Big Lychee, Various Sectors

In China File, Jeremy Goldkorn goes back to China for the first time in years… 

It may be hard to make money in China in 2026, but it is very pleasant to spend it. A major element of involution is the brutal competition in every market that puts downward pressure on prices as consumers, spoiled for choice, demand higher and higher quality. Hotels, trains, flights, food, clothes, cars, phones, electronics, massages, mountaineering gear, Labubus: all are cheap compared to the United States.

But first you have to figure out how to pay for stuff. The country has gone cashless, and you need a mobile phone tied to a verified identity to use Alipay and WeChat Wallet, and these are the only digital wallets that work. 

…Aside from the ubiquitous cameras, it is not possible to move around a city on any form of transport or pay for anything without the apps, and they always know who and where you are. In Yangzhou’s Geyuan … you need to watch a video advertisement and scan your face to get toilet paper. Once only: the dispenser remembers who you are and won’t give you seconds. Some parts of Beijing look like a spoof science fiction film about a surveillance state: we visited a friend in a part of Haidian District where there are a lot of government buildings and housing compounds. There are horizontal bars above the street every 50 meters, each bar holding more than a dozen different cameras—we counted them. Our friend pointed out the different types: that one reads license plates, this one is for facial recognition of pedestrians, this one scans the faces of people inside cars, that one is used for gait recognition…

Semafor compares two Chinese tycoons…

…both share one thing in common: They are products of a system that concentrates massive resources at the command of the state, in the process generating colossal waste and leaving a trail of debt and industrial overcapacity. In sum, the pair represent how the business cycle in China plays out. 

…Hui [Ka Yan, ex-Evergrand boss now serving life in prison] is the fall guy for China’s real estate meltdown. No doubt his crimes are real, but he was also only playing his part in what was essentially a Ponzi scheme that everybody — from village committees to the Politburo — relied upon to drive growth and generate employment. Real estate speculation wasn’t a flaw in the system; it was for a time China’s primary development model. Developers like Hui came to see the market as a one-way bet — why would the government spoil its own party? — and in a sense, loading up on risky debt was a rational strategy.  

Michael Pettis asks who pays for the clearing of Chinese state banks’ bad debts. Another way of putting it: why is household consumption so weak?

…when the owners or creditors are politically powerful—or when imposing losses on them threatens broader financial stability—governments often intervene to socialize the losses instead. There are many ways to do this, but in almost every case the losses are ultimately transferred, often indirectly, to the household sector. This can occur through explicit fiscal bailouts financed by taxes, through inflation, or through financial repression that transfers income from depositors and other holders of monetary assets to borrowers. 

This leads to two fundamental points that are essential for understanding China’s banking cleanup. First, losses never disappear, even when they appear to. They are always absorbed by some sector of the economy. Second, loans that finance projects whose economic value ultimately proves to be less than their cost represent real economic losses, whether or not those losses are immediately recognized. Moving bad loans from one balance sheet to another does not eliminate them. It merely changes the way in which the losses will be allocated. 

The Jamestown Foundation on the growing alliance between China and Russia…

While Beijing is in control, and there is real and growing asymmetry between the two countries, excessive focus on Moscow as a weakened “junior partner” that fights costly wars, supplies discounted energy, and repeatedly seeks concessions from Beijing misses both the integration now taking place and the strategic assets Russia still contributes.

Asian Review of Books looks at Entangled Empires: Four Centuries of China-Russia Relations…

Putin and Xi indeed look rather chummy. But how broad, deep and lasting are the ties that bind their two nations? According to Sören Urbansky and Martin Wagner, two historians of Eastern Europe, the answer is not as much as many might think. To their mind, “florid proclamations of friendship are undoubtedly a façade behind which historic rivalries persist.” 

While Hong Kong pays lip-service to TCM for patriotic reasons, the city’s government is otherwise sensible about serious public-health measures like vaccinations. In the US, top health officials are pretty much denying that measles can be deadly; RFK Jr – when he’s not swimming in sewage and promoting unpasteurized milk – says chicken soup can cure it. From Science-Based Medicine. 

Prospect Magazine on Chow Hang-tung…

…she advocated for labourers in mainland China and built connections with Chinese dissidents. During frequent visits to friends there, Chow gained a reputation for her bravery, as well as her capacity to drink large quantities of Chinese white wine.

She was sometimes criticised by fellow activists in the Hong Kong democracy movement for focusing on the rights of mainland dissidents over issues closer to home. But according to her friend, the activist Patrick Poon, Chow was “prophetic” in seeing how the experience of dissidents in China foreshadowed what was to happen in Hong Kong. While many of the movement’s leaders had fled abroad, he says Chow was determined to remain inside the region. 

“What she saw and heard in mainland China made her realise more deeply that whether a society has freedom, rule of law and civil rights is not an abstract political concept, but directly affects the lives of every ordinary person,” her fiancé Ye Du tells me. He is barred from leaving China and has been placed under strict surveillance. The couple have not been able to communicate with each other since February last year.

One early morning in June 2021, police smashed down the door to her barrister’s chambers…

HKFP on Hong Kong’s first Chinese medicine hospital…

In addition to launching inpatient services, the hospital will expand existing outpatient services, including those offered in its radiological diagnostic and pathology departments. 

The hospital will also introduce 10 new special disease programmes in September and November, covering conditions such as eczema, Parkinson’s disease, and functional gastrointestinal disorders. 

Never knew that Chinese folk medicine uses scientific equipment like X-rays, ultrasound, etc. Do these procedures detect qi? For political reasons, Hong Kong must devote resources to what the Skeptic’s Dictionary defines as…

…a hodgepodge of diagnostic and healing practices developed over many centuries across a vast expanse of land that roughly corresponds to what today we call China. 

…these practices evolved long before the development of science and science-based medicine. What is called Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a label that mischaracterizes two millennia of various healing traditions as if they comprised a monolithic brand. 

…Underlying every aspect of TCM is a metaphysical system that has little, if any, correlation to science-based medicine. This is not surprising since the many practices of TCM developed before science as we know it began evolving in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It is also not surprising that the many attempts to confirm the scientific validity of TCM practices have largely failed since there is no plausible “mechanism of action for most of its therapies.”*

(Back in the late 1990s – the early days of the Internet – I emailed skepdic.com author Robert Todd Carroll and mentioned that his tone towards defenders of quack science and conspiracy theories was refreshingly rude. He replied: “It’s the only language they understand.”)

A group of lawyers’ organizations issue a statement on Chow Hang-tung…

Chow Hang-tung has been subjected to extensive harassment, multiple arrests, prolonged pre-trial detention and periods of solitary confinement by the authorities for her legitimate human rights work. In 2024, the government enacted further national security legislation under Article 23, ‘Safeguarding National Security Ordinance’. Chow Hang-tung was among the first to be targeted under this law, with new charges brought against her on 28 May 2024 for social media posts regarding a “sensitive date”, the Tiananmen Square anniversary that the authorities deemed as “inciting hatred” against Beijing. 

Following more than four years in pre-trial detention, often spent in prolonged solitary confinement, her trial commenced on 22 January 2026. Representing herself throughout the proceedings, she consistently sought to exercise her legal rights, including applying for bail, challenging restrictions on public reporting of the case, and contesting the secrecy that typically surrounds national security proceedings.

From HKFP – more on the government’s response to the negative publicity following the conviction of Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung…

…Echoing Friday’s judgment, the government statement said that the defendants “refused to pull back from the brink” even after Beijing implemented a national security law in Hong Kong, “and were bent on embracing the resistance line of the Alliance to the very end.” 

…a panel of government-appointed judges acknowledged that the activists did not suggest any specific means of ending one-party rule, and that the Alliance had never used or advocated violence.

But they said the defendants still spread the goal of “end one-party dictatorship” after the security law was passed, and compared the anti-extradition protests and unrest in 2019 to the “June 4th Incident” – the Tiananmen crackdown.

“[This stirred] up the hostility of [Hongkongers] towards the CCP, eroding and undermining the public’s confidence in its leadership,” they said. 

What brink did the defendants ‘refuse to pull back’ from? How do the authorities or courts detect or measure shifts in ‘public hostility to the CCP’? And if Lee and Chow did not suggest ways to end one-party rule or use/advocate violence, what exactly did they do – other than express an opinion? (So many other questions. For example: if one-party rule is beneficial to the people, why does the state feel a need to imprison citizens who call for an alternative?)

A mid-week read – American Affairs Journal on China’s domination of supply chains… 

For decades, companies and countries navigated this [politicized protectionism] environment with a rough working knowledge of the rules. Stay away from Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Tiananmen. Do not challenge China’s territorial claims. Do not embarrass the Party. Violate these norms and face the consequences, typically in the form of lost market access. It was an uncomfortable bargain, but a navigable one.

That changed in 2010. Following a territorial dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands, China did something it had never done before: it imposed an export ban on rare earth minerals, cutting off supplies to Japan. This was not market access coercion: China was not threatening to close its doors to Japanese goods. Instead, this was supply chain weaponization: China was threatening to cut off something Japan needed to make things, not just sell things. The distinction is fundamental. Market access coercion punishes you for what you export to China. Supply chain weaponization punishes you for what you need from China.

The world watched, took note, and moved on, concluding it was just Japan’s problem. That was a catastrophic misreading

Following a notorious animal-cruelty case in the Mainland, Hong Kong people line up to lay flowers in memory of the dead dog Wang Wang and launch publicity campaigns calling for better protection for animals in China. But will the authorities see such activism as yet another national-security threat? HKFP reports…

Kenneth Chan, associate professor in the Department of Government and International Studies at Hong Kong Baptist University, said that even advocacy campaigns for causes as politically innocuous as animal rights are inherently treated by the government “with suspicion.”

“It is hard to ignore the perceived arbitrariness” of what people or businesses believe to be permissible in the eyes of the authorities, he said.

The experiences of the boxing gym and the transport advertisers, he added, “show how a ‘better safe than sorry’ mindset exerts strong yet equivocal impacts on every aspect of the public domain.”

“Nothing can be ‘non-political’ in clear terms in a place where the authorities talk about being vigilant towards threats arising anywhere, anyhow, anytime,” Chan said.

The Guardian on Chow Hang-tung’s prison writings…

In another essay, she describes being handed a white Mickey Mouse t-shirt to wear in court because she is not allowed to wear clothing that carries the branding of her protest group, the Hong Kong Alliance.

“The Mickey Mouse t-shirt may seem innocent on the surface, but isn’t it still a prison uniform provided by the correctional facility? Even before the Alliance has been convicted, its clothes have already become contraband,” she writes.

While some writings are breezy and irreverent, many are deeply considered essays on defending civil rights in the face of a powerful and oppressive Chinese Communist party. As a highly regarded barrister who has been representing herself in court, she also dives into legal philosophy.

(Translations of her writing at Brian Kern’s blog.)

For enthusiasts – a description of ‘New Qing History’, and why the CCP hates it…

Traditional historiography often holds that the Qing dynasty’s success stemmed from the Manchus being highly “Sinicized.” New Qing History scholars, through Manchu-language and other archives, have proven that Qing rulers deliberately maintained Manchu ethnic identity and did not permit Manchus to be assimilated by Han culture. There is ample historical evidence from aspects such as official systems, power structures, territories, and cultural customs. At the same time, these frontier ethnic groups played active, interactive, and cooperative roles in the Qing Empire’s expansion and governance, rather than being merely passive objects of conquest or assimilation. Thus, the Qing Empire ultimately implemented a pluralistic system of “governing according to local customs”: adopting the traditional Confucian bureaucracy in the interior heartland, forming a Manchu-Mongol alliance with Mongolia, and establishing a patron-priest religious relationship with Tibet—demonstrating the flexible, multi-centered governance strategies of the Great Qing Inner Asian Empire.

The Hong Kong government’s statement on the conviction of Chow Hang-tung and Lee Cheuk-yan…

The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government today (August 22) expressed strong dissatisfaction with and firm opposition to, and strongly condemned, the baseless slanders and smearing against the HKSAR by various western countries, anti-China media, organisations and politicians, using the court’s verdict of conviction yesterday (August 21) concerning the incitement to subversion case of the “Hong Kong Alliance” (the Alliance).  

…The spokesman stressed, “The reasons for verdict handed down by the court clearly emphasised that the defendants were put on trial not because of their political views or beliefs. The court would only consider the laws and evidence relevant to the case to decide whether the prosecution is able to prove the charge beyond reasonable doubt. The court also pointed out that the defendants had all along been hostile towards the CPC and the Central Government under its leadership. After the implementation of the Hong Kong National Security Law (HKNSL), the defendants refused to pull back from the brink and were bent on embracing the resistance line of the Alliance to the very end. Even though the defendants knew that what they had said and done might have already gone beyond the scope of lawful freedom of expression, they paid no regard to it.”  

And a not vastly different one from the Legislative Council…

The Legislative Council (LegCo) of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government today (22 August) expressed strong opposition and dissatisfaction with, and strongly condemned, the malicious attacks, slanders and smearing against the judicial system and national security laws of Hong Kong by various western countries, anti-China media, organisations and politicians, using the court’s verdict of conviction concerning the case of “incitement to subversion of state power by the Hong Kong Alliance”. 

…The LegCo spokesperson stressed that the reasons for the court’s verdict were detailed, clearly pointing out that the trial of the case was never targeted at the defendants’ political views, but was based on objective law and evidence, strictly following the Hong Kong National Security Law (HKNSL) and other relevant laws. After the HKNSL came into effect, the defendants still persistently pressed ahead with subversion activities, and their acts clearly went beyond the boundaries of lawful freedom of expression.

The Guardian on Britain’s response to Friday’s HK Alliance guilty verdicts…

The UK Foreign Office’s Indo-Pacific minister, Rosie Winterton, said: “This verdict is a further demonstration that even peaceful acts of remembrance in Hong Kong are now treated by the authorities as threats to national security. The extensive use of Beijing’s national security law to punish and restrict peaceful expression undermines the commitments China made to Hong Kong under the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration. We reiterate our call for the national security law to be repealed, and for rights and freedoms to be respected in the Hong Kong special administrative region.” 

HKFP summary of statements from Hong Kong and overseas, including former Alliance participants and family members.

Via Brian Kern, a translation of two Witness articles on Lee Cheuk-yan – with a lot of old photos.

For enthusiasts of ‘fake history’ stories from China: a post suggesting that online Tang Dynasty denialism is actually aimed at mocking ‘western pseudohistory theory’ (ultranationalist claims that, for example, Ancient Greece didn’t exist). Makes sense. And quite amusing.

And the SCMP reports (paywalled) that China is criticizing US historians for not echoing Beijing’s official line on the Manchu-but-actually-Chinese Qing Dynasty. (More here.)

For years after 1989, the HK Alliance were free to organize annual Tiananmen vigils, which included calls for an end to one-party rule in China. Then, in 2021, its leaders were arrested and charged with inciting subversion under the NatSec Law. The trial of Lee Cheuk-yan and Chow Hang-tung didn’t start until earlier this year, and the verdict is due today. Maximum sentence: 10 years. AP story…

…prosecutors argued they incited others to use unlawful means to topple China’s fundamental system and central political bodies, including inciting the overthrow of the Communist Party’s leadership through calls for “ending one-party rule,” which was one of the alliance’s core demands.

The defense denied they meant to end the party’s leadership, arguing the slogan was about moving toward democracy and urging the party not to enforce “dictatorship.” It insisted the alliance had not asked people to adopt any illegal means.

…critics consider this case and its result a litmus test of Hong Kong’s civil rights and judicial independence.

The existence of the alliance and the city’s annual vigil have been considered key characteristics of Hong Kong under China’s “one country, two systems” governing framework in the past, said Eric Lai, a senior fellow with the Georgetown Center for Asian Law.

…He noted the charge of inciting subversion was commonly used in mainland China to criminalize the acts of human rights lawyers, activists and intellectuals, including late Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo.

“We can see to what extent the court in Hong Kong falls into the level of the party-led judiciary in the mainland through the criminal verdict,” Lai said. 

The Straits Times reports…

Friday’s verdict “will be a significant indicator of how far courts are willing and able to interpret broadly drafted national security offences in a way that is compatible with fundamental rights and freedoms”, Urania Chiu, a law lecturer at Oxford Brookes University, told AFP.

…”So far, in applying the national security law, the courts have arguably prioritised ill-defined national security concerns over other common law and constitutional values,” said Chiu.

HK Labour Rights Monitor asks…

…can advocating an end to one-party rule, without calling for any illegal or violent means, amount to incitement to subvert state power? 

Some history weirdness, via CNN… The Tang – 618-907 AD – were partly Mongol and ruled territory from Korea to what is now Afghanistan. A wacky theory that the dynasty never existed has taken off on China’s Internet, and the government is not pleased.  

It all appears to have started when a history influencer named Qiao Yu deployed some baffling astrological data in a video in May, to “prove” the Tang had never existed. 

The outlandish claim has since spread far and wide. Reports later emerged that people were calling up the tourism bureau in Xi’an, the site of the ancient Tang capital, to demand it close down because the dynasty itself had been shown to be a hoax. 

…The Tang dynasty has been criticized in the past by Chinese nationalists as its founding emperor was not from the Han ethnic group that makes up most of China’s people. The basis of Qiao Yu’s claim is that the succeeding Song dynasty actually began far earlier than traditionally accepted, therefore canceling out the Tang. The Song dynasty was of ethnic Han origin. 

Some stats from a contributor here. A quarter of Hong Kong’s population is over 65. It’s amazing things are still ticking over.

Joel Chan at Numberwang goes into detail…

Looking back in time, the population has hovered around 7.5 million since 2018. 

…Readers of this blog might remember me saying there was an outside shot that births in 2026 would be below 30,000 for the first time since the Second World War … the odds of that occurring have increased.

…in the last 7½ years, the number of people in Hong Kong that are aged 61 or older have increased by 642,300, while the number of people in Hong Kong that are 60 or younger have decreased by 576,600. Hong Kong has a demographic crisis on its hands, but– as illustrated in its failed baby bonus scheme– the government is not taking the issue seriously. 

In fairness, no government has found a way to induce citizens to have more children. And Hong Kong is not an outlier: around a quarter to a third of Korean, Japanese and Taiwanese 30-somethings have never dated.

As everywhere in the developed world, more Hong Kong women want their own lives and careers, and don’t see marriage as appealing. People who do marry find the financial and opportunity costs of kids daunting. For many Hong Kong couples, memories of high-pressure schooling convince them that having a dog is less of a nightmare. Everywhere in the world, the next generation are so preoccupied with smartphones that they simply don’t socialize as much as people used to. In Hong Kong specifically, government policy is, in effect, to keep homes unaffordable and/or too small to decently accommodate a family. Even if you want more than one baby, there’s no space for it – keeping land valuations high is all that matters.

Although China has its own demographic problems, it can easily spare half a million or so underemployed younger people to top up Hong Kong’s dwindling supply of under-50s. And what better way to Mainlandize the city? In Japan, meanwhile, they are making immigration harder.

Hong Kong’s population reaches 7.58 million – a 0.3%/19,400 increase year on year. After some 30,000 births and 50,000 deaths, that means a net inflow of around 40,000…

The government spokesman said that various measures to attract talent and import labor continued to bring people from around the world to Hong Kong…

Brian Kern has another angle…

…[his estimates] should be regarded as indicative rather comprehensive—an incomplete portrait and an almost-certain undercounting. But the updated numbers do give a fuller picture of emigration patterns and provide more concrete evidence that a substantial exodus of about five percent of Hong Kong’s 2020 population of 7,481,800 has occurred.

Kern says the main destinations for emigrating Hongkongers from 2020-mid-2026 have been: the UK (234,000); Taiwan (59,000); Canada (54,000); and Australia (33,000). 

Compared to countries like Syria and Venezuela, which have seen immensely higher levels of emigration, five percent may not seem like so very many, but it’s worth emphasizing that about one in twenty people moving away from a well-developed, economically stable society that is not at war or suffering some other catastrophe is almost unheard of.

…That brings the total number who have left Hong Kong with the intention of settling abroad to 384,269—about 5.1 percent of Hong Kong’s population in 2020, when the exodus began. And that’s including only the four countries for which statistics are most readily available. An educated guess is that the overall number by now most surely exceed 400,000.

From 2020 to 2024, there was an average of about 5,625 Hong Kongers per month emigrating. From 2025 to the middle of 2026, the average has been 2,595. That’s a reduction of more than half, a big decrease, but emigration is still occurring at a pace perhaps somewhat faster than expected, especially considering, as we will see below, that there are backlogs in Australia’s and Canada’s processing of applications for residency through Hong Kong-specific immigration programs.

Anecdotal evidence, falls in junior/secondary school enrolment and Census Dept district population figures from the last few years all suggest that much of the 5% are younger people with kids and/or educated/middle class. In other words, an even larger portion of those groups left. Hence the Hong Kong government’s strenuous efforts to attract more immigrants from the Mainland (or ‘around the world’).

A thorough HKFP account of Hong Kong’s clampdown on bookstores, which seems to be expanding into a broader official fear of books imported from Taiwan…

This year alone, staff from four bookstores were arrested by national security police. In March, staff from Book Punch were arrested, and in June, staff from Hunter Bookstore were apprehended.

The arrests also came on the heels of independent bookshops being barred again from the annual Hong Kong Book fair earlier that month.

Since 2022, a litany of new, independent bookshops – which had carved out space in the national security law era – found themselves barred from the annual fair. But Elmtree, which has since also announced its closure, and Luck Win, were unassuming retailers with decades of history. They were atypical targets, not known for attracting government scrutiny.

This time, the arrests have put the close relationship between Hong Kong booksellers and Taiwanese publishers in the spotlight, sparking fresh concerns about the future of the city’s independent bookshops.

The article also mentions tax audits and frequent inspections by various government departments, plus the impact of increased attention on Taiwanese publications on the courier companies that handle the shipments. 

No word on whether direct on-line orders of books by consumers are being intercepted by Customs. Or on whether the authorities might attempt to bar Hong Kong residents from downloading digital versions of ‘bad’ publications. Nor is it currently clear whether or not people can be arrested simply for possessing such material in their homes. 

A dash of weirdness from the Standard…

Hong Kong cryptocurrency tycoon Harry Yeh Chun-tak recently plunged to his death from his mansion in Paraguay, sparking suspicions amid a growing trend of extortions and murders of crypto asset holders. 

A well-known crypto magnate with connections spanning the United States and the Middle East, Yeh was reported to have fallen from the 30th floor of his mansion in Paraguay on August 7, being entirely naked at the time of the fall. 

Investigators later found his apartment door wide open and the interior severely ransacked…

From the HK Uncensored Substack…

A hard-hitting Observer investigation by Danny Vincent reveals the extraordinary lengths Hong Kong’s authorities have gone to keep Jimmy Lai isolated — clearing entire floors of Stanley Prison to cut him off from other inmates.

At 78, Lai can sometimes barely stand on his own, Vincent reports, as he suffers his sixth sweltering summer in solitary confinement. Aug. 8 was the hottest day ever recorded in Hong Kong, hitting a brutal 98 degrees Fahrenheit (36.9 degrees Celsius). Inside Stanley Prison’s heat-soaking concrete, with no air conditioning, Lai endures conditions that would test a man half his age. 

…CFHK Foundation President Mark Clifford told The John Batchelor Show that while Xi Jinping’s persecution of Lai is personal, allowing Hong Kong’s most famous political prisoner to die behind bars would be disastrous for the Chinese Communist Party’s reputation. 

Bitter Winter looks at televised confessions…

This [Stalinist and Maoist] logic has resurfaced in Hong Kong through a new media environment shaped by national security enforcement. The televised series “NS [National Security] Files: Decoded,” produced by the Security Bureau and launched on June 30, presents political cases as morality tales. The first episode opens with Leon Tong, the first dissident arrested under National Security Law. On July 1, 2020, the day the National Security Law came into force, Tong was arrested while riding a motorcycle with a flag protesting the statute. 

A host visits Tong in jail in “NS Files: Decoded,” episode 1, and the dissident states, “I understand the things I did seriously harmed the country,” a line that echoes the tone of earlier Communist confession rituals. The series uses interviews with national security police, dramatic footage of arrests, and a narrative structure that guides viewers toward predetermined conclusions. The accused appear as characters in a story crafted by the authorities. 

…“NS Files: Decoded” is promoted as a search for truth. Posters declare that the truth lies within the files. The presentation suggests discovery, yet the program’s structure offers conclusions before questions can form. Confession becomes the opening act, and the rest of the episodes reinforce the message through interviews and footage selected to support the storyline. Journalism becomes a device within a larger script.

This approach carries consequences for the city. Media outlets that once operated independently now collaborate with authorities on productions that frame dissent as danger. The same establishment that prosecutes journalists and publishers also produces content that defines acceptable speech. The boundaries between reporting and enforcement fade, and the public is invited to watch political cases as serialized drama.

The Stalinist and Maoist confession ritual has returned in a new setting. It no longer takes place in factories or stadiums. It unfolds on television screens, in online videos, and in competitions for schoolchildren. The machinery of remorse has adapted to a modern media economy, and Hong Kong has become one of its stages.

For those who missed it: Stephen Roach’s reply to the responses to his recent ‘Hong Kong is over’ comments…

Beijing’s actions, as condoned by a pro-Beijing Hong Kong government, resulted in a forceful takeover of the city rather than a spontaneous, organic evolution of a dynamic urban center. Would the large outflow of expats have occurred had there not been such a forced development? Would six foreign judges have not resigned? Would bookstores not have been closed? Newspapers not shut down? More so-called dissidents not rounded up?

It’s one thing to love your city for all its history and traditions. It’s another thing to conveniently look the other way and ignore a much bigger force that connects the dots. The questions I raise are not about normal occurrences, nor spontaneous coincidences, for any city. They all happened after Beijing’s takeover. Right before your eyes. Resilience is Hong Kong’s timeworn battle cry. To me, it looks more like forced capitulation.

Foreign Affairs asks if China’s economic imbalances could cause a worldwide crisis…

…the world’s ability to absorb Chinese overcapacity is approaching a breaking point. And if that breaking point comes, the consequence could be a global economic crisis at a time when governments are particularly ill equipped to manage the fallout. 

…The political appetite for accepting the deindustrialization and critical dependencies that come with the flood of Chinese imports is finite and shrinking. As these trends continue, protectionism is likely to rise, cutting off Chinese manufacturers’ market access and thereby short-circuiting Beijing’s strategy, introduced in 2020, of “dual circulation,” which promotes both domestic economic self-sufficiency and continued engagement in international markets. 

…China has a much larger economy and cannot continue on this trajectory without eventually running out of customers. Put simply, Beijing has outgrown its economic model. 

…Firms invest more to produce more to export more at lower or negative margins, subsidized by local governments whose own fiscal health depends on the factories’ staying open. The result is an industrial machine that cannot stop and cannot slow down—but that, owing to the limits of demand, cannot keep going. 

…Over the first two months of 2026, China’s trade surplus grew by more than 20 percent year-over-year. Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has projected that the global economy will grow only 3.1 percent this year. This trend is unsustainable: global demand is not rising fast enough to absorb Chinese exports at this pace, in key sectors or in aggregate. Eventually, the market for new factories in China will run dry, as did the market for property. China’s trade surplus could, in effect, collapse on itself. 

China’s exports are out-competing industries and swamping markets in both developed and developing economies. Beijing’s leadership surely realize how vulnerable this makes the country. If (or when) the rest of the world puts up serious trade barriers, it would cause a major economic shock in China.