.
There's a different truth to be had and a different way of approaching that truth, and that, I think, benefits better through fiction, and I hope to... I guess I could write a regular novel, but I love crime novels anyway, and I thought I could have a pretty great way of approaching it. I mean, the book is a mystery. There's a policeman who solves the crime, but there's also the whole dilemma.
His younger sister is deeply into the protests. I mean, I think that's a good half of the book is why the protests are happening, especially when they're basically futile. They know they can't win. So I just thought it was a much better way to get at the... But to me, were fascinating and very moving, very emotional aspects of the situation for Hong Kong and its people.
Is this book available in Hong Kong?
No.
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Chapter 5: How does the national security law affect freedom in Hong Kong?
Booksellers will take it.
It's not available in Hong Kong because of the censorship laws in Hong Kong. Is that fair to say?
Absolutely. Well, as far as I know, I haven't checked officially. I did check with the booksellers. I mean, you know, unofficially to see if they take it and they just wouldn't stock it, basically. It hasn't even come up, actually. But, yeah, they're petrified. I mean, they just passed a law saying that restaurants have to comply with the national security law.
How exactly that's going to be put into effect, but, I mean, it's beyond farce.
City's still relatively free, you think, or not really?
No, not at all.
It's become a Chinese city. When I was there in 1998, it was still, in my mind, a British city that had Chinese characters on the roadsides. It's not that anymore.
No, they haven't done that. And superficially, it looks much the same. Well, you would know this, Anthony. The reason that it's still successful economically, despite the fact that Shenzhen, for example, and Guangdong have a greater GDP, but...
Hong Kong has one precious thing which will always make it, which is they have a separate currency and Chinese companies can IPO there and raise money from the rest of the world. It's incredibly useful, especially because China has already decided they don't want anybody to... They've made most of their companies withdraw their listings in the NYC and so on.
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Chapter 6: What role does family play in the context of Chinese culture?
I don't know how many people you've run into who are dissidents and prominent dissidents. And you say to them, what is in the character of somebody like this? He's courting almost being arrested. He has not been arrested yet. The story never ran. It's fascinating to me, but he's really the only one. And what other person was there was the head of the Hong Kong Journalist Association.
And she's been speaking out a bit, but even she has been. It's just too extraordinary. You know, you'll be put in jail for a really long time. And that's probably the best result.
I feel like when I read the book and having known the city as well as I know the city, certainly not as well as you do. I was reading a crime novel and that was a great thriller and I would recommend anybody to pick this book up and read it. But it also felt like an elegy to a Hong Kong that no longer exists, Simon. Was that part of it?
Absolutely. I mean, I was born in the place. I lived there. My sister still lives there. I've got family there. I've got friends, obviously. And as I said, there is a very analogy. Yeah, I mean, a goodbye, you know, a sad and very emotional-filled goodbye to some extent that Hong Kong... for the foreseeable future, is gone.
I mean, already people in, you know, 250,000 people have taken advantage of the British national overseas thing to emigrate to God knows where in Britain, Hull. I mean, not that I have anything against Hull, but some of the, you know, the places in Britain where even some Brits might acknowledge that the weather's pretty awful and conditions are not anything like Hong Kong.
So often people with children, because they didn't want their kids raised to be brainwashed in the school and turn into little red pioneers. And so it is very, very sad. It had a great thing.
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Chapter 7: How does Simon Elegant's novel reflect the current state of Hong Kong?
I think I get into it in the book that they had an extraordinary arrangement
with this benign administration by the brits who did a pretty good job of just backing off you know milton friedman admired the economic arrangement a great deal um it just worked it worked for really well so they ended up with a fantastic corruption free civil service they have the longest lived people in the world longer lived than the japanese they had a great medical system medical insurance probably
It just was a place that worked and people were pretty happy and extremely, as you know, productive. Really good entrepreneurs. Yeah, so it is sad. Yes, I would say that's definitely accurate that there's an element of goodbye to that.
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If you're an expat, so you work for an American bank, you're an expat, and you want to put a kid in school over there, you're getting the doctrine of China in that school?
So you're getting a little bit of CCP propaganda nonsense in force, but only a little bit. They have international schools. So they've got a Hong Kong international school, a you know, various Brit schools are set up there.
So there's a restricted element, but anybody who goes to the regular day-to-day, which my protagonist does because he's a Caucasian, but he was basically raised as another Hong Konger. Those people are getting the full bore, history, everything shoved down their throat. And they're getting, you know, anybody who did, that's one of the places they targeted first was teachers.
They really enforced that very, you know, they understand this stuff. Anthony, they're really good at the Communist Party. They really get what they have to do and what they have to stop people from doing.
Yeah, I think we in the West really didn't understand how good they were at it. We thought they were coming our way 30 years ago. Okay, let's go to the protagonist, this gentleman, Killian Tong, Superintendent Killian Tong. He's a disgraced police officer seeking redemption. So who is Killian, and what does he represent in the broader context of the crisis that's going on in Hong Kong?
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Chapter 8: What message does Simon hope to convey through his writing?
I mean it wasn't there it was it was called Asia's finest and. So his father, who died when he was young, and left him in charge of his stepmother, who was Chinese. So he was basically raised as a full Hong Konger, speaking, you know, properly speaking Mandarin and Cantonese.
And he's in the force, and there's a terrible incident, because everybody in the force has to rotate through, quote-unquote, riot duty. In other words, protest suppression, whatever you want to call them, riot squads. Because there aren't enough people in the police to... The demonstrations are so great. You know, a million people on the streets sometimes at one time. Crazy numbers.
20% of the population. So the police had to cycle through other offices so they wouldn't have enough money to control the crowd. So yeah, there's an unfortunate incident. He's basically exiled, sent away to what counts as a Siberian Hong Kong, which is such a small place. It's not far. And there's a murderer and he's asked if he'll take care of it. So that's his road to getting back in the force.
I feel like there's something about his story and Hong Kong itself that when you were writing it, it felt like it was near history. But then as the story unfolded, everything about the story is more or less true, Simon, meaning the facts on the ground are linked almost perfectly to the story that you wrote. Am I right about that? I mean, is that accidental or what happened?
No, not accidentally at all. No, I deliberately want to... I mean, the climax of the book is the day that the national security law is passed, not in Hong Kong.
I mean, I guess for your readers, most of you obviously don't follow this that closely, but this struggle between the people of Hong Kong and the pretty incompetent local government trying to do what Beijing wanted them had been going on since 2004, when they first tried to pass this law, and the protests were so strong that their chief executive, the head of the...
the head of the administration, had to resign at the time. So they resisted for 15 years at this point. And basically Beijing was getting pretty exasperated because they really didn't, they just wanted to be left alone. But they didn't want to endanger this issue that I talked about earlier, the golden goose of the IPO and basically the position that Hong Kong played.
So yeah, so it was very much very conscious. Obviously, I changed the name of the chief executive and stuff like that. But other than that, it was very deliberate. Yeah.
All right. So I want to I want to for our viewers and we have a lot of young viewers and I want to go out and read your book. But I want you to give them a little bit of this national security law that was imposed on Hong Kong and passed on June 30th, 2020. Tell us a little bit what it criminalizes and how dangerous it is and what Amnesty International said about it.
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