Thread on a report that HK Inland Revenue is issuing 13% fewer tax returns than in 2019-20 – presumably because of emigration of salaried residents.
From the Guardian, a forthright account of Beijing’s zero-Covid policy…
Xi Jinping’s measures have very little to do with public health. They have been a masterclass in dictatorship with an underlying theme of “how to more effectively control society after a disaster strikes”.
CEPA commentary on French President Macron’s recent grovel-ridden visit to China…
Macron’s words had a singular merit, neither expected nor sought: no European leader now will be able to express indifference about Taiwan or to imagine a third way between America and China. As with the French president’s futile pre-invasion flirtation with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, he has given the impression of an attachment to an obsolete strategic conception, this time about China.
Foreign Policy article blasts US culture-war conservatives for believing Russian and Chinese military PR videos (bare-chested soldiers jumping through flaming hoops) and calling their own troops’ training ‘effeminate’…
…A modern military defined not only by physical strength but also by technical acumen and mental agility—including a diversity of viewpoints, backgrounds, skills, and abilities—makes the United States’ all-volunteer force the deadliest military in the world. Elected officials should have more important things to deal with than fetishizing authoritarian militaries, but if they must do it, they should leave U.S. service members out of it.
Might resonate among Hongkongers 1: a detailed thread by a Korean on why they probably won’t have kids (the country now has a fertility rate of 0.78).
Might resonate among Hongkongers 2: How Tokyo became an anti-car paradise.
Nonono they have it all wrong Hemmers, I am sure that the CCP would say that Macron ‘understands China’ almost as well as Henry Kissenger.
But since I mention him it does beg the question… if Kissenger’s big win was capitalising on the Sino-Soviet split, and currently there is a strong alliance between Putin and Xi, what does the rest of the world have to gain from pandering to the PRC?