Desperate to jump on a long-discredited bandwagon, Hong Kong wants to become a major digital asset hub…
Despite the potential risks involved, [virtual assets] also carries with it fundamental value,” Christopher Hui, Hong Kong’s secretary for financial services and the treasury, told AFP in an interview.
By ‘fundamental’ we mean ‘zero’. And has no-one told them that Beijing has pretty much banned crypto? In the UK, lawmakers want cryptocurrencies to be regulated as online gambling. (More from David Gerard.)
Despite not being Hong Kong, Macau gets a revamped NatSec Law…
The amendments expand the offence of secession to cover non-violent acts, while subversion is stretched to punish opposition to any central government department and China’s ruling ideology.
Restrictions on “foreign political organisations or groups” have been widened to cover those operating outside Macau including non-political groups.
Macau police also now have extraterritorial jurisdiction to pursue suspects outside the city.
…But the city’s secretariat for security defended the changes after the consultation period ended. Only 0.4 percent of more than 111,000 opinions they collected disagreed with them, it said.
Hong Kong’s forthcoming NatSec Law will presumably have similar extraterritoriality and other provisions.
A little weekend reading…
Massive report on Beijing’s involvement in Canada’s elections.
A declining population and too many kids at university – Guardian story on Chinese graduates having to accept menial jobs. Chart showing massive increase in the number of degree holders in China in the last 20 years. Part of the problem is that mercantilist trade policies suppress domestic consumption and thus creation of skill-intensive service-sector jobs.
A review of the British Museum’s Qing exhibition.
Some out-of-area things…
From the UK National Archives – Caribbean Chinese on the Empire Windrush…
As early as 1803, over thirty years before the ending of slavery in the British empire, Kenneth MacQueen, who had been appointed to explore the possibility of transporting Chinese workers to Trinidad, wrote to the commissioner regarding the idea of recruiting a ‘numerous’ contingent of Chinese workers as indentured workers.
Interview with session bassist and legend Carol Kaye.
I interrupted my six-hands massage on the yacht yesterday twice to see if you had updated but another day went by without the real gen on the Asian Pearl’s descent into Maoist doublethink darkness. I thought you might have succumbed to the heat or had the four o’clock Thought Police knock.
Not to worry. RTHK News keeps one entertained with its straight reporting of what the government and its lickspittles do and say. The wonderful thing about this is that they can report verbatim and de facto and still be hilarious. It is satire which writes itself and all the journalists and reporters have to do is to write it all down. What a wonderful job to have!
There is this for example:
“Social workers, teachers, nurses and doctors will be required to report suspected cases of SERIOUS child abuse in future under proposed legislation.”
What constitutes SERIOUS child abuse? Beating, starving, ritual satanic rituals, crucifixion at dawn, reading Nury Vittachi books? So is non-serious child abuse all right, like sending your kids to mind-numbing tutorial classes at Kumon or not seeing them at all all week because the Mainland mistress is in town and you are making so much money at present? Actually all that can be much worse than beating or starving.
And recently Trans Commie Priscilla Lau of the DAB Brownnosers announced that it was all right to appoint Mainland advisers to the silly old jet black hair dying CE as Hong kong was “an open society.”
WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
say Ingsoc and Big Brother. To that for Hong Kong’s benefit we can add a fourth dictum to engrave and illuminate on the Bank of China building:
TRUTH IS SATIRE
Hurrah!
For Hong Kong to enhance itself as a digital asset hub, the logical step would be to immediately digitize all real estate title and abandon the Slough of Despond of title document registration, born 1841 (still going strong). Even Slough in The United Kingdom managed it, as did even Russian-trashed Georgia, in their case by blockchain.