In case you missed it, some more background on the Standard/Sing Tao’s coverage of Kaisa’s special tiny apartment on sale by tender…
Would that be the same Mainland group … Kaisa whose executive director and vice chairwoman Kwok Hiu-ting, the daughter of Kwok Ying-shing (Chairman of Sing Tao News) and co-CEO of Sing Tao News, suddenly resigned from the day before the company defaulted on principal and interest payments on a US$400 million note “to devote more time in other business commitments”, three days after her two sisters, Kwok Ho Lai and Kwok Hiu Yan, resigned from the board of a Kaisa Group healthcare subsidiary “to devote more time in their personal commitments”?
(Deathly silence as no-one faints in amazement.)
While many media organizations were not invited to cover the July 1 inauguration in the first place, the authorities have turned down more reporters – even from fairly pro-government outlets – for ‘security reasons’. Because of quarantine/testing requirements, they can’t be replaced.
It could be that the NatSec people decided to get extra paranoid at the last minute about media organizations. Or it could be the SCMP, Ming Pao, HKET, TVB, Reuters and other journalists have been blacklisted as individuals because of previous work they had done. It seems even Ta Kung Pao and Government Information Service personnel were included, though cynics might say that’s for show, so the government can say its decision was ‘balanced’.
Not that the sleuth reporters will miss much breaking news in the Great Hall of the Wanchai tomorrow.
Some Handover 25th Anniversary Long Weekend links…
Bloomberg on growing business uncertainty in Hong Kong…
In private conversations with diplomats, [Carrie] Lam has said she doesn’t have the power to eliminate quarantine even though she personally wants to open up to international travel, according to a person familiar with the situation. In an interview with Bloomberg this month, Lam acknowledged that Hong Kong’s quarantine policy “weakens our position as an international city” without saying when or how it might change.
…At the time the security law was unveiled, Hong Kong officials said it was mainly targeted at a few activists and said the stability it brought would reassure the business community. Yet the pandemic has shown the erosion of autonomy in the wake of the protests has affected almost every aspect of policy making in the city.
Unflattering juxtapositions of photos of Hong Kong when the Queen visited and Hong Kong when Xi visits today: here, here and here.
The latest update from the HK Democracy Council…
Hong Kong now has one of fastest-growing populations of political prisoners in the world, rivaling Belarus, Burma, and Cuba…
An RFA interview with Chris Patten…
The fact that the independence movement has grown in Hong Kong is an indication of how badly China has behaved and how little people actually trust China today. It’s an extraordinary thing that so few people are actually proud of Hong Kong being part of China now. There’s a great sense of Hong Kong citizenship, and there’s a great sense that people are Hong Kongers but only a small number think of themselves as Chinese.
Phrase-Coining of the Week Award goes to George Magnus, commenting on an FT report on superior job opportunities enjoyed in China by graduates in Marxist theory: ‘Nothing to lose but their brains’. The story…
“The purpose of the major is to train thought police to brainwash the entire population,” said Ming Xia, a political-science professor at the City University of New York. Chinese universities offering Marxism degrees inculcate students in the philosophy developed by Karl Marx as interpreted by Xi and his revolutionary idol, Mao Zedong. A curriculum for a three-year masters program in Marxism at a university in central Henan province includes a module on the “principle and methods of thought education” and 18 hours of study of Xi’s speeches on education.
It is a selective interpretation of Marx…
Xi’s government has cracked down on young people who apply Marxist analysis too critically to abuses of labour…
How a Chinese fantasy novelist inserted fictional Russian history into Wikipedia…
Over more than 10 years, the author wrote several million words of fake Russian history, creating 206 articles and contributing to hundreds more. She imagined richly detailed war stories and economic histories, and wove them into real events in language boring enough to fit seamlessly into the encyclopedia…
“Characters that don’t exist in the English-Russian Wiki appear in the Chinese Wiki, and these characters are mixed together with real historical figures so that there’s no telling the real from the fake. Even a lengthy Moscow-Tver war revolves around the non-existent Kashen silver mine.”