What a wonderfully empty city we had over the holiday weekend…
Easter saw an “exodus” of residents, with approximately 2.22 million departures made over four days, an increase of 180,000 compared to the same period last year. In contrast, there were only about 400,000 mainland and foreign arrivals, resulting in a “travel deficit.”
Traffic peaked on the final day of the long break as northbound vehicles returned to the city. At 5.30pm yesterday, the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge checkpoint reported a 500-meter vehicle backlog, with border-crossing wait times stretching up to 40 minutes.
According to Immigration Department data, as of 9pm yesterday, there were over 957,000 crossings recorded, with inbound travelers exceeding 631,000, some 86 percent of which are Hongkongers.
Economist Simon Lee Siu-po said the ongoing trade war has weakened the yuan, making products appear cheaper for Hongkongers to shop in the mainland.
Some things you might have missed while contributing to that horrible ‘travel deficit’…
China Media Project looks at the gap between Chinese media claims about the country’s tech prowess and the reality…
The current AI landscape, [tech academic Zhu Songchun] said, is one in which media narratives, investment patterns, and government initiatives present a distorted picture of progress. “What’s truly blocking our progress is not foreign technology restrictions,” Zhu told the audience, “but our own limited understanding.”
The reasons for this problem? Zhu says both Chinese media and officials tasked with promoting AI have little understanding of how it works. For their part, the media have fed the public “exaggerated” stories about AI. While Zhu notes this as a key problem, he tactfully steps around an important impetus behind this coverage — the fact that the leadership’s appetite for promoting AI as the next driver of development is also exerting pressure on state media to signal positivity and success.
…This disconnect was illustrated once again over the weekend, as Beijing hosted a half marathon where Chinese-built robots raced alongside human competitors. The CCP’s official People’s Daily described the event as a “fierce competition” that had pushed the robots to their limits. Xinhua sang about “infinite possibilities,” and proclaimed in its headline that the racing event had “closed the distance between us and the future.” The less stellar reality, alluded to in a report by Guangzhou’s Southern Metropolis Daily that noted the “many problems” holding the race down, was that the robots had suffered constant failures and necessitated nearly constant repairs by the exhausted human crews running alongside them. In the end, only six of the 21 robot entries completed the race, and one quite literally lost its head.
George Magnus interviewed by Swiss outlet The Market…
If China, with its 1.4 billion people, had an income and consumption structure like the US, the UK or Switzerland, then their economy wouldn’t be in the situation it’s in. But it doesn’t. Why? Because the CCP is wedded to mercantilism, industrial policy, and export promotion. They try to boost growth through exports. But who’s going to take China’s overproduction voluntarily? Many countries all over the world are raising trade barriers against China. They’ve reached the end of the road with their growth model.
…what is the purpose of having a trade surplus? This goes back to Adam Smith, who famously said that the purpose of exporting is to be able to import. To be able to consume other things. That’s the big thing that’s missing in China. They don’t import enough, they don’t consume enough. China’s exports last year grew four times as fast as world trade, and imports didn’t grow as fast as world trade. Something’s wrong there. The philosophy behind China’s economic model is pure mercantilism.
…so far, there hasn’t been any strong expression [in Beijing] to embark on tax reform, income redistribution, an abolition of the hukou system, or privatization of state assets. Xi is very opposed to welfare payments, he sees them as a Western corrupted practice. There are a few brave Chinese economists at think tanks who have called for such measures. But so far the government hasn’t done it. I’m skeptical that they’re comfortable with the idea of what strengthening household incomes and consumption implies. Because if you really transfer economic power to the citizens, households, and small firms, you are transferring political power as well.
The White House deletes practical info from the US government’s Covid website and replaces it with ‘lab-leak’ stuff. (An investigative journalist’s pithy response.)
What is the conspiracy-theorist/MAGA obsession with the ‘lab leak’ thing? Past experience (SARS, etc) shows that viruses are especially prone to cross species in central/southern China for a combination of natural and man-made reasons. The real scandal, beyond animal-trafficking and mismanaged wet markets, is that local and later national authorities in China tried to cover up the initial outbreak. Next thing, it spread worldwide and cost millions of lives and hundreds of billions in economic damage. The lab-leak story, hinting at evil scientists engineering exotic bio-weapons with Dr Fauci something something, detracts from that.
Having seen first-hand the practices at Chinese supposedly-“biosecure” facilities (although not specifically in Wuhan), I’m quite willing to consider the lab-leak theory. Especially given that the CCP did everything possible to prevent investigation of same.
Why the outrage from certain groups AGAINST the lab leak theory? Jasnah Kosbollocks, who pretends to be a scientist but who spread so much vaccine disinformation on Sinovac (on Apple Daily and X), they could be singlehandedly awarded a prize for “killing the most old folks in Hong Kong”, is vehemently against the theory, just one of a cabal of the usual “human rights grifter” suspects who always sing in harmony.
@HK yellows etc… Another daft conspiracy.
“What is the conspiracy-theorist/MAGA obsession with the ‘lab leak’ thing?”
They want the truth and they want accountability.
Is that too much to ask?
“accountability.”
LOL. Good one.
they had that virus ‘cha bu duo’ under control, what’s the big deal?
Whilst the MAGA credulous are obviously divorced from reality, it behoves us to remember that a stopped watch tells the right time twice a day.
Thus far, I reckon the lab snafu scenario seems a lot more likely than the alternative.
It is, at the very least, a staggering “coincidence” that a bat coronavirus from Yunnan (halfway across the country) managed to cross over into humans and kick off a pandemic in the one city in China with a big old lab studying how Yunnan bat viruses cross over into humans.
If it were a natural crossover, you’d be forgiven for expecting it to kick off in Yunnan where the nearest bat virus originates, rather than “inexplicably” appearing a couple of thousand kilometres east, in Hubei.
It’s also a tad strange that the bat coronavirus epidemic kicked off in a seafood wet market that didn’t sell bats. Sure, you can certainly posit a intermediary animal host, but then we’re back to the “all the way from Yunnan” problem (and why did no one catch it from the intermediary on the way?). And in the back of my mind is the nagging fact that the WIV where all the Yunnan bat coronaviruses are kept, is just a few minutes away across the river.
It’s also odd that no one points out that the market is right round the corner from Huazhong University of Science & Technology’s Tongji Medical College’s Institute of Respiratory System Disease with it’s “Key Laboratory of Respiratory Diseases of the PRC’s National Health Commission”.
To me, that sounds like the kind of place you might expect not only folk with novel respiratory diseases to pitch up, but also folk who are studying bat coronaviruses’ danger to humans to turn up occasionally for conferences, meetings and lectures. And folk who have spent a hard day at a conference or meeting on respiratory viruses generally go out for a nice seafood dinner after.
And you have to ask yourself what would the CCP do if they found out they had a virus leak out of one of their top labs that was possibly going to kill millions and millions of people worldwide?
Would the CCP come clean, and own up to their incompetence? Or would they hope it goes away and then lie and cover it up when it doesn’t?
As reference, their trade figures usually can’t be trusted, and they can’t even bring themselves to tell the truth about history: Tian’anmen, the Great Leap Forward, those “Chinese” “dynasties” that were actually foreigners invading, Mao deliberately killing more people in Changchun than the Japanese did in Nanjing and the Yuen Long MTR “riot”… Oh look! Squirrel!
And yeah, His Mango Mendaciousness loathes the truth, and if you asked him about accountability, he’d loudly claim he has nothing to do with it and doesn’t know anything about it.
Yes, accountability for a man-made virus that killed millions of people, caused unimaginable suffering to those it killed and to their families, inflicted illness on the hundreds of millions who continue to suffer from the effects of the virus, irreparably harmed billions of children through the deprivation of their education, damaged and sometimes destroyed the lives of billions of people, and stole years of life away from innocent people simply going about their daily lives everywhere around the globe.
Have any of the responsible parties been held accountable?
We are angry still, we want the truth, and we want accountability.
Sigh. How many times does the lab leak theory have to be disproved before it sinks in? That the FDT administration has embraced it is emblematic of their terrifyingly uninformed, incompetent, and lethally dangerous approach to public health policy. As Dr. Freud might have said, sometimes a stopped clock is just a stopped clock.
@steve
Your certainty regarding the lab-leak theory is unbecoming. Any rational analysis, post-2021, concludes that it’s possible, but not certain. US departments (at least before Trump loyalty overtook honest endeavour) are split. @Batshit bullshit leans toward it, but doesn’t assert. My enquiries find natural causes somewhat more probable, but only in the 60-70% range. I’m not even sure what @HK Yellows is on about but his/her hysterical tones don’t engender confidence.
With a ‘hear, hear’ to calls for accountability, if not much confidence that it can be achieved, can’t we just leave it at ‘maybe’?
@Steve
YMMV, but as Reader points out — I merely lean towards, as I doubt we’ll ever find out one way or another.
It bears remembering that lab leaks don’t have to be “unnatural” engineered stuff or deliberate.
I just think that given there’s two large “pools” of bat coronaviruses that can potentially crossover —the “natural” one in Yunan and the WIV in Wuhan — a crossover outbreak appearing in Wuhan would seem to point to “lab leak” as being the more likely vector, with the application of Occam’s (and Hanlon’s) razor.
The natural occurrence of a Yunnan-based virus cross over is, of course, entirely possible. That said, having it somehow first occurring 2,000km+ away in Wuhan by complete coincidence right next to the other pool of bat viruses is definitely the more complicated and convoluted scenario than, say, “Zhang San dropped a test tube or Li Si got bitten by test animal #7 while feeding it and they covered it up to avoid getting into shit at the WIV”.
I’m cynical enough to frame the last two examples as being natural causes, despite them also being lab leaks. 😉
A simpler explanation tends to be the more likely, as a rule of thumb.
As to accountability, I think we all know MAGA’s motive is not really to find out what happened, and said accountability is about as likely to be forthcoming over COVID from the CCP as it is from the Trump Administration over all their myriad unbelievable screw-ups.
I appreciate the measured and reasonable responses to my exasperated and rather dismissive comment. My knee was jerking because of the way the MAGA/fascist contingent in the US has weaponized the lab leak theory out of purely racist motivations. This is in itself not a new thing, but it’s truly a scary time to be an immigrant in this freshly, utterly benighted land. Overseas university students are being warned by their administrations not to leave campus, and you’re lucky if you are on a campus where the admin isn’t welcoming ICE thugs to kidnap you and send you to a gulag. Anti-Chinese sentiment is currently running behind unhinged hatred of people from the Middle East and Central America, but it’s well positioned to ramp up as “necessary.” There have been incidents of Chinese students and faculty who’ve been detained or fired without any due process. What a time.
MAGA/fascist vs. TDS sufferer. Which are you?