No, I don't think that it's possible to have human rights protections and true respect for human rights in a non-democratic country.
I think that's what some of these authoritarian leaders.... The PRC government would want us all to believe that it's possible and that there's just a different culture or a different way of doing things that is somehow cultural, social and somewhat rooted in history, but I don't think that's true. I think that's a really good excuse and a quick way to try to shut people up.
We see the Chinese themselves, Tibetans.... Everywhere you look in these closed societies where there is no true democracy, people are calling for it and asking for it.
To think that in the Xi Jinping era, in the first protest in that COVID lockdown period, when the man put the banner on the bridge and openly said that they don't want a king—they want democracy and they want rights—