Big Lychee, Various Sectors

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.  

Spent yesterday morning getting my first proper physical in a decade at a place in Central. They must do dozens of people every day – a three-hour long conveyor belt of form-filling, examinations and tests, plus some waiting in between. 

First, you’re not allowed to eat or drink anything since the night before because they’ll be taking blood (a surprising amount of it). So they cover your chest with electrodes and make you stroll, then walk, then run uphill on a treadmill while you’re starving. Next thing, you need a full bladder ahead of an – extremely slimy – ultrasound exam. 

There are two ways to check a man for signs of prostate cancer: a blood test or a doctor’s finger. Here you get both. Better safe than sorry.

Couldn’t help noticing that men are laid back about walking around carrying little plastic jars containing their stool and urine samples, while women coyly wrap the receptacles up in layers of tissues and paper bags. 

Good luck getting an appointment with this doctor…

A little weekend reading: Steve Roach compares and contrasts the Chinese and Japanese economies.

Lingua Sinica examines the links between pro-Beijing media outlets attacking the HK Journalists Association last week…

Without evidence, and in remarks that seemed a clear public setup stemming from the Wen Wei Po question [at a press conference on a different subject], Tang issued an unambiguous threat on national security grounds. “Regardless of the name or guise you adopt,” he said, “if you seek to endanger national security, collude with foreign forces or subvert state power, I can assure you that I will nail you, and you will bear the consequences.”

More concerning still was the apparently coordinated media campaign that unfolded before and after Tang’s Friday remarks. Over a period of five days, at least six pro-Beijing outlets in the city piled on with strongly-worded coverage questioning the HKJA’s legitimacy and representativeness.

For what? Its audacity in continuing to exist? And does these outlets’ content really count as journalism?

Desmond Shum tweet on Beijing’s tax clampdown on offshore wealth…

Article 11 states that even someone who has obtained foreign nationality or permanent or long-term residence overseas may still be deemed a Chinese domiciled tax resident if his or her “main economic interests” derive from China.

I suspect Beijing’s immediate target is mainland Chinese wealth owners—including those who have recently relocated to Hong Kong while retaining their businesses, assets and economic interests in mainland China.

Those cases are relatively straightforward.

The difficult question is: where do you draw the line?

And another…

For China’s wealthy, the implications extend well beyond paying more tax. Offshore trusts lose much of their value as asset-protection vehicles. Many families will now be looking to diversify not only their assets, but also their residency, citizenship and long-term wealth structures further away from China before additional restrictions emerge.

It is also difficult to see this as positive for China’s domestic investment environment. Private investment has already been in decline since 2023 as economic growth slows and business confidence deteriorates, reached minus 3.8% in 2025. Policies perceived as retrospective and highly discretionary will likely accelerate that trend.

Capital markets are also likely to feel the effects. Hong Kong’s, and to an extent Singapore’s, offshore wealth-management industry has been built in large part around mainland Chinese clients… 

China faces serious long-term fiscal challenges on the spending side as well. Dragonometry on Beijing’s drive to boost enforcement of social-security payments… 

China’s growth model systematically shifts income away from households and toward producers and the state. As a result, every attempt to patch a symptom without addressing that structure ends up reproducing it. Here is a clean illustration of it. Social security shortfalls are themselves a symptom of an economy that underpays labor relative to what it produces. The fix for that underpayment, as implemented, is to enforce accurate reporting of wages that are already too low, which raises the cost of employing people without raising what they take home. It is, in the plainest terms, private-sector Peter being robbed to pay private-sector Paul. Nothing about the aggregate flow of income between households and the state improves. The accounting gets tidier. The underlying problem does not move.

It would be a mistake to read this as mere incompetence, or a leadership that has failed to notice the contradiction. The more troubling reading is that they have noticed, and are choosing the option that does not require confronting vested interests among employers, local governments and the fiscal authorities who benefit from the current arrangement.

Attendees at a Guangzhou academic symposium in June argued that the Batanes Islands – part of the Philippines – are actually Chinese. China Global South Project on the ‘bizarre claim’…

The most immediate explanation for the surprise claim on the Batanes is that it was a reaction to a May 28 decision by Japan and the Philippines to open formal talks on their maritime boundary, a development that Beijing viewed through the lens of Taiwan and its broader maritime claims.

The Batanes argument also comes at a contentious time for Beijing’s maritime history: it is likely no coincidence that Chinese scholars made their dubious claim less than two weeks before Manila was set to commemorate the 10^th anniversary of the ruling in its favor at the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) on July 12^th.

After all, the PCA invalidated Beijing’s expansive sovereignty claims in the South China Sea under its “nine-dash line,” which encompasses roughly 85 percent of the sea based on historical rights and in contravention to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) that China itself both signed and ratified.

The Court of Appeal allows 11 of the HK47 – convicted of ‘conspiracy to commit subversion’ over the 2020 pan-dem primary elections – to go to the Court of Final Appeal…

The defendants feature some of Hong Kong’s most prominent pro-democracy activists, namely Clarisse Yeung, Helena Wong, Owen Chow, Winnie Yu, Gwyneth Ho, Lam Cheuk-ting, Gordon Ng, Cheng Tat-hung, Kalvin Ho, Raymond Chan, and Leung Kwok-hung. 

What will happen? Two possible hints… The CFA has already upheld the law making it illegal to urge others to boycott elections, rejecting the notion that the law is a straightforward violation of freedom of expression. And under the NatSec Law, Beijing – through a NPC Standing Committee ‘interpretation’ – can override court decisions. 

Meanwhile, also from HKFP, the HK Bar Association…

…has asked a court to overturn its own disciplinary board’s decision clearing pro-democracy figure Margaret Ng of misconduct linked to her 2019 [unauthorized assembly] protest conviction. 

The legal challenge comes after the Barristers Disciplinary Tribunal decided in June that the complaint against Ng was unsubstantiated.

The complaint was linked to Ng’s conviction five years ago for taking part in an unauthorised assembly during the protests and unrest in 2019. She was cleared in 2023 of organising the demonstration.

Note the words “its own”. The Barristers Disciplinary Tribunal is part of the Bar Association. This is sort of like publicly slapping yourself on the face to show contrition. Maybe if the court fails to satisfy, the Bar Association will sue itself.

Stupidest AI rendition of Hong Kong I’ve seen for at least two days: landmark towers in the wrong places; a bay where there is no bay; a cruise liner where there are no cruise liners; a distant vast mountain range with ski resorts where there is no etc etc. Cobbled together to promote a ‘Wiki Finance Expo’, which sounds like it must be some sort of crypto, Web3, blockchain and AI bullshit-fest for ‘leaders, innovators and visionaries’. And indeed it is. (Speakers include Chivy Chan, a chief compliance officer.)

Lingnan University Students Union – founded in 1967 – decides to dissolve. The only student unions still active are at City U and HKUST, plus a couple of Chinese U’s colleges. 

One of the few remaining prominent and critical civil-society bodies that stubbornly refuses to go away is the HK Journalists Association. But the authorities are doubling down on the pressure, with the Security Secretary blasting the Association’s current leadership election…

Secretary for Security Chris Tang said on Friday that the Hong Kong Journalists Association (HKJA) had not publicised its list of candidates who are running in the election at Saturday’s AGM. 

He said it had been reported that all of the candidates were from foreign media outlets, “so-called free media,” or online outlets. 

“There’s not a single person from a mainstream Hong Kong outlet,” Tang said in Cantonese. “How can it be called the [Hong Kong] Journalists Association?”

“Not only is the HKJA hiding its candidate list, it also will not publicise its list of candidates after they are elected. With black-box operations like this, how can there be any credibility at all?” he added.

The HKJA says it keeps candidates’ names internal for fear that individuals will face harassment. But why should the Security Secretary – responsible for police, fire, prisons, immigration and customs services – be so concerned about it? (And are government officials in a position to criticize the credibility of elections now Hong Kong has barred all but approved ‘patriots’ from district and legislative bodies?)

After several years, the government gives up trying to find something incriminating about Next Digital, which a court ordered shut down in late 2021. CFHK notes…

Even the Hong Kong regime has finally admitted the Kafka-esque futility of investigating a company that no longer exists while its founder [Jimmy Lai] and senior executives sit behind bars…

…Mark Clifford, CFHK Foundation president and one of those questioned during the probe, summed it. up: “This entire exercise was an expensive, taxpayer-funded harassment operation. [The regime] tried to blame directors for the company’s shutdown and wouldn’t even look at government’s freezing of our bank accounts.”

The Hang Seng Index suffers a modest plunge as insurers, banks and property developers worry that Beijing’s new drive to tax decades of offshore income will dissuade wealthy Mainlanders from parking their money in Hong Kong. Some observers will wonder why China’s increasingly cash-strapped authorities took so long to sort out the loopholes that allow Hong Kong (and other jurisdictions) to benefit from Mainlanders dodging taxes and capital controls. The city’s officials, who love to push family offices, insurance products, etc, put a brave face on it. (And they have pro-democracy shops to deal with.)

In Asia Times, the boss of a financial advisory company points out that many countries will want to widen their tax nets in the coming years. The twist is that Beijing’s new measures are retroactive…

Wealthy families are being asked to settle gains from windows chosen with little public rationale, with their accounts based in China frozen until they pay. It’s the act of a government working backward from how much money it needs toward whoever still happens to have some.

What wealthy families fear in a moment like this is rarely the tax rate itself. Rates are negotiable and can be planned around years in advance. What can’t be planned around is a government reserving the right to rewrite the deal after the fact, which is why the response to that kind of risk is exit over negotiation.

An HKFP op-ed looks at overseas scholarships – the latest national-security threat to face Hong Kong. The author recalls his own experience of a study trip to Germany in 1969… 

The thing which most impressed the English contingent was the slot machine in the entrance hall of our castle, which dispensed cans of beer. As the sale of booze in England was still surrounded by restrictions on places, times and ages, this was a pleasant surprise, and the machine did a lot of business.  

That wasn’t the half of it. Truly enterprising British exchange students in Germany many decades ago discovered soon upon arrival that the local beer-vending machines accepted UK 5p (or shilling) coins as Deutschemarks, which were worth around five times as much. Underage drinkers got their booze – and at 20% of the actual price.

Some weekend reading and viewing…

A Taipei Times editorial on Beijing’s withdrawal of The Belief (澎湖海戰), a movie about the Qing Dynasty’s early moves to take control of Taiwan… 

In the past few months, there has been a noticeable increase among the Chinese public of interest in, and affiliation with, the Ming Dynasty, the last indigenous Han Chinese dynasty before the 1911 revolution. The sentiment, branded the “1644 historical perspective” (1644史觀), has become tied up with a trend called “Mourning the Ming” (悼明風). Both ideas take a nostalgic look at the supposed economic prosperity during the Ming Dynasty and place the blame for the decline in China’s fortunes at the feet of the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which began in 1644.

The problem for the CCP is that it wanted a propaganda vehicle for advancing the idea of the historical inevitability of the defeat of “Taiwanese separatists”: What it got was public scrutiny of the historical facts.

Too Simple, Sometimes Naive (a Substack blog – and of course a Jiang Zemin quote about Hong Kong reporters) looks at the fate of one Edward Kuperman, an American ‘influencer’ churning out pro-China videos on the payroll of a Gansu state media operation… 

… former Global Times Editor, and infamous nationalist commentator, Hu Xijin felt compelled to weigh in.

‘Some netizens accuse Kuperman of being a spy… but they are just trying to sabotage his lucrative job‘, said Hu on Weibo, dismissing the rumours, but also repeating them.

He added: “In the media Lao Hu used to work, foreigners never received such a salary.” That’s true. Global Times are notorious in Beijing circles for their low salaries — perhaps explaining the tabloid’s often irritable tone.

…media centres are part-local state media, part-tourist boards, who often utilise foreign faces for international exposure, to mixed success. Ever wonder why cities like Chongqing or Zibo keep going viral? Or why YouTubers keep flocking to the same places in China? 

For those interested in the debate over whether Hong Kong cinema’s glory days are over, or who like seeing authentic stunts and effects rather than CGI/AI, or are just into mindless gore – if you don’t mind seeing the ending – the totally nuts final scene of 1992 Hong Kong movie Angel Terminators.

We don’t hear much about the Legislative Council these days. Although there are 90 of them, the all-patriots members are mostly low-profile. There’s the one who drove her car the wrong way down a street. And another who did something similar. Starry Lee is the chamber’s president? I guess I’d already heard – but it didn’t stick in my mind.

HKFP reports that the legislators are miffed after Ming Pao checked to see how much they spoke up during Council business…

The newspaper revealed last week that at least 17 lawmakers had never spoken at some committee meetings, with five having no speaking record for meetings of more than one committee.

The five include the New People’s Party’s Adrian Ho and Dominic Lee, and social welfare lawmaker Grace Chan.

Besides attending weekly, LegCo-wide general meetings on Wednesdays, all lawmakers are also members of smaller topic-based committees such as transport, education or security, which also hold regular meetings.

In response to Ming Pao’s findings, many of the lawmakers said that they did not want to repeat what had already been said by other legislators.

Who can argue with that? When all the members are picked to support whatever the executive branch says or does, you can’t have originality, alternative views or actual debate. What’s the point of 89 people taking it in turn to stand up and recite “what he said”? 

Former lawmaker Doreen Kong criticizes current members’ silence during a recent case of a sports coach allegedly abusing students…

“…regarding how society views the issue of the allegations … why won’t our representatives in the education and welfare sectors on the Legislative Council speak up in fairness to the students and athletes?” Kong asked.

She was one of the lawmakers who chose to stand down last year. Surely she realizes that, in an opposition-free chamber, no-one will express a view unless they know it agrees with the executive branch’s.

Actually, one did mention the issue. Junius Ho said…

“I love my father for teaching me, and I love my mother even more for beating me,” Ho said, suggesting an exemption for physical punishment under Hong Kong law. “If they didn’t beat me growing up, how would I have become [House Committee] deputy chair?”

I take back what I said about alternative views.

A commenter on Twitter…

The Legislative Council has lost all public credibility … They fail to scrutinize and check the government’s errors, denounce negligent officials, or align with the people’s will … and serve merely as a rubber stamp. We might as well do without it.

You certainly wonder why there are 90 of them.

From Flying Chopstick on Substack, a long, academic-type piece, partly critiquing a starry-eyed guy called Perez who thinks China has invented a space-age new form of governance, but mainly examining how Hong Kong fits into China’s system of government, with reference to last year’s Tai Po fire….

…After the Wang Fuk Court fire, a student who organized a petition for an independent inquiry was detained by national security police and later expelled from university. Other people were charged over comments about the fire, the inquiry committee declined to seek statutory powers, and the national-security office reportedly summoned foreign outlets and accused their coverage of distortion.

Hong Kong still formally protects speech, publication, assembly, and demonstration under Article 27 of the Basic Law, the constitutional document that came into force at the 1997 handover. In practice, the limits are learned through examples: an arrest, an expulsion, a prosecution, a lost job, a frightened institution. A writer learns the boundary by watching someone else cross it.

That is a poor environment for the criticism a government needs after a disaster. It is also an unusually clear environment for understanding a political system’s priorities. The central question here is whether China’s governing model stays responsive to reality when reality contradicts the Party’s preferred account of itself. Wang Fuk Court offers a grim answer.

What follows is a detailed explanation of…

…what the city lost when it dismantled the institutions that made official negligence expensive.

And the dismantling could not be selective. A councillor making a fuss about fire nets was not threatening Party rule, and neither was a toothless opposition that could not choose the Chief Executive or govern the city. The problem was precisely that it kept raising a fuss. It talked back. It made ministers answer questions they did not want asked, put evasions into the public record, and declined the performance of deference Beijing expects before official authority. The councillor making a fuss about fire nets was attached to the layer Beijing feared, and both came out together. What replaced the ecosystem was not silence in an empty space. It was a positive prohibition. Under the National Security Law and the sedition provisions, public criticism of the government and the police now carries legal risk, civil servants and district councillors swear loyalty oaths, and the student who asked for [an empowered] inquiry was expelled…

…Wang Fuk Court shows the limit of a system that constrained the public mechanisms most able to expose an institutional failure, then channeled public horror toward a safer story about [bamboo] scaffolding. 

(Perez’s piece is here, should you want it.)

HKFP reports criticism of the Hong Kong government’s clampdown on bookstores from a slightly unexpected source: a small conservative Christian group known mainly for its anti-gay views…

The Society for Truth and Light’s secretary general Choi Chi-sum said in a Friday statement that the bottom line of Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” constitutional framework “is the freedom of speech.” 

“Citizens should not have to live in fear simply for expressing personal opinions or possessing publications that haven’t been ruled illegal by the courts,” he wrote in Chinese. 

…With most of the city’s outspoken civil society groups having disbanded in the wake of the Beijing-imposed national security law in 2020, the Christian group’s statement is a rare public rebuke of the government’s crackdown on independent bookstores. 

While authorities say police discovered books at the stores that contained content that could provoke hatred against the government, no official list of banned books has been made public. Secretary for Security Chris Tang has said authorities would not release such a list.

Choi said not publishing such a list is an “abuse of power and an act that undermines the spirit of the rule of law.”

Businesses should have legal frameworks to rely on, he added, “rather than having the legality of actions and speech decided solely by the subjective views of individual officials or law enforcement officers.”

Just visited a bookstore that the NatSec police haven’t raided yet – the Japanese books and magazines section at Sogo. Among possible seditious threats on the shelves: a lavishly illustrated tome on ideas for presenting toast; ditto for hotdogs; and Detective Bottom…

A new outlet for those with patriotic urges: CY Leung complains about property developers naming their residential projects in English only…

…the former chief executive argued that such a trend attempts to appear as high-end, criticizing that developments targeting Chinese buyers but lack a Chinese name are unacceptable. 

Surely, the names are so stupid they can’t even be translated. Or, they’re in French or Italian. Recent examples include La Mirabelle, Twin Victoria, Cloudview, Le Mont, The Pavilla Forest, Fleur Pavilia, Park Silicon, Grandview Oceania, Lime Spark, Mount Broadcast and the irresistible-sounding Nob Hill. And let’s not forget The Belchers.