First they came for Ted Hui’s mother’s money…

We start the week with Ted Hui, now in the UK, on people’s minds. This is partly because of his record as a lawmaker and activist – described in this tribute, and this one. (While we’re at it, a Vice bio of Agnes Chow.) It is also partly because CCP/Police retaliation against him and his family has struck a raw nerve.

The NatSec Regime is succeeding in stimulating ever more chatter about leaving Hong Kong. A few months back, the talk was about where and when to go, but the conversations are getting more detailed about preparations and precautions. 

Should we sell our apartment sooner, and rent a place, rather than wait until we’re definitely leaving? Do we make a pre-emptive move now or risk having to pull the kids from school at a bad time a year or two ahead? How exactly do middle-class households move their savings out of the CCP’s grasp? Seriously – what is the alternative to HSBC, which has frozen (and partially unfrozen) Ted Hui’s family’s accounts? Would the local branch of Citibank say no to the NatSec Gestapo? If jailing activists on trumped-up charges doesn’t stir you, how does losing all your money sound?

In Foreign Affairs, former CCP insider and academic Cai Xia – who called Xi Jinping a ‘mafia boss’ – writes on the failure of the party. Interesting account of her growing disillusionment in the post-Cultural Revolution era, for example with the dogmatic distortions used to align Marxist ideology with Jiang Zemin’s capitalist-friendly ‘Three Represents’. 

Once a loyal member of the CCP, I was secretly harboring doubts about the sincerity of its beliefs and its concern for the Chinese people.

I felt for the first time that the system I had long considered sacred was in fact unbearably absurd.

I saw that the highly centralized, oppressive version of Marxism promoted by the CCP owed more to Stalin than to Marx himself. I increasingly recognized it as an ideology formed to serve a self-interested dictatorship. 

And, as with Ted Hui’s family, the CCP thinks nothing of just grabbing her savings…  

Soon, I was expelled from the party. The school stripped me of my retirement benefits. My bank account was frozen.

This entry was posted in Blog. Bookmark the permalink.

16 Responses to First they came for Ted Hui’s mother’s money…

  1. Casira says:

    You can always sue HSBC in the UK or Citibank in the US and they’ll pay for reputation preservation, good luck with BoC.

  2. Bitcoin says:

    As for what you do with the money…. Bitcoin. I hear a lot of people using it to move millions with only a few pennies in fees. You also can’t shut down the network, and since nobody owns it, there’s no way to shut down the wallets and personal accounts that hold it. I mean, this is exactly what families in Venezuela and other countries experiencing hardship with money have been doing for years.

  3. Hong Kong Hibernian says:

    I know a number of people here in the Greater Shenzhen Bay Area Mini Motherland Economic Opportunity Lucky Everfortune Zone (is that it’s called this week?) who haven’t departed yet ONLY because of the situation with Covid-19 in other locals.

  4. Reactor #4 says:

    Yes. However, the situation we now find ourselves in is not unexpected. I would argue that if the rabble had backed off after Carrie Lam had withdrawn the extradition bill, things would not look as nearly as bad as they do now. The protesters would have had the ascendency as they had forced the government into a U-turn, but, critically without any losses on their side. Fact is, you cannot keep sticking it to an authoritarian regime and not expect at some point for the dogs to be unleashed. Actually, I reckon that many of HK’s moderates (individuals, companies and organizations) will eventually band together and sue the protester leaders for 4cking up their futures (and don’t throw out that crap argument about it being a leaderless movement – it will garner no traction with me).

  5. Siu Jiu says:

    @so: Thanks for the link. Telford Taylor is just the model we need to hold up — and his brilliant words are just the inspiration we need to ponder — in these dark times.

  6. Joe Blow says:

    Notorious gangster Broken Tooth, who spent many years behind bars for trying to kill a senior police officer in Macau, is also a prominent bitcoin banker now. It seems that anyone can start their own little bitcoin outfit. That is so re-assuring to know. What could possibly go wrong?

  7. Broken Tooth's Dad says:

    Joe Blow: Dragon Coin, which is what I think you are referring to, is not Bitcoin. Please do a little research about what separates the actual Bitcoin and its blockchain from the false and usurious tokenomics you refer to. You can only afford to be ignorant and naive for so long, until the technology catches up with you.

  8. Hamantha says:

    With bitcoin, aren’t your transactions still highly traceable, given that the blockchain ledger is viewable by all and is literally kept up to date by all users?

    Like… couldn’t law enforcement just wait for a transaction within their jurisdiction, force the broker or transactor to give up the person’s name, and then “freeze” the assets in that way?

  9. Mary Melville says:

    Another community support group has had its HSBC account frozen.
    Next step……. dust the street collection boxes for fingerprints?

  10. Casira says:

    @Hamantha: Well that is exactly what they did when there was the Twitter bitcoin scam in 2020.

  11. wampam wimwam blanket says:

    hamantha: No.

    It is a public ledger, which is part of its utility and value, but the only people who can access the funds are the holder of the private keys. It’s uncensorable money.

    You don’t need a broker to transact in bitcoin. It’s essentially private and privately controlled money.

  12. Boris Badanov says:

    Bitcoin’s useless as currency and medium of exchange and environmentally destructive. It’s only use is to keep clowns who indulge in “alternative fact” based monetary fantasies, people who like to be defrauded in asset bubbles and techno-libertarian-utopia-fantasists busy so they don’t bother the rest of us as much. So it does have a purpose.

  13. Boris’s Big Baby Daddy says:

    Boris is quite blatantly a moron.

    Most, like Boris, who don’t endeavour to actually study the facts of the situation, will resort to limp overly cliched defensive arguments that only make sense to the ill-informed.

  14. Free the Meerkats ! says:

    But anyway, “Bitcoin” blah blah blah….

    Does anyone else – apart from me – think that Ted Hui has been irresponsible in fleeing to the UK ?

  15. where's my jet plane says:

    Does anyone else – apart from me – think that Ted Hui has been irresponsible in fleeing to the UK

    Given the current political shenanigans, he was emintently sensible to go. Hui’s big mistake was in not moving his money first.

Comments are closed.