HK Alliance convictions not going away

Prospect Magazine on Chow Hang-tung…

…she advocated for labourers in mainland China and built connections with Chinese dissidents. During frequent visits to friends there, Chow gained a reputation for her bravery, as well as her capacity to drink large quantities of Chinese white wine.

She was sometimes criticised by fellow activists in the Hong Kong democracy movement for focusing on the rights of mainland dissidents over issues closer to home. But according to her friend, the activist Patrick Poon, Chow was “prophetic” in seeing how the experience of dissidents in China foreshadowed what was to happen in Hong Kong. While many of the movement’s leaders had fled abroad, he says Chow was determined to remain inside the region. 

“What she saw and heard in mainland China made her realise more deeply that whether a society has freedom, rule of law and civil rights is not an abstract political concept, but directly affects the lives of every ordinary person,” her fiancé Ye Du tells me. He is barred from leaving China and has been placed under strict surveillance. The couple have not been able to communicate with each other since February last year.

One early morning in June 2021, police smashed down the door to her barrister’s chambers…

HKFP on Hong Kong’s first Chinese medicine hospital…

In addition to launching inpatient services, the hospital will expand existing outpatient services, including those offered in its radiological diagnostic and pathology departments. 

The hospital will also introduce 10 new special disease programmes in September and November, covering conditions such as eczema, Parkinson’s disease, and functional gastrointestinal disorders. 

Never knew that Chinese folk medicine uses scientific equipment like X-rays, ultrasound, etc. Do these procedures detect qi? For political reasons, Hong Kong must devote resources to what the Skeptic’s Dictionary defines as…

…a hodgepodge of diagnostic and healing practices developed over many centuries across a vast expanse of land that roughly corresponds to what today we call China. 

…these practices evolved long before the development of science and science-based medicine. What is called Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) is a label that mischaracterizes two millennia of various healing traditions as if they comprised a monolithic brand. 

…Underlying every aspect of TCM is a metaphysical system that has little, if any, correlation to science-based medicine. This is not surprising since the many practices of TCM developed before science as we know it began evolving in the 16th and 17th centuries.

It is also not surprising that the many attempts to confirm the scientific validity of TCM practices have largely failed since there is no plausible “mechanism of action for most of its therapies.”*

(Back in the late 1990s – the early days of the Internet – I emailed skepdic.com author Robert Todd Carroll and mentioned that his tone towards defenders of quack science and conspiracy theories was refreshingly rude. He replied: “It’s the only language they understand.”)