Some weekend links…

Gwyneth Ho’s no-pulled-punches testimony in the HK47 case. I assume the defendants will be stressing – as in screaming out loud – that vetoing a budget/triggering CE’s resignation was specifically allowed for in the Basic Law…

In theory, it should be all they need to get the case thrown out. In theory.

NatSec police ‘take in’ more relatives of the overseas wanted eight for questioning.

Standard report here.

A Spectator article on China’s economy joins in…

The strange juxtaposition of opportunistic charm and thuggery is also evident in Hong Kong. The government has launched a ‘Happy Hong Kong’ campaign to woo back tourists and business. But just as this was getting up to speed the Hong Kong authorities announced they were offering a HK$1 million (£100,000) award for information leading to the arrest of eight exiled pro-democracy activists. John Lee, the territory’s tin-pot leader, announced that the activists should be treated like ‘street rats’. Earlier this week, Hong Kong police took away for questioning the parents and brother of Nathan Law, one of the wanted activists, who is now in the UK.

Some weekend links…

A China Daily piece by a former – not to say elderly – government information official who has become almost a parody of a pro-Beijing tool. Even sadder than it might seem. Note the almost robotic/cut-and-paste language (like it was written by some AI program). 

Academic Zhang Jun on the need for China to boost household incomes… 

There is a significant blind spot in the discussions within the Chinese economic academic community, as all the discussions revolve around the development of enterprises and industries, with no focus on families, and very little attention given to wage issues. Even when discussing technological advancements in enterprises, there is a lack of research on how these advancements are shared with labor in terms of returns. 

(As Michael Pettis would point out, China’s low household consumption is part of a bigger structural pattern that creates trade surpluses – essentially offshoring consumption via capital flows into trade-deficit economies like the US and the UK. Germany does it too. It lowers living standards for both surplus and deficit economies.) 

A thread on China’s strange obsession with establishing separate genetic origins for its own human population…

Someone should ask Dr. Luo if the Uyghurs, Mongolians etc. and other members of the “Chinese race” zhonghuaminzu are connected to this chain, and then if Kazakhs and Koreans are too, and if yes/no how etc. Would love to hear how he thinks it all makes sense. 

That comment was inspired by this SCMP story on a claim that pre-Homo sapiens hominins’ culture in what is now China has ‘continuous links’ with modern-day Chinese culture – and by implication, ethnicity. (In fairness, the SCMP science reporter points out that pre-Homo sapiens hominins overlapped with modern humans in other parts of the world. In theory, Neanderthals’ or other groups’ cultures could have influenced modern humans – so there would be nothing special, let alone ‘Chinese’, about such a thing happening in East Asia.)

Who needs copywriters when you have Marjorie Taylor Greene? Joe Biden takes a sort-of blistering attack by a Republican critic and uses it, verbatim, as a campaign ad for himself.