I need to retire for real so that I can reflect on the whole experience of the past many years.
Just quickly, one thing that's very important from the training work I did on the mainland is that you need to build the personnel infrastructure. You don't just build rule of law with no people. That's why it was very important to train the young lawyers and the young teachers. Indeed, they are the ones who are now having to carry and fight that steep challenge of legal reforms on the mainland. They are indeed still doing that.
I'm very intimidated that this committee, more than any government committee I've ever appeared before, has actually gone and read our writings and then come back and thrown our writings back at us. I think that's the human rights part. Intellectually I have a certain degree of pessimism, but as a human rights lawyer and activist, we really don't have the luxury of pessimism. Our job is to make sure that we provide solidarity and create a safe space for Hong Kongers to be able to continue the work. The Hong Kong student union took out a full-page ad saying that they would die, they would give their lives, for freedom, with a powerful opening letter that quotes Hannah Arendt on totalitarianism. Even in these dire circumstances, you are seeing these students, these young people, continue to speak out.
I have to add that on the mainland, where we have now seen more than 75 years of real repression in the ecosystem, you have support for Hong Kongers. They are being prosecuted. They have gone to prison. They have suffered harassment. Douban is the largest online social media platform for reviewing films and social media. They have millions of people. Someone just posted, despite all of this repression, a comment reviewing the national security law in Hong Kong. They had the nerve and courage to give it one star. To me that shows, “Why do we think we'll win? Because you can't kill us all.”
The big cartoon is the rooster: You can kill all the roosters, but it won't stop the dawn. It just won't. That's a fact.