Monthly Archives: November 2013

From the Wall Street Journal… “China’s probably calculating that [establishing an ‘air defence identification zone’ in the East China Sea] is incrementally making other countries accustomed to accepting its authority in international air space,” said Rory Medcalf, an expert on … Continue reading →

Hong Kong wakes to find on its doorstep steaming piles of ordure left over from the era of ex-Chief Executive Donald Tsang. The least offensive bit of ooze comes in the form of Timothy Tong, former head of the Independent Commission … Continue reading →

The US sends a couple of B-52s through China’s recently declared air defence zone. And, to paraphrase the old peace-and-love poster, ‘nobody came’. The zone probably overlaps corridors patrolled pretty much daily by P-3 Orions and other US and Japanese … Continue reading →

Some people are so hard to please. In 1989, Tiananmen student activist Wuer Kaishi was (we can presume) more than happy not to be arrested by Chinese authorities, and no doubt hugely relieved that Hong Kong let him pass through … Continue reading →

With all their free-trade hubs and other hyped-up regional projects, Chinese policymakers are experts at drawing lines on maps and declaring the areas within them special ‘zones’. Now they have done it with a big chunk of the East China … Continue reading →

How long before Beijing declares that the new island off Nishinoshima, Japan is historically Chinese territory, and sends fisheries patrol vessels to lurk menacingly on the horizon? It’s not just the Western Pacific that’s seeing new real estate cropping up … Continue reading →

Hong Kong is on tenterhooks, apparently, as it awaits the visit of Li Fei, the cheerless-looking number-two in China’s rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress. He is here to ‘swap ideas’ on the Basic Law and the city’s political structure. … Continue reading →

Like the city itself, Hong Kong’s news channels are so crammed full of stuff happening today that it seems they’re about to burst. Activists who hate broadcaster TVB plead with viewers to switch off their televisions to bring the station’s ratings … Continue reading →

It is probably true, and sad, that few people in Hong Kong believe that anyone wealthy and/or influential would do something out of the kindness of their heart or for the public good. Finely honed instinct leads us to presume … Continue reading →

The front page of the South China Morning Post features a suitably well-fed ‘industry leader’ called Thomas Ho complaining about a terrible manpower shortage crisis. By ‘manpower’ he actually means ‘labourers willing to toil for a sack of rice a … Continue reading →