Big Lychee, Various Sectors

Police staked out a bathroom in order to catch an autistic 18/19-year-old for scrawling ‘seditious words’ on the wall. The guy worked part-time as a clerk for the Vanuatu consulate…

Magistrate Victor So handed down judgement on Wednesday morning at West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court, Sing Tao Daily reported.

The magistrate did not accept a psychiatric report submitted earlier by the defence, which stated that the defendant showed symptoms of autism and that stress caused by poor examination results triggered his dissociative disorder.

Leung [Kai-lok] was arrested in July last year by national security police. He was accused of leaving seditious messages on the wall of a male bathroom inside China Hong Kong City in Tsim Sha Tsui on three occasions between July 17 and 21 when he worked as a part-time clerk at the Consulate of Vanuatu.

The seditious messages included “Bomb Li Ka-chiu to death” in Chinese, in an apparent reference to the city’s leader John Lee. He also scrawled the Chinese characters for “Gwong Si” – an abbreviated version of the 2019 protest slogan “Liberate Hong Kong, the Revolution of Our Times.” Courts have ruled the phrase carries seditious intent.

SCMP reports…

A 19-year-old in Hong Kong has been convicted of sedition for writing anti-government graffiti in a commercial building toilet, violating the city’s domestic national security law.

West Kowloon Court on Wednesday rejected a defence psychiatrist’s opinion that a congenital mental disorder prevented Leung Kai-lok from understanding the offensive words he used against the government and police.

Leung stood trial earlier this year before a magistrate hand-picked by the city leader to oversee national security proceedings.

How many man-hours did the police spend valiantly ‘staking out’ the bathroom? Do cops feel they have done a good job after catching an autistic teenager this way? Is graffiti just vandalism or does it threaten the national security of the PRC? And who’d have thought Vanuatu had a consulate here?

From China Unofficial Archives, an introduction to the Hong Kong Research Database at Taiwan’s Academia Sinica – with an emphasis on their collection of T-shirts…

The words on the T-shirt, “Hello, Please Step Down,” seem quite mild. But in fact, this was borrowed from a political slogan from 1984—during China’s National Day military parade in 1984, a large banner reading “Hello, Xiaoping” appeared on the streets of Beijing, expressing the public’s support for Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping. By 1989, the meaning of this phrase was completely turned upside down. “Hello, Please Step Down” conveyed another layer of meaning: Deng Xiaoping had stayed “for too long,” and the Chinese people now wanted him to hand over power and step down from the political stage.

Notably, the top of the T-shirt reads “Giordano.” Giordano was one of Hong Kong’s most famous casual wear brands at the time, and the company’s founder was Jimmy Lai. Jimmy Lai later founded Apple Daily, making it one of Hong Kong’s most influential pro-democracy newspapers. In 1989, Jimmy Lai was just a businessman, not yet a media tycoon. The Tiananmen movement deeply moved him, and he decided to publicly take a stand and support the student movement. His story also reflects the immense political changes that Hong Kong has experienced since then.

The Wire China on Taiwan’s economic transformation in the last 10 years…

 [Taiwan] exported $116.1 billion in goods and services to the U.S. in the first five months of this year, according to U.S. government data. That compares with $105.5 billion from China, home to 1.4 billion people and the world’s second-largest economy. (The China figure includes Hong Kong.) The last time this happened was 1992, when China’s economy was only about twice the size of Taiwan’s. Now it is 21 times bigger.

The U.S. has also displaced China as Taiwan’s top trading partner, another development that would have been unimaginable not long ago. In 2016, Taiwan-U.S. trade totaled $85 billion, less than half of the $180 billion in Taiwan-China trade that year.

Foreign Affairs on how China depends upon the Western world it seeks to displace…

If Europe and the United States decisively reassert control over their external accounts, China would face a fundamental constraint: the external markets for its excess production would be closed off. Other advanced economies are unlikely to offer alternative markets, while most developing countries lack the financial capacity to sustain the deficits required. Under such conditions, China would sooner or later be forced to reconfigure its economic model at home.

In principle, this could produce the most constructive outcome for all sides. A successful reorientation of China’s growth model would require a substantial transfer of income toward Chinese households, boosting consumption, reducing domestic inequalities, and making growth less dependent on exports and industrial investment. These redistributive policies would ensure that a larger share of the gains from economic growth accrues to ordinary households rather than to businesses, local governments, and state-favored sectors. Paradoxically, to safeguard the long-term well-being of its people, China may have to become more socialist again: this time, not by socializing production but by socializing prosperity.

Such a shift would also ease tensions with the United States and Europe, reduce global imbalances, and weaken the logic of Beijing’s beggar-thy-neighbor economic nationalism. In practice, however, changing China’s economic model would be an immense undertaking. Moreover, in order to raise household income significantly as a share of GDP, China’s leaders would need to make a corresponding reduction in the resources currently controlled by businesses and local governments, a shift that would be economically and politically costly for Beijing.

If Beijing’s immediate problem is how to persuade the world to continue absorbing its excesses, its longer-term challenge is finding a path to prosperity that no longer depends on them. If the immediate question for the United States and Europe is how to regain control over their external balances and rebuild their productive economies, their own longer-term task is figuring out how to engage China in redefining its rise in a manner that is more compatible with a sustainable international order.

Of all the national security threats Hong Kong has faced in recent years – teenagers, housewives, booksellers, etc – this one must be the most pitiful…

A Hong Kong court has sentenced a man with an intellectual disability to two years and four months in prison for inciting subversion, promoting a pro-Taiwan party and disseminating anti-Communist Party messages, with the judge noting that his condition had affected his moral judgment.

District Court Judge Stanley Chan Kwong-chi on Monday sentenced Chan Ho-hin, a 23-year-old waiter, who had earlier pleaded guilty to publishing 118 subversive messages on his social media accounts between June 27, 2024, and April 24, 2025.

The defendant repeatedly posted messages suggesting the Taiwanese government could “liberate” Hong Kong if it were to regain power in mainland China.

…Though he denied being a party member, evidence showed that the defendant had frequent exchanges with a person claiming to be Cheng Kai-li, the [China Pro-Taiwan Anti-Communist Restoration] party’s secretary general.

The defendant said he supported the party’s manifesto and the unification of China under Taiwan’s government.

One absurdity on top of another (even disregarding the ‘…with a person claiming to be…’ stuff). This supposed party has Chiang Kai-shek-era KMT ideology – seeing the Republic of China as the true China (temporarily ensconced on the island of Taiwan) and the PRC as an illegitimate entity to be displaced one day. The group rejects the modern-day KMT on the grounds that it has become pro-CCP.

This is not a ‘pro-Taiwan’ position. Most Taiwanese people have no wish to pretend to ‘own’ (or be a part of) China. Where Hong Kong is concerned, if the group adheres to traditional KMT thinking, it would see the city simply as a rightful part of China (along with, among other former Qing domains, Mongolia).

Only nerds can get their heads around the ROC/KMT/modern-Taiwan history, dynamics and definitions. The media (including the SCMP) invariably can’t. With all respect, it is unlikely that a mentally disabled waiter has a clue about it. It is equally unlikely that he understands the concept of ‘inciting subversion’. Do any of us?

Detained-bookseller artwork here.

I visited Hunter Bookstore over the weekend. Quite crowded, with a slight ‘closing down sale” vibe – though the store is issuing customer-loyalty cards as if it expects to be around for the long term. 

As well as some local volumes, a lot of the stock comprises Taiwan-published translations of international works, including a nice selection of Japanese manga, such as the magnificent Spy Family and, of course, Hunter X Hunter. Among the possibly subversive titles on sale: several by Hannah Arendt; The Dalai Lama’s Cat; one on the collapse of the workers’ paradises that are ant and bee colonies; and Chili & Cheese: Food and Society in Bhutan – perhaps too spicy for Hong Kong.

For fans of irony: according to reports, one of the books that allegedly endanger national security is Let Only Red Flowers Bloom by Emily Feng. (English edition published by hotbed of subversion Penguin.)

From the Wall Street Journal…

Hong Kong was once home to one of Asia’s most freewheeling book markets, with shops selling everything from exposes of the 1989 Tiananmen crackdown to critiques of the deadly famine precipitated by the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s.

But in the years since Beijing began tightening its grip on the city, Chinese authorities have targeted publishers and bookshops as part of its effort to stamp out dissent.

The latest incident came this week, when Hong Kong police raided two independent bookstores for carrying what authorities branded as seditious books.

One of the bookshops, Have a Nice Stay, which once carried books on protest movements in Hong Kong and mainland China as well as tomes by Chinese dissidents, also said this week that it would shut. It was impossible to operate given the lack of a lack of clarity on what books might violate the law, it said, noting security officials wouldn’t specify which books are illegal.

…A handful of small bookshops have persisted despite the crackdown, keeping out of sight books on more sensitive topics like China’s history and leadership, particularly those published overseas. The authorities have accused those shops of promoting “soft resistance” to the government, arresting staff in March and June for allegedly carrying seditious works. Pro-Beijing media had previously accused the shops of carrying a biography of Lai and works by dissident cartoonist Zunzi it said vilified the government and extolled the 2019 protests.

On Monday the state-controlled Wen Wei Po newspaper accused a handful of small booksellers of carrying works that “smeared the country and the Communist Party,” including works by a former Apple Daily columnist and another by the former head of the Hong Kong Journalists Association. 

(Interesting how much CCP papers Wen Wei Po and Ta Kung Pao seem to guide the NatSec Police in these matters. Also that Zunzi, who worked for Ming Pao up until three years ago when officials complained his satirical cartoons were ‘inaccurate’, is now classed as a dissident.)

NYT…

Earlier this month, the Hong Kong government barred the Elmbook and Luckwin bookstores from exhibiting at the Hong Kong Book Fair, Yalkun Uluyol, a China researcher for Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

Last month, the authorities arrested two employees at Hunter Bookstore on suspicion of “sedition.” In March, the police arrested four employees at Book Punch under the same allegations. Mr. Uluyol said that both bookstores were said to have carried a biography of Jimmy Lai, a jailed pro-democracy media tycoon…

Hong Kong authorities have also launched tax audits on at least six independent bookstores since late 2023, according to Human Rights Watch. The scrutiny is part of what experts said is an attempt to silence dissent since antigovernment protests engulfed Hong Kong in 2019.

“Independent bookstores are among the few remaining spaces where people can encounter ideas, build social ties and sustain an intellectual public,” said Victoria Hui, an associate professor specializing in Chinese politics at the University of Notre Dame. “So targeting both an established bookseller and one founded by journalists displaced by the media crackdown fits a broader pattern of dismantling Hong Kong’s civil society.”

The Washington Post…

“The moves against bookstores [are] part of an ongoing struggle for the hearts and minds of young people in Hong Kong,” said Jeffrey Wasserstrom, a historian of modern China at the University of California at Irvine. Pro-democracy movements in the city have been driven by young protesters, Wasserstrom said.

From NBC (which also uses the HKFP pic)…

Amnesty International’s Asia deputy regional director Sarah Brooks said the use of “sedition” offenses to target bookstores demonstrated how the city’s national security framework “is being weaponized to silence dissenting voices and eradicate spaces for free thought.”

“This year’s escalating attacks on Hong Kong’s independent bookstores hammer home the chilling reality of what the city has become: a place where you can be criminalized simply for what’s on your bookshelf,” she said.

Authorities say the national security laws are crucial for the city’s stability. Hong Kong’s Secretary for Security Chris Tang has said the government will not set up a list of banned books, saying it would be pointless to implement in reality.

AP’s report suggests that the authorities want to leave it unclear which books threaten national security…

“If you are a bookseller, you have the responsibility to make sure the books you sell won’t endanger national security,” he said. “It’s equal to, for example, when you are selling food, you need to ensure the food won’t cause a stomach ache and is not either poison or illegal.”

Asked if authorities would make a list of banned books, Tang said that would not be conducive to effective law enforcement targeting titles that “intend to harm the country.”

“We will not let criminals off the hook like this,” he said.

So informing people what is or isn’t illegal is ‘letting criminals off the hook’?

From Focus Taiwan…

President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) on Thursday expressed solidarity with independent bookstore owners and urged the Hong Kong government to respect diverse views after authorities raided two bookstores and arrested five people a day earlier.

“Every independent bookstore is an important bastion for ideas,” Lai wrote in a social media post.

…Referring to Taiwan’s martial law era, when publications were censored and freedom of expression was suppressed, Lai said Taiwan understood that freedom and democracy had not come easily.

“We would like to express our concern and respect to all bookstore staff and cultural workers who stand their ground in adversity. Words and ideas should not be shackled by political pressure,” Lai wrote.

Bookstores Have a Nice Stay and Greenfield are raided by NatSec police…

In a statement published on Wednesday night, the government said the five people were suspected of “doing with a seditious intention an act or acts that had a seditious intention,” an offence under Article 23, the city’s homegrown security law. 

…Police investigation found that the five had displayed and sold items carrying seditious intent. Their contents could stir hatred for the Hong Kong government, the Judiciary and law enforcement bodies, the statement read.

Police also seized books that had seditious intention. The five have been detained for investigation.

The HKFP pic of macho cops detaining a bespectacled young woman deserves a photo-journalism award. Her T-shirt says ‘I work at a book shop’. 

Last month, Hunter bookstore got the same treatment. Presumably, if these cases go to trial, we will find out what sort of books are capable of threatening the security of the nation. I guess a volume explaining how to make a nuclear bomb in your kitchen might fit the definition.

BBC story. AP.

RTHK reports…

The annual [Hong Kong Book Fair] opened on Wednesday, with a focus on world literature and culture. 

…Bookworm Hailey Li, a student, said she enjoyed the variety of literature on display at this year’s fair, themed “Reading the World: Cultural Legacy, Joyful Journeys”.

“I feel like this year’s book fair is more diverse. It shows different cultural aspects, for example, we have booths focused on Hong Kong culture,” she said. 

At what point do the authorities decide Hong Kong has sufficient NatSec legislation? It seems there isn’t one…

The vice president of the Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macao Studies said on Tuesday that Hong Kong should keep improving its national security laws.

Wang Zhenmin, a law professor at Tsinghua University, described the process of improving national security legislation as a long and gradual one – saying it is always a work in progress and never truly complete. 

…“In recent years, the national security risks and challenges we face are rising significantly, especially with external efforts to suppress the country,” Wang said.

“We must respond to changes in the external security environment and the practical needs of safeguarding national security, and further improve relevant legislation, arming and protecting ourselves with the law.” 

Brian Kern on an American writer being refused a visa to visit Hong Kong…

Blumberg-Kason’s case is … not unique. What is significant about it is the insight it provides into the extent to which the Immigration Department screened her politically. Blumberg-Kason was somewhat surprised by the attention her visa application received, given that neither her books nor other literary activities have been especially “politically sensitive.” It is not hard to imagine that if the Immigration Department engages in such investigative measures in the case of the visa application of an American writer wishing to visit Hong Kong for a short period, it is making similar efforts in other cases. 

…what is most striking is that the agency was so open about its screening, revealing it to the applicant and seeking a response. In other cases of which I’m aware, the people seeking to enter Hong Kong or applying for a work visa simply got rejected with no explanation at all. 

Does the Immigration Dept have the resources for such intensive political background checks into visa applicants? Or are they outsourcing the job to amply staffed NatSec agencies?

Though it seems working in those agencies can be quite stressful…

A Hong Kong police officer has been sentenced to nearly two years in jail for filming upskirt footage of a woman and attempting to grab a colleague’s handgun to kill himself after his arrest last year.

…Ko, a married father of two with 15 years of service, had been under immense pressure since joining the force’s national security department, the court heard.

And another bookstore decides to close its doors…

Independent bookstore Have a Nice Stay has announced its closure, citing financial difficulties and “unclear red lines” that make it hard to determine which titles can legally be circulated in Hong Kong. 

…Have a Nice Stay’s post stated that the owners “cannot possibly read every single book,” let alone determine which ones are ‘problematic.’”

Authorities have declined to publicise a list of banned books.

Global Times on a recent academic gathering at which ‘experts’ said that China has sovereignty over the Batanes Islands – Philippine territory south of Taiwan.

A Taipei Times op-ed anticipates that Beijing might start to claim the islands…

The symposium offered the usual comical PRC faux history inventions. “Ju Hailong, Dean of the School of International Studies at Jinan University, noted that the [Batanes] were under the jurisdiction of Taiwan Prefecture during the Ming and Qing dynasties,” said a PRC media report…

…Many of us have worried, based on the PRC’s attempts to create a link between Taiwan’s Indigenous people and Fujian province, that eventually it would act as if all Austronesian peoples were “Chinese” in origin. Sure enough, one of the symposium “scholars” observed that the “Ivatan residents on the [Batanes] share linguistic and cultural ties with the Tao people of Lanyu [Orchid Island, off southeast Taiwan], with their cultural heritage originating from China.” Ironically, the Tao appear to have migrated up from the Philippines.

…Both the claim to the Batanes and the expanded claim to the Babuyan Islands show a key PRC behavior: claims to one territory, in this case Taiwan, lead inevitably to claims to nearby territories. Eventually the PRC will begin manufacturing claims to the Japanese islands to the east of Taiwan. This has also been the case with the PRC’s claims in the Himalayas. 

This follows similar Chinese academic discussion about Okinawa. From ASPI Strategist…

In this increasingly sophisticated narrative, the modern Japanese prefecture of Okinawa is frequently substituted with ‘Ryukyu’, the historical archipelago kingdom that included the present-day island of Okinawa. This terminology serves to decouple the islands’ identity from the Japanese state, which is cast in Chinese historical discourse as a perennial aggressor. By presenting the Ryukyus as a dual victim of Japanese militarism and US imperialism, these narratives align the Okinawan experience with China’s own century of humiliation. Ryukyu is thus depicted as a former Chinese tributary, forcibly absorbed by Japan, devastated in World War II, and later returned to Tokyo through a United States-led arrangement portrayed as illegitimate. 

The author of the latter article believes that these unofficial but high-profile hints of territorial claims are primarily a way to raise diplomatic pressure rather than lay the ground for possible future attempts at annexation. 

What would the UK’s Count Binface do if he were in Hong Kong? OK, he would possibly be in prison for subverting state power, inciting hatred of the government, or colluding with foreign powers (he’s from another planet, after all). But that aside, what would he make of my local streetside waste receptacle situation?

The pic shows my neighbourhood green bin on a good day: bits of crap balanced precariously on other bits of crap. Usually, it’s worse: boxes on either side overflow with similar pyramids of refuse. 

It wasn’t always like this. There used to be an orange bin across the road, which was emptied daily. Then the Orange Bin (‘Food and Environmental Hygiene’) Dept took it away, leaving the one in the sitting-out area (run by the Green Bin or ‘Leisure and Cultural Services’ Dept) to take the strain.

The Orange Bin Dept removed many bins around Hong Kong as part of preparations for their exciting Municipal Solid Waste Charging initiative, under which households and businesses would pay for special pre-paid garbage bags. After numerous false starts, and expenditure of several hundred million bucks, the idea was abandoned because highly paid officials couldn’t work out how to convince people to accept it. (Japan, Taiwan and South Korea have used such a system for years. It’s almost as if having democratically elected municipal governments leads to better public input into policy-making and gives leaders a mandate to get things done.)

The Orange Bin Dept never reinstalled the bins it removed, and the Green Bin Dept hasn’t increased the frequency of its receptacle-emptying – much to the delight of the local pigeons.

On a brighter note: Orange Bin Dept boss Tse Chin-wan recently won Sing Tao‘s Leader of the Year award, in the Community/Public Affairs/Environment & Conservation (of pigeons?) category.

HKFP op-ed on the case of Ami Chan – found with laser pointers and spray paint at the age of 15 in 2019, and arrested now, in 2026…

I express no opinion about Ms Chan’s guilt or innocence, on which the magistrate is now pondering. I do believe that having fallen so far below the standards expected of prosecutions in cases involving children, the Department of Justice should not have brought this case at all. 

The department’s guidelines for prosecutors (echoing numerous human rights instruments, including our local one) say that defendants are entitled to a trial within a reasonable time. What the department’s denizens seem to have trouble getting their heads round is that this may vary with the age of the accused.

Pro-Beijing forces established significant influence at grass-roots level in Macau back in the 1960s, so the city never had a civil society and political activism on Hong Kong’s scale. But there were some pan-dems and workers’ rights groups. No more. From AP via HKFP…

In July 2025, [teacher and former pro-democracy New Macau Association] lawmaker Au Kam San became the first person to be arrested under Macau’s national security law, with authorities alleging he had ties to foreign groups endangering China. 

There has since been a lack of public information regarding the case.

On Thursday, a Macau court said in a statement that a judge determined on July 2 that Au was the “principal offender” and had committed crimes of “subversion of state power”.

Au was also suspected of “establishing links with organisations, groups or individuals outside Macau… to commit acts endangering national security” and “breach of confidentiality”, the court said.

…The Chinese casino hub expanded the scope of national security laws in May 2023, which officials said was meant to step up prevention of foreign interference.

In March a new bill was passed to allow Macau’s judges to decide whether national security cases should be heard in camera and require defence lawyers to obtain clearances before appearing in such cases.

NPR’s All Things Considered – it’s still going – looks at Hong Kong’s ‘sound of silence’…

VINCENT: …On July 1, NPR saw plainclothes men following W from a gathering, across several stops on the subway and into a busy shopping district where small groups of activists gathered to quietly mark the anniversary of the handover. W says on days like this, she feels she’s under surveillance. Hong Kong police told NPR that they take action in accordance with the law and made appropriate deployments due to the threat of public safety, public order and national security.

Do you know where the red lines are?

W: I don’t know. Yeah, because some people are still saying things that’s against the government on Facebook, but they’re – nothing happened to them. But some only have less than 100 followers in Facebook, and they got jailed. No, I don’t know the red line.

…VINCENT: Across town, we meet C. He is retired but also a longtime activist. Like W, he asks not to be named for fear of reprisal.

C: It’s not just a law. It’s like a – the weapon. They weaponized it. I think it’s more like to clamp down the political opponents. They tried to erase – not only rewrite, erase the history like nothing happened before.

Still – Hong Kong consolidates its role as Asia’s independent-bookstore-closure hub…

Elmbook, an independent bookshop that opened in 1997, has announced it will shutter its physical store in Mong Kok after being banned from the Hong Kong Book Fair. 

…The announcement came a day after local media reported that Elmbook and another independent bookstore, Luck Win Bookshop, were banned from participating in the Hong Kong Book Fair, which is scheduled to run from July 15 to 21.

InMedia reported that the two bookstores had imported many books from Taiwan for the book fair, but they were suddenly notified of the ban in late June.