Bloomberg on the recent replacement of Beijing’s Liaison Office boss in Hong Kong…
As fraught an exercise political tea-leaf reading may be, the difference in tone between Zheng and Zhou’s first public comments may well speak to Beijing’s shifting priorities for Hong Kong, as well as its growing importance to President Xi Jinping’s administration. (To be sure, Reuters reported that Zheng’s departure in part reflected Beijing’s displeasure over being surprised by CK Hutchison’s plan to sell much of its global ports business, including those in Panama, to a group initially led by BlackRock.)
Consider that the top Chinese diplomat, Wang Yi, was just in town to promote Hong Kong as a global mediation hub. Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office in Beijing, is set to visit the city later this month for the first time in more than a year, the South China Morning Post.
…Meanwhile, the local bourse played host to the world’s biggest listing this year, with CATL’s debut on the city’s exchange last month helping the battery giant raise billions of dollars while navigating complex capital market geopolitics. More high-profile listings are set to follow, underlining the city’s crucial fundraising role for mainland companies that represent China’s industrial and technological prowess.
All this is playing out as relations between Washington and Beijing have deteriorated. … While Beijing is firmly in control, Hong Kong retains some distinctive financial qualities even as political ones have been largely sandpapered away. And, at least for now, the city has been elevated once again to a significant and strategic platform.
…Five years after the worst unrest in decades rocked the city and led to the imposition by Beijing of a national security law, Hong Kong is finding itself refashioned from a restive and recalcitrant outpost — less a pebble in Beijing’s shoe than a cornerstone of its global ambitions. Chief Executive Lee gave a nod to this new chapter over the weekend, noting Hong Kong’s “transition from stability to prosperity.”
Hong Kong’s ‘distinctive financial quality’ is the absence of capital controls. There was a time when people thought/hoped that the city could become Asia’s New York or London. A future where its main purpose is helping Beijing ‘counter the US’ sounds relatively underwhelming.
Desmond Shum discusses China’s ‘century of humiliation’…
A lot of Western politicians, academics, and journalists still repeat the CCP’s line about the “Century of Humiliation” as if it’s some deep, emotional truth shared by all Chinese people. But the reality is—it’s not. It’s a made-up narrative, carefully crafted by the Chinese Communist Party to serve its own political agenda.
We need to call it what it is: a piece of state propaganda designed to reinforce the Party’s hold on power.
In China Books Review, former FT China correspondent Lucy Hornby reads eight official oral histories of Xi Jinping’s life…
Unsurprisingly, these books do not make for gripping reading. It is easy to imagine that their intended audience extracts enough of the general picture to recite a few key lessons at a study meeting, then moves on. That, dear reader, is formalism — one of the deadly sins that transforms a revolutionary Party into a stagnant bureaucracy. Formalism is something that Xi Jinping does not like, and (according to these books at least) has never succumbed to himself.
A close reading of the series, and a healthy dose of context, reveals more about Xi Jinping than the editors may have intended.
A good read. Includes some interesting background on the role of oral sources in the crafting of official accounts of the past.
A fascinating snippet from a YouTube vid by an gambling expert on a Macau casino scam a few years ago.