HK launches new weight-loss trade fair

Hong Kong reveals its latest bizarre Covid rule: no eating allowed in the city’s Food Expo. According to the Standard…

…the expo will employ staff to go around the area and see if anyone tries to taste food in the convention center…

Onlookers can mock. Will mock. Should mock. But it’s important to remember that the aim here is not to create and implement scientifically effective public health measures. The goal seems to be to devise rules (like closure of barbecue sites) that may be obscure but are still onerous enough to provoke some loud complaints. That way, local officials can point to their Beijing overseers and show them how Hong Kong is assiduously and loyally implementing Xi Jinping-style ‘dynamic zero Covid’. The public are angry about the restrictions – therefore we must be doing our job well.

Of course, thanks to the compulsory quarantine rules, the trade fair won’t exactly be bursting with overseas visitors either.

I am proud to notice that the Food Expo (opens August 11) coincides with the Hungry Ghosts festival (August 12)!

Painstakingly curated mid-week links…

In the SCMP’s once-a-month positive-energy-free op-ed, Michael C. Davis summarizes the UN Human Rights Committee’s recent criticism of Hong Kong, and begs the authorities to restore the city’s reputation as a free society.

An HKFP explainer on Hong Kong’s resurrection of archaic sedition laws as a way of silencing and jailing critics.

Al Jazeera video on the decline of press freedom in Hong Kong

China Change presents a translation of a marathon seven-part history of the HK Alliance published last year by Stand News.

From the Wire China, evidence that China’s population is falling faster then officials are letting on.

Andrew Batson on China’s housing crisis, partly due to a Hong Kong-style of pre-completion sales of new homes and ‘a failure of ethics and the rule of law’…

China’s system for financing the construction of new housing put an unusual amount of risk onto households [and] the legal safeguards in place to protect households from those risks were in practice routinely ignored.

Foreign Affairs on China’s efforts to boost its international clout following the Russian invasion of Ukraine – notably its ‘global strategic initiative’ to win over anti-Western and non-aligned countries.

The Diplomat compares and (mostly) contrasts the Russia-Ukraine and China-Taiwan situations. One similarity is the unwillingness of the target countries’ people to embrace their overbearing neighbours’ nationalist narratives…

Since the late 1980s, the Chinese government has been eagerly promoting cultural, social, and kinship ties with Taiwanese people. The initial purpose of this move was the understanding (or misunderstanding) that with more cultural and social communications, Taiwanese people would grow more like mainland Chinese people and feel increasingly their belongingness to the “motherland.” Identity politics, however, shows reversed effects. With more communications and contact, the Taiwanese people instead increasingly saw their differences from mainlanders.