Happy Monday!

Another NatSec 47 trial week. A thread of charges against individuals.

WaPo examines the unfortunate juxtaposition between the ‘spiffy’ [sic] Hello Hong Kong relaunch campaign and the city’s transformation in the NatSec era…

Civil society has been decimated. Pro-democracy politicians and activists are mostly in jail, in exile or too fearful to speak out. Press freedom has been eroded. More people are leaving, or planning to, than coming in. Lawyers facing intimidation and threats have fled. The million people who defiantly marched in 2019, and the 600,000 who voted in the democratic camp primary a year later, have been silenced; even peaceful protest has withered.

HK Free Press op-ed on why you won’t get an independent Covid inquiry from the Hong Kong government.

Some links from the weekend…

William Nee in The Diplomat describes China’s ‘GONGOs’ – state-run quasi-NGOs that back Beijing’s human-rights record at the UN. Parts of this sound familiar…

While China – nominally a socialist state – insists to the world that it cares about labor rights, Wang and Huang are facing the charge of “inciting subversion of state power.”

…China’s government has justified its persecution by claiming that the defenders are carrying out their important work only “under the banner” of human rights and instead have ulterior motives. Since the government rejects the concept of an independent judiciary, seeing it as a “Western” plot, the party-state has no problem securing convictions in criminal proceedings.

There are 10 different ‘One China’ policies/principles. Can you name them all today? An explanation of the varieties and their histories from Carnegie Endowment. Quick summary of the Tendentious Ten from the author.

Academic James Lin offers a better-than-average explanation of Taiwan’s (non-)status. 

Over time, much of the world realized that the ROC’s imagined control of all of China was just that, imagined. As a result, Beijing has become less adamant about asserting its claim to be China’s rightful government, a question which seemed to be a relic of the 1950s and 1960s. Instead, it has become more insistent about asserting that Taiwan is a part of China, which has increasingly become the key issue with respect to Taiwan’s status.

…For Beijing, enforcing their vision of “One China” today is no longer about a diplomatic battle against a rival regime, but rather about repressing the popular will of the Taiwanese people. Ironically, present-day PRC interests have aligned with historical KMT interests. Whereas in the past, it was Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT elite that would not stand for any notion of a separate Taiwanese identity under the ROC, today it is Beijing that feels threatened by that same Taiwanese identity.

Noema on Politburo member Wang Huning’s mission to craft a new approach to Taiwan… 

If Wang were to frame the link with Taiwan as shared civilizational kinship instead of unification under Beijing’s political system, it would open up a prospect for resolving the Taiwan dispute through the loose structure of a “commonwealth.” 

…the next generation in China would be far more amenable to this kind of pragmatic accommodation than to being drafted into yet another cycle of exhausting and diverting “patriotic struggle” against the West that would follow any attempt at forceful reunification.

No mention of what the Taiwanese might think, or whether the CCP could envisage a mainly symbolic arrangement that leaves Taiwan outside its control. It certainly couldn’t with Hong Kong.